I might be wrong - but... March ‘26 issue.

Crazy new risks intersect in logistics and manufacturing.

Because I can be an idiot sometimes, it never occurred to me that I should put my monthly newsletter as a blog entry. Thank you, Mark. This is nicer to read, and allows me to manage the mailing list using real tools, not my clunky text based system that is about 25 years old.

Welcome to the March 2026 issue of Scott Hampton’s take on important trends that might be lost in the news cycle. As always, I’ll link sources if you want to drill down (URLs explain themselves), and as always these are my rollups of the news flavored with a few opinions. This month there are obvious topics.

Three intersecting topics this time around, with a generous serving of quality information links.

1) Logistics is going to get really ugly as two own-goals intersect here in the USA.

First there is the War on Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz, and obviously diesel prices are already rising and have a long way to go. The last time this happened truck drivers were abandoning trailers because prices were going up so fast that they went from profit to loss overnight just because of fuel costs - OTR independents run on thin margins. Secondly the “immigration crackdown” is hitting fleet and independent drivers hard, it’s estimated that up to 50,000 drivers will not be on the road by summer. The automation of logistics is making this worse, see below.

Takeaway: Expect your logistics prices to increase dramatically and quickly, possibly by double or triple based on historical events.

https://abettertruckdriver.com/truckers-are-quitting-in-droves-why-2026-could-break-americas-supply-chain/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/10/ice-crackdown-immigrant-truck-drivers
https://calculator.academy/oil-to-gas-price-calculator/ - put in $60, then $120. Add fifty cents for diesel. Now put in $200 which is where we’ll be in four to six weeks (optimistically) if this goes on.
https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/humans-are-being-replaced-by-machines-in-the-food-supply-chain-and-its-leading-to-truckloads-of-waste

Adding on Mar 13 (2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/03/12/nx-s1-5736253/immigrant-truckers-trump-crackdown

PS) I’m already seeing the driver shortage impact, it now takes a day or two longer to book an FTL, and LTL is getting to be very unreliable - last month I had to re-book a six pallet run *three* times, lost a week on that one.

2) Americans are seriously underestimating the duration of the Iran War.

Some decades ago, Iraq invaded Iran w/ overt USA assistance (see also Reagan). Even when we provided chemical weapons and advanced targeting info, eight years later Iran was still standing with the same borders, and had learned a lot about modern warfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War). On the other side, the current regime leadership in the USA appears to run on bluster, hopium, and ignorance of history.
Iran is already attacking commercial shipping and mining the Straits of Hormuz.

America has never bombed a country into submission, and Iran is uniquely large and populous - and famously keeps grudges. Expect the shipping disruption to last a good while - as it is now, *only* Iran is shipping oil from the Gulf. And Iran’s military are masters of cunning simple (and cheap) tech that defeats multi-million dollar systems. Even if TACO stops and claims victory, Iran will not stop until they have, to their satisfaction, balanced the books - that is their tradition and doctrine. Expect nothing less than what has happened every time before, but now Iran has learned that the USA will follow Israel and that will harden their spirits further.

Look at this from the Iranian point of view: They were negotiating with the USA and were then attacked without warning, in which one of the very first missles hit a girls school and killed MANY, and then also the leadership - which was meeting to discuss a treaty. From their view this was treachery and all the civilian deaths make it a personal matter for every citizen. This isn’t an existential threat to the Islamic Republic government any more, it is now an existential attack on the people of Iran and their Persian pride.

https://www.twz.com/news-features/the-misconception-that-air-supremacy-has-been-achieved-over-iran
https://warontherocks.com/2026/03/a-worst-case-scenario-for-the-war-with-iran/
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/mosaic-defence-doctrine-iran-studied-us-wars-for-20-years-says-abbas-araghchi-what-it-means-1.500460676
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/10/the-fourth-successor-how-iran-planned-to-fight-a-long-war-with-the-us-and-israel
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/why-irans-vital-kharg-island-oil-hub-is-still-untouched-by-us-israel-bombers
https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2026/03/06/iran-can-still-fire-drones-and-missiles-experts-weigh-the-implications-on-the-war/

Takeaway: Whatever you are hearing from American Media, it’s stupidly shortsighted and ignorant of history. This is going to be ugly and stay ugly for months or even years. $200 crude may be an optimistic assumption for summer prices.
Note: Iran’s biggest weakness seems to be water, they were already running dry in Tehran etc. Alas, attacking their desalination systems only emphasizes that America wants to kill Iranian civilians to help Israel kill more civilians.

PS) Isn’t that a cheery collection of insights from the linked domain experts? Shame the DoD and FBI got rid of all their Middle East analysis teams. Seriously, the new bro-culture leadership fired all but ONE of the Iranian analysts in CENTCOM, and most of the Farsi speakers as well (and shut down the Voice of America’s Farsi broadcasts). This is just <elided> stupid.

3) So how many different critical materials (not just crude oil) come from the Middle East?

This partial list has items that account for 20% to 50% (yes, one half) of the global supply, and a few scary thoughts (I’m not going to put links on each of these, you can look up the intel if you want to drill down.):

• LNG - TSMC, the Taiwanese company that makes *all* the advanced chips, and the rest of Taiwan which makes a lot of other important tech, have only a ten day reserve of this fuel for their power grid.  
  

• Sulfur - Sounds boring, but this is used to make sulfuric acid which is necessary to refine copper, zinc, and other ores plus process a host of chemicals and pharmaceuticals in Every Damn Thing (tm).
  

• Fertilizer - And here we are going into planting season in the Northern Hemisphere. Expect these prices to skyrocket, putting further pressure on the American farmers that are already under water. Plus their diesel is going to skyrocket. Plus the logistics issue mentioned above - it’s going to be a terrible year for farmers and any of you that like to eat.
  

• Helium, Argon, Neon - USA and EU have their own supply but don’t share (there is already a shortage). You need noble gases to make computer chips, for instance, run an MRI or other sensitive measuring system, keep your atomic clocks working, and so forth.
  

• Plastics - primarily bulk (nurdles) of PE, PP, HDEP, etc and this mostly goes to Asia and SE Asia (where most of our stuff is made)
  

• Chemicals - bulk and specialty precursors used for polymers and pigments, this mainly goes to India and China. Connect those dots …
  

• And much of the internet in that hemisphere runs on cables that connect in the Gulf States, see also Amazon data center bombings.

Takeaway: Far too much of the global economy is going to run out of manufacturing and life-support inputs soon, it appears Iran can inflict pain in return for pain. In weeks, not months, this is going to get ugly. American farmers are fucked. Diesel price increases plus fertilizer price increases will hammer the already crippled agricultural industry reeling from tariff fallout and immigration caused loss of workers. Food prices are going to get stupid.

Summary: Well, there you go. I’m your agent of sunshine and cheer, as always.

I believe that if we spend 3% of our revenue on insurances and risk reduction, every business person should spend 3% of their time looking at the catastrophe scenarios and thinking them over. Whom is prepared, may adapt.

… oh hey, if you want to get a bit of a 360 on AI and the near future, my modeling group is doing some interesting work there, including with our house trained AI (it’s not an LLM, we call it a Socratic Engine).