The logistics people who collectively decided to stop ordering chips for cars just because we had a lockdown for a couple of months early 2020 have been variously described as naive, incompetent and much, much worse depending on who you talk to.
But with the way JIT had been drilled into every manager over the past 30 years or so, did they really have a choice?
If thinking for themselves was never an option, then what is really to blame is the JIT orthodoxy. And didn't the whole just-in-time (and more importantly keep no inventory) really become popular in the early 1990s when oil was $10 a barrel?
Ironically, the early 1990s was when the USSR collapsed and I remember one thing the Soviets were efficient at: their occupancy rate for railway freight was really really high.
This was because they seldom moved empty railway cars around they place instead they'd wait weeks or months until the whole train was full. The total opposite of JIT. Very inefficient in its own way, but the constant delivery of small orders wastes a lot of energy at transport. JIT relies on cheap transport costs.And in the UK, that's almost all exclusively by road.