The way the BRAC process played out didn't help. With so many of the ammunition plants out in the middle of nowhere in rural areas (rightfully so), they didn't have a lot of political clout trying to protect them.aezmvp said:It's a complete mismanagement of industrial and defense policy since the end of the Cold War. This is just one prong of it. The real nightmare is on the Navy side. It'll be easier to stand up ammo manufacturing than the drydock side. It's crazy how screwed the Navy is over the next two decades.LMCane said:aezmvp said:
Yeah, this war more than anything should contribute to a complete rethinking of American industrial and manufacturing policy at every level. It's been clear for at least a decade and really 2 decades that after NAFTA and aggressive offshoring we have completely imploded our capacity to turn out a high volume of material and our conflicts against inferior and completely outmatched military groups, especially the Iraqis in the Gulf War has led us down a path which is completely out of step with peer to peer or near peer conflicts.
The reason I say especially Iraq is that on paper in 91 they had a large and capable military force. It was of course mostly lightly trained conscripts with a corrupt officer corps and a lack of logistical support subjected to a sustained campaign that was a generation ahead of anything they were strategically or tactically prepared for with a political restriction that prevented them taking full advantage of their strategic surprise. And so it looked like American military doctrine of strategic precision strikes could rapidly defeat a conscript army equipped with Soviet/Sino-Russian equipment in short order.
That's not the environment we would go up against in our most likely conflict vs. China. We are woefully lacking munitions and our mismanagement of naval infrastructure has put us in a precarious position there too. I'm not saying we would lose, I think, currently, we would win or draw. But recovery of any loses would be difficult and we would very, very quickly run low on critical munition supply in a conflict that would go on more than a few months.
it was hard enough to supply just Ukraine with IMU Inertial Measurement Units for missiles and bombs,
now add in Israel using thousands of them and having to prep for a Chinese assault.
We are in heap big trouble.
Re: the Navy, anybody who took Dr. Beaumont's History of Naval Warfare class (or whatever it was called), knows this is the pattern of naval power. It gets ramped up in times of war and then the longer the peace endures, the lower the Navy is drawn down, while people who should know better talk themselves into "new paradigms" that don't require a large standing Navy. Then when war breaks out, everybody spends the first several years suffering and bleeding each other while they build up their Navy to where it needs to be to properly support the goals of the war effort.