Inside the monumental, stop-start effort to arm Ukraine
A shift away from producing munitions to target big ticket items, a lack of production workers and supply chain issues with small components are all showing a major flaw in the US war fighting capacity and it's not going to get fixed easily. Running out of precision munitions in a few days or weeks after starting a major conflict would dramatically change how we fight.
One of the best outcomes from the war in Ukraine may be the US figuring out how to supply a modern fight.
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"A conventional war … is an industrial war," said Seth Jones, a former adviser to U.S. Special Forces who now heads the International Security Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). There are "serious challenges" to current supplies in the U.S. arsenal, he said. "We are really low … and we're not even fighting."
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An upcoming CSIS report on American readiness, Jones said, concludes that "the U.S. defense industrial base is in pretty poor shape right now. If you identify China as the 'pacing' threat, and an 'acute' threat from Russia, we don't make it past four or five days in a war game before we run out of precision missiles."
A shift away from producing munitions to target big ticket items, a lack of production workers and supply chain issues with small components are all showing a major flaw in the US war fighting capacity and it's not going to get fixed easily. Running out of precision munitions in a few days or weeks after starting a major conflict would dramatically change how we fight.
One of the best outcomes from the war in Ukraine may be the US figuring out how to supply a modern fight.