The massive US military industrial complex is struggling to keep up, according to officials, with ever-escalating attacks on various targets across the planet, and growing demands from its various customers looking to build up their assorted missile arsenals for assorted wars.
Pentagon officials are hyping “surging sales” while warning that they are lobbing missiles and bombs at stuff faster than they can replace them, and that ultimately the US is facing a supply shortage. Their solution, unsurprisingly, is massive new funding for weapons production.
3,271 munitions were dropped in November, and officials say some 32,000 have been fired overall in the 16-months of the ISIS war. Given that the US is talking up a protracted war lasting “a generation or more,” this is expected to be a drop in the bucket of what they plan to eventually use.
While the Pentagon is presenting this as a pseudo-crisis, the companies are all salivating at the huge profits to come from a protracted and ever-growing war against ISIS. The Pentagon’s crisis mode, as ever, is expected to begin and end with another trip to Congress to lobby for a hike in military spending.
The USG had gutted its traditional manufacturing base decades ago
when it took over the Arms and illegal Drug business.
Arms sales and illegal drugs are the backbone of this corrupt and
racist USG Shadow Government. You can also throw in other nefarious
activities including money laundering and child sex-trafficking.
When I was still a young lad (decades) ago, I attended a college
fair for recent graduates. With my degree in hand, I interviewed
with RCA, GE, Westinghouse, Matag…
At the time, these companies had abandoned their traditional base
in exchange for bogus government defense contracts and corporate
welfare handouts from the vile Reagan regime.
Today, I still have trouble understanding why the so-called MATAG
repairman would need RF Signal engineers with experience in
missile tracking and radar systems…
I meant to say MAYTAG (sp).
A war lasting a generation or more is not unreasonable. The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland lasted 30 years and ended with GB capitulating on everything the IRA wanted except formal sovereignty (which the IRA didn't really want in the short term anyway, given that the British welfare state is still better than the Irish one. Indeed, the core of the Good Friday settlement, the power-sharing executive, was already on the table 25 years earlier! Thus, ISIS cannot be "beaten", be it by Obama, Putin, Israel or anyone else. It has to be negotiated with. How long that takes depends on the politicians.
ISIS can be eradicated within a matter of months; that is if the USG and its crime affiliates would stop funding it.
100% Correct!
War is the health of the state.
Of course ammunition makers always benefit from shooting. Ammo in quantity costs more than the weapons shooting it, even for simple ammo like artillery.
Now with our air campaign that is especially so, because the US makes such extensive use of precision guided munitions. They cost a hundred times more than an iron bomb, at its cheapest being an expensive package bolted on to an iron bomb.
This may seem to be good, seem to be less likely to kill the wrong people. It isn't. The problem is finding and identifying a target worth a precision hit. We very precisely hit the wrong things, and very precisely kill civilians, as when we so precisely destroyed that hospital in Afghanistan.
We have steadily made war ever more expensive, flying jets that cost hundreds of thousands of dollar per flight to fire the most expensive munitions at targets that are too often wrong.
We could do the same work with turboprop counter insurgency aircraft firing rockets. They'd kill fewer of the wrong people. They'd cost about 1% of what we spend doing it this way.
These wars are defense spending boondoggles, on top of all the other problems with them. Soon we will have stealth jets firing stealth missiles at empty tents and wrong targets.
That's a role reserved for the F-35. That is, if they ever get lucky enough to get it off the ground for more than 30 seconds.
Another key piece of evidence that should dissuade the "cakewalk Russia crowd". As large as the US defence budget is, running short of ordinance seems to be a regular occurrence. As large as the US economy is, credit default swaps, M@A and the "service economy" have very little to do with the industrial capacity to wage war on a scale necessary to confront Russia.