Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein has bragged that the US is “hitting more targets than we’ve ever hit in a long time in Iraq, Syria, and in Afghanistan,” with tens of thousands of bombs dropped in 2016 alone. Those numbers show no sign of getting smaller any time soon.
That’s bad news for the people in those countries the bombs are falling on, and bad news for the taxpayers, but it’s great news for a handful of key US arms makers, who are seeing their sales soar on the orders that the military has placed to replace the dropped bombs and fired missiles.
These bombs aren’t cheap, with even the smaller “dumb bombs” amounting to $30,000 or more, and more advanced technology like Lockheed Martin’s Hellfire missiles costing in excess of $100,000 each. With thousands of Hellfire missiles being fired, that’s a costly proposition.
From the Pentagon’s perspective, the big issue in all of this is that the companies are having trouble escalating production fast enough to meet demand, and they are fretting that bombs are being dropped faster than they’re being replaced.
For companies like Boeing and Lockheed, that’s a good problem to have, with the companies not just seeing record volume in their orders, but juicy margins on rush shipments as the Pentagon keeps finding new explodable stuff to drop things on.
Probably vastly overpriced bombs. That’s what the US military is all about theses days- spending $$$ instead of actual combat effectiveness…
Yes, but given multiplication effects, it need not even be overpriced to cost as much as the weapons, or more.
No amount of money can replace the dead. Fortunately we have a new administration coming in and the Don will be in charge. According to surveys four out of five murdered humans prefer to be slaughtered by a Republican or at least someone pretending to be.
It depends where those humans live. Possibly only in the USA would the politics of your killer make any difference at all.
Most slaughtered people on earth know it was Americans who did it, or somebody paid by Americans to do it.
That includes the ‘higher class’ of what what the US calls ‘terrorists’.
I suspect that you are correct. My post was written tongue in cheek.
Nasty truth — ammo costs as much as the weapons themselves. It may be low tech, and it may be individually much less expensive, but then multiplication takes over.
Take a civilian example — a normal hunting rifle is good for about 20,000 rounds fired over its lifetime, before needing at least a new barrel. Season after season, owner after owner, at firing ranges again and again, it will fire ammo costing over 20x the cost of the rifle.
Machine guns? Even more. Artillery? Each round is even more.
Aircraft are expensive, but they fly for years. They drop a vast number of bombs. If a bomb is $50,000, and the plane drops 1,000 of them, the bombs cost more than the plane.
Ammo is kept piled up, as reserves for expenditure in major fighting. Thousands of rounds per artillery piece, thousands of bombs for an aircraft unit, stocked in each theater of potential fighting as pre-positioning. The US keeps billions in ammo in Israel, as a reserve they too can draw on.
There is a lot of money in ammo.
The same folk probably have the printer ink market covered.
After watching several videos from syria, I can’t imagine how much money had been wasted there. That huge quantity would give an economic cushion to the desperate people who originally revolted against assad
The Saudis and the UAE have dropped their ‘stocks’ on Yemen so, if the Israelis decide to clear the old munitions off into Gaza again, their should be enough overtime to see the bomb plants through to the first of July.
Thomas, ‘not to reveal my age’, but I remember the 1960 epic classic, Spartacus. with Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier. After the final battle which the Romans won, Crassus (Olivier), offered amnesty
to the man who could identify Spartacus (Douglas).
One by one, every man stood up and claimed himself to be ‘Spartacus’. That was an incredible and powerful scene.
I often mention that scene to my friends at Code Pink.