A new age of conflicts being fought with old-standby weapons has exposed the move away from making basic munitions as a strategic error.
A new age of conflicts being fought with old-standby weapons has exposed the move away from making basic munitions as a strategic error.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-us-global-war-weapons-race/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
The deficit of basic materiel and dearth of capacity to make it reflects a wider problem: The US no longer focuses on making everyday things, even things that can be critical in a crisis. When Covid-19 struck, the race was on to produce more cotton swabs and ventilators. Shortages of auto parts, generic drugs, baby formula and other common goods have become more frequent.
Yeah, people did start to figure this out two years ago, once Russia pulled back and settled in for a long war. NATO governments spent billions more to procure shells and artillery pieces, and on incentives to get the arms industry to build more factory lines and supply lines.
But decades of neoliberalism have gutted the states ability to do anything itself, or to compel a corporation to do anything, even something as simple as build an artillery shell that was designed in the 1870s. The end result is that the incentive money was used to streamline and automate the existing, privately owned, factories, allowing them to fire workers and run more cheaply , but not to actually expand production. And with billions more dollars chasing the same supply of shells, the cost of an artillery shell has now skyrocketed to ~$9,000 a shell.
mom can I have billions upon billions of dollars?
to manufacture munitions for the war?
yeeees
does stock buybacks like a boss 😎😎
Critical support to anti-war weapons manufacturer CEOs, for gutting the global North's war capacity in exchange for short term gains
just-in-time artillery
time-on-target
just-in-timeThere was a report about European munition factories standing by idly because they require orders to be put before manufacturing, as they only make enough for the order and wait for the next lol
So all that stuff about Le RuZZian Orks running out of ammo "next week" was just projection, huh?
Apparently the fascist invaders are willing to waste endless lives and resources on this imperial land grab. Empire is basically the same everywhere. #freeukraine #freepalestine
you are morally obligated to enlist and die for your hero, bandera.
The question is: will the West™ be able to "fix" this problem? (I hope they don't)
They didn't fix it after Libya, so you're hopes have grounds.
We pay those motherfuckers a trillion dollars and year and they don't know that you need bombs to fight wars??? I'm starting to think something doesn't add up here
This is the fault of DEI
I mean has America put winning a war first since WW2?
If I remember correctly in Korea, American soldiers were trained to fight alongside tanks, but then the MIC couldn’t provide tanks, because the hot commodity was Air Force bombers and nukes. Almost all small arms weapons were just surplus or restocked from WW2. This made the ground forces training essentially worthless and caused the highest casualty rate per day in an American war.
the US MIC has been jerking itself raw to ODS for 30 years now and they still think that high tech wunderwaffen are how peer wars are won because (?)
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them. Or at least sell off the chairs they are teetering on with the nooses around their necks.
They'll sell us the rope, but unfortunately we'll have to build to guillotine ourselves.
Hangings leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Guillotines are more complicated, but fine by me.
What’s the point of a “next generation” fighter jet if all you do with is bomb villagers in a poor country with no Air Force instead of testing it on peers
"What do you mean we can't use our hypersonic missles to shoot down all the makeshift rockets the barbaric masses are firing at us?"
Americans don’t even have bypersonics lol
Oh, lol. Get fucked.
Imperialism eventually eats itself because it's based on grifters and fascists.