A draft copy of the new National Defense Industrial Strategy says American companies can’t build weapons fast enough to meet global demand.
America’s defense industry is struggling to achieve the kind of speed and responsiveness to stay ahead in a high-tech arms race with competitors such as China, an unreleased draft of a new Pentagon report on the defense industry warns.
The first ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, which is set to be released in the coming weeks by Pentagon acquisition chief William LaPlante, is meant to be a comprehensive look at what the Pentagon needs in order to tap into the expertise of small tech firms, while funding and supporting traditional companies to move faster to develop new tech.
As it stands now, the U.S. defense industrial base “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale,” according to a draft version of the report, obtained by POLITICO.
How the defense industry sees itself🎶Never before has a
boymilitary industrial complex wanted more.🎶Oh wait…
US defense spending is close to a trillion. China’s is less than a third of that.
And how about an effin audit. No?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-year-row-2023-11-16/
The way China organizes its defense spending keeps a lot of it off the books. There are many corporations that are government controlled which engage in research, espionage and military weapons production that are not in the central government’s books.
The CCPs military spend is much higher than they let on.
Also salaries are lower.
China is still pretty far behind on all sorts of tech.
Stealth: China just figured out how to hide the exhaust inside the airframe, the US was doing that in the 70s. They don’t have stealth missles the US has thousands.
Missles: China has missles fueled with water, liquid fuel are less stealthy than solid. China is much closer here than most areas.
Logistics: US cargo planes can cary more farther. Russia has shown what bag logistics can do.
Boats: while China has more boats they are less capable. China has two aircraft carriers with one on the way US has 11 with 5 on the way.
Asymmetric warfare: US has demonstrated capability to handle drones and cruze missiles in a real world scenario, no one else has.
Fuck off.
Fight climate change, not wars.
Defense spending prevents wars.
STFU, moron.
Strong fact-based argument, pal.
War mongers want more weapons
I like how we got the “Pentagon slaps solar panels on its roof” piece the same day as this.
But sure, it wasn’t a puff piece to try and get you to ignore the fact that the pentagon is the singularly largest source of emissions on the planet.
(( not enough)) … “to satisfy the … needs…”
USA should re-evaluate its “need” to support Israeli’s genocide in Gaza.
China is imitating the US Munro Doctrine, in which the US largely succeeded in excluding the European Great Powers from the Western Hemisphere by the end of the 1800s. China is trying to do the same in their neighbourhood. In this analogy, the South China Sea is China’s Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.
However, it will be exponentially more difficult for China to achieve local hegemony given that they are surrounded by other industrialized nations on home soil who clearly see the threat and don’t want to become subjects of an authoritarian state.
The lesson that the US learned from WW1 and WW2 is that authoritarian states are very dangerous and the US cannot isolate itself from world events.
The lesson the US is learning from “winning” the Cold War is that global hegemony is corrupting and dangerous in terms of domestic politics.
