For at least six months after it became apparent the Western strategy for Ukraine was to dribble enough armaments into the battle to slow the Russian takeover of the eastern third of Ukraine, but not enough for Ukraine to win, we were posting on this weird approach to war:
August 1, 2022None of the electorate in the NATO countries voted for another of these inconclusive, forever wars, so profitable for a select few and so costly in life and treasure for regular people. Surely no one in the developing nations signed on to pay for sanctions with their food budget. It is time to figure out a) What our goals are and b) What the hell we are doing, period and in furtherance of those goals. This isn't some game of RISK with let's try this, or let's try that and no consequences at the end of the night. Since the Maidan coup in 2014 the West has had eight years to plan for this.
Do it or don't do it; because trying to finesse a halfway reaction is nuts.
As the philosopher asked the generals and armaments producers some time ago:"When was the last time you b****es won a war?"
"No holidays for Ukraine: Financial needs increase"
The EU has to either go all-in or call a halt to what they are currently doing.This halfway stuff does not work for anyone but the arms merchants and is just plain evil in terms of lives lost and livelihoods ruined. As the BSD's used to say: "Go big or go home."
As it turned out Russia is outproducing the U.S. in artillery shells by around 7:1.
So on top of dribbling material in to extend the war of attrition (the RAND plan) the U.S. actually couldn't have done any more, any faster than they and the rest of the West did without depleting their own stores and arsenals.
Pathetic.
There are other posts but zooming back to the present here's the Wall Street Journal with the headline story, December 6:
America’s industrial base struggles to ramp up defense production while China’s churns out ever more weapons
When the Center for Strategic and International Studies simulated a war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, the wargame ended with Taiwan still free, at grievous cost. The U.S. loses two aircraft carriers and up to 20 destroyers and cruisers; China sees more than 50 major surface warships sunk.
What looks like a draw, though, becomes a Chinese victory before long. As Eric Labs, a navy analyst for the Congressional Budget Office explains, China can replace lost ships far more quickly. In the past two years, its navy has grown by 17 cruisers and destroyers; it would take the U.S. six years to build the same number under current conditions, he said.
“In terms of industrial competition and shipbuilding, China is where the U.S. was in the early stages of World War II,” Labs said. In the U.S. now, “we just don’t have the industrial capacity to build warships…in large numbers very fast.”
Intensifying security challenges from the western Pacific to Ukraine to the Middle East have fueled debate over whether the U.S. can afford a bigger military. In fact, the more pressing question is whether it can build one—when its principal adversary possesses vast industrial capacity.
U.S. military spending was 3.1% of gross domestic product in the last fiscal year, near the lowest since World War II. Add the $106 billion President Biden has requested in aid primarily for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and the total would still be less than the 4.6% spent at the peak of Iraq and Afghanistan operations in 2010, never mind the 8.9% in 1968, during the Vietnam War. Healthcare, pensions and interest on the debt really do menace the nation’s finances; military outlays don’t.
The problem is that even when money’s available, the munitions and weapons are difficult to deliver. In May of 2022, Biden and
promised to double production of Javelin antitank missiles by 2024. That has been pushed back to 2026. The U.S. announced the sale of Harpoon antiship missiles to Taiwan in 2020. They might not be delivered until 2026. Because the U.S. only builds about 1.5 nuclear submarines a year, some legislators worry it will take too long to replace those the U.S. will sell to Australia under Aukus, a technology-sharing pact that includes the U.K.In the early 1990s, with the Cold War over and military budgets shrinking, the Pentagon pushed defense contractors to consolidate. Since then, the government’s emphasis on lowest-cost production discourages the remaining contractors from having the extra capacity needed to surge production, said Cynthia Cook, a defense industry expert at CSIS....
....MUCH MORE
Very related from
Due to the unique geographical position of the U.S., the Navy has the luxury of defending the nation’s interests “over there.” Since World War II, it developed and maintained a navy that was able to project power overseas; to reconstitute its combat power while still at sea or at least far from national shores; and continuously maintain proximity to competitors. This expeditionary character minimized the dependence of the fleet on shore-based and homeland-based infrastructure to sustain operations, allowing the fleet to be more logistically self-sufficient at sea.
However, late in the Cold War, the U.S. Navy started to diminish its expeditionary capability, and became more reliant on allied and friendly bases. A key development was subtle but consequential – the vertical launch system (VLS) for the surface fleet’s primary anti-air, anti-submarine, and land-attack weapons. While a very capable system, reloading VLS at sea was problematic and soon abandoned. While an aircraft carrier can be rearmed at sea, surface warships cannot, which constrains the ability of carrier strike groups to sustain forward operations without taking frequent trips back to fixed infrastructure. The Navy is revisiting the issue of reloading VLS at sea, and those efforts should be reinforced.
The next step the Navy took away from an expeditionary capability was in the 1990s, when it decommissioned most of the submarine tenders (AS), all of the repair ships (AR), and destroyer tenders (AD), and moved away from Sailor-manned Shore Intermediate Maintenance Centers (SIMA). Not only did this eliminate the ability to conduct intermediate maintenance “over there,” but it destroyed the progression of apprentice-to-journeyman-to-master technician that made the U.S. Navy Sailor one of the premier maintenance resources in the military world. Combat search and rescue, salvage, and battle damage repair are other areas in which the U.S. Navy no longer has sufficient capability for sustaining expeditionary operations....
