Tinfoil hat time?
This lets the current administration direct funding away from established military primes to their preferred vendors (i.e. political patronage).
To take just one example out of dozens, the US fired somewhere from 100 to 150 THAAD interceptors - about ¼ of the stockpile - during the 12 days war in 2025. We produce just under 100 per year. There are plans to raise that number to 400 per year.
The Ukrainians were expending somewhere around 10,000 drones per day in mid 2025. Russian numbers are likely broadly similar.
Many historical conflicts have featured a substantial bottleneck on multiple munitions during ramp up. World War 1 had artillery shell crises across Britain, France, Russia, and Germany. World War II had similar, especially for the Russians and Germans. The US was short on ammo early in the Korean war.
Modern mechanized combat demands an insane manufacturing and logistics chain. It can burn through stockpiles incredibly fast, especially of high capability expensive munitions. War production levels are utterly unsustainable during peace time.
This is why peer and near-peer conflict is as much an economic and productive game as it is a military one. Shock and awe takes a tremendous amount of resources to accomplish at all, let alone sustain.
Your whole comment I kept recalling "The Art of War" - which is of course, mostly about how not to go to war, how if you must go to war, it needs to be efficient, bc the war will decimate the State faster than the enemy ever could, but be really smart about it, bc not only is it incredibly expensive, you could also lose, and its very hard to recover from.
Best to avoid warring if you at all can - thousands of years later, still true.
The problem is, those decapitation attacks work when the institutions are weak or structured in a way that all the power is in the hands of one person. It's always funny to watch in Hollywood movies everybody scrambled to save the US president and the US president being extremeyly important. Even in real life Americans swear in a replacement ASAP when the president dies (i.e. Kennedy). That's very funny from European perspective, RIP to the guy but just elect someone else why you are making it a big deal?
Also, the wars in Europe all have stories about how soldiers pausing the fight one the frontlines and having a chat sharing meals exchanging cigarettes with the opponent etc.
Just a reminder that THAAD interceptor price is not due to material cost or difficulty to manufacture. Its approximately as expensive as gold per kilogram precisely because its made in such small numbers as part of a gold plated military contract.
Warfighting and good grooming were said to be key.
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This is reminding us something that we should never have forgotten - modern war has an insatiable demand for munitions.
To take just one example out of dozens, the US fired somewhere from 100 to 150 THAAD interceptors - about ¼ of the stockpile - during the 12 days war in 2025.[1][2] We produce just under 100 per year.[3] There are plans to raise that number to 400 per year.[4]
The Ukrainians were expending somewhere around 10,000 drones per day in mid 2025.[5] Russian numbers are likely broadly similar.
Many historical conflicts have featured a substantial bottleneck on multiple munitions during ramp up. World War 1 had artillery shell crises across Britain, France, Russia, and Germany.[6][7] World War II had similar, especially for the Russians and Germans.[8] The US was short on ammo early in the Korean war.[9][10]
Modern mechanized combat demands an insane manufacturing and logistics chain. It can burn through stockpiles incredibly fast, especially of high capability expensive munitions. War production levels are utterly unsustainable during peace time.
This is why peer and near-peer conflict is as much an economic and productive game as it is a military one. Shock and awe takes a tremendous amount of resources to accomplish at all, let alone sustain.
*Sources:*
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/middleeast/us-thaad-missile-i...
[2] https://armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2025/us-army-rais...
[3] https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/lockheed-pentagon-ink-pl...
[4] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5713637-lockheed-martin-q...
[5] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/22/ukraine-deploys-9000-drones-da...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Crisis_of_1915
[7] https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/shells-cri...
[8] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13518046.2024.2...
[9] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA416944.pdf
[10] https://wp.oldmagazinearticles.com/magazine-articles/the-col...
Wouldn't it be to only launch cheap missiles / drones for a week or two to deplete interceptors and only then start using more advanced missiles ?
1. Bomb everything.
2. Bomb everything some more.
3. ?
4. Profit! Peace and democracy breaks out.
That seems unlikely.
It's tricky because the opposition don't have arms so it needs some of the guys who do to turn.
The US/Israel are being quite brutal though - killing all the regime leaders (as in youtube https://youtu.be/2TZF8_wwAUs?t=572)
On the other hand, exchanging an anti-US dictator for a US-aligned dictator is probably a lot better for the average citizen because your country won't be embargoed anymore, you just have to accept US oil companies on your territory.
If the US lacks the munitions to fight all of these conflicts, and is unreliable to allies or foes leads to a high likelihood of conflict.
4000 in stockpiles, they shot maybe couple hundred in one day. Could sustain for 2 weeks at this pace.
The Iraq war cost about $2T over a decade.
You could have about 10% subsidized healthcare, which I would obviously argue is better than pointless war killing tons of people.
But you couldn't just "have healthcare".
See also: not having daily mass shootings.
The United States military budget is now 1.5 trillion dollars per year.
