We make plenty of stuff at scale. We just haven’t designed any of military around it since WWII.
> unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes
We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.
Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is?
I am finding it difficult to imagine it'll be any different for terrorists of a different ethnicity.
The device had a physical keyboard with a micocontroller that managed it and they ended up writing the code that ran on that micro as it was largely independent of the code we were writing, and easy for us to test. The first versions were not great, but they got better quickly.
As we talked amongst ourselves about why they were so emphatic about this, it became clear to us that they were taking a long term view of the importance of moving into the intellectual property side of things. Dustin points out that, in some areas, they are there.
Something that stuck with me was that dude had an uncle that worked at a bolt factory down the road, and now there is literally no way to source domestically made bolts. And that they could find one retired guy after scouring multiple states who could help make an injection mold. I'm sure some of the larger defense contractors have a few guys who can do this, but that makes for a pretty low bus factor.
I think the Ukranians are still unimpressed with the withdrawal of US support, especially from the shells which were being manufactured in the US (now moved to Rheinmetall), and the de-sanctioning of Russian oil: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2871wyz9ko
Problem is that US wants to distance itself instead of ending the conflict
Sorry, what is "the other side" exactly?
Considering that Trump literally tried to blackmail Zelenskyy in his first term, why on earth would they have supported him in 2020?
Should have worn a suit.
The US is not an ally of Ukraine, it sees Ukraine as a nuisance that should have rolled over long ago but somehow refuses to and because the US still needs Europe for a bit longer (but maybe not that much longer) they're still playing ball as long as Europe pays (as it should, but that's besides the point).
Allies come to each others aid, the US has all but abandoned Ukraine after Trump came to power and did far less than it could have done early on. Why you would expect Ukraine to be generous after the numerous put downs and actions that were clearly organized to benefit Putin is a mystery to me.
The same goes for when you try to strongarm a country into fabricating evidence to shore up your lies.
The USA was an ally in 1945 and has since steadily eroded that. In 2001 they briefly regained a lot of sympathy but squandered it just as fast and now we're at low tide. And I wonder how much lower it will go before people with common sense will be back at the helm and reparation of the relationship can begin, but I don't expect the aftershocks of this to be gone quickly.
And no, help was not offered '90% of the time'. Most of the time it was just business in disguise, altruism did not factor into it as far as I can see.
That’s a straw man. Nobody argued that before you mentioned it.
Also, threatening Greenland was not just "taking a break". Lying about what allies did in Iraq and Afghanistan was not just "taking a break". Insulting Europe, quite grossly, was not just "taking a break". And tariffs were not just "taking a break" either.
For that matter, trying to make Europe more fascists is not "taking a break", it is "meddling in".
The soviet union collapsed as a result of military overspending and massive supply chain corruption in an attempt to keep up with an opponent with lower levels of corruption and a far more powerful industrial base.
Which is to say, inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons while showering them with cash would signal that that Christmas came early for Putin.
The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.
The west tolerates nearly all of the corruption in Ukraine but keeps tight control of two political organs in Ukraine - NABU and SAPO.
These "anti corruption agencies" will mostly hear and see no evil until a politican in Ukraine deviates from western foreign policy goals. Then they "discover" how corrupt this one individual turned out to be and crack down on them until everybody is once again on the same page.
Twice they have threatened Zelensky (once when he tried to bring the agencies under his direct control) and twice he has backed down.
Ukraine is a massive weapons manufacturer. It's a small country holding Russia's entire military-industrial complex at bay. We have a lot to learn from them, even if it's just tactics and industrial organisation. And those lessons don't only apply to fighting pisspot dictatorships like Putin's.
What they have is a dire situation that drives efficient and pragmatic proucurement. This is much harder to export.
They built a network centric warefare with starlink and cheap android tablets down to the drone teams in the field.
They built a network of cheap acousting sensors (old phones) as passive sensors and using ML models to find the drones cheaply and increase the coverage. (Radars are expensive and easy to hit because they emit).
What they achieved is a "sensor fusion like" distributed system buid on cheap components and updated realtime. And all this is battle tested in the new environment of transparent battlefield (there is always a drone looking).
Also a lot of real-life electronic warfare stuff and drone applications.
This is what's missing in the US army. They are optimized for a symetrical 20th century warfare.
And ultimately whatever model of distributed lethality / survivability (which US planning foresaw) is less relevant that US global commitments requires high end hardware that has to be rotated / propositioned selectively, and sustainable only in limited numbers vs adversaries mobilized on total war.
But the fundamental problem is US adversaries are catching up on precision strike complex. Iran isn't asymmetric warfare, but restoration of symmetry. It's not so much US getting weaker as adversaries getting stronger, and without monopoly over mass precision strike (which naval / air superiority / supremacy is only delivery platform), US expeditionary mode simply on the losing side of many local attrition scenarios. Ultimately all US adversaries will gain commoditized local precision strike (even deadlier if bundled with high end ISR), at varying scales due to proliferation requiring persistence across global theatres US simply doesn't have numbers/logistics for.
TLDR: US expeditionary model is bunch of goons with rifles in trucks, driving around neighbourhood where everyone had knives that could not get in range. The second everyone else buys guns, then rifles, the expeditionary model breaks.
US manufacturers dont make cheap effective solutions because there is little profit in it when they can upsell expensive options.
The US has little motivation to optimize.
Not the stuff that matters (chips, electronics, metals, etc). We don't even have a primary lead smelter, which we would likely need if we got into a peer conflict.
It's also important to note that the US lacks the ability to quickly pivot and set up plants. Much of the knowledge to do so has been disappearing as employment in that sector has been steadily declining for decades. Sure we make stuff at scale using automation, but that automation can't be changed to significantly different stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs, you get the "Oh we produce high value products, mostly military".
Then you get posts like this. How is one to reconcile these ideas? Is Lockheed Martin the Ferrari of weapons?
>When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs
That percentage goes down every year due to reduced manufacturing but also jobs are lost to high-tech automation in manufacturing. But it's still a buttload.
Many of the best known American products, e.g. computers, are only assembled in USA from imported parts.
If the imports from certain countries would be completely interrupted, it is unknown how much of that US manufacturing would be able to continue.
That is happening, only with "EU" not "America". Because the EU are Ukraine's allies.
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-to-open-10-weapons-expor...
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-to-open-arms-factory...
https://euobserver.com/209049/eu-signs-off-on-e260m-grant-fo...
As for the US being Ukrainian allies as compared to EU, well: https://kyivindependent.com/us-military-aid-to-ukraine-dropp...
I think that it's understood that when we use shorthand such as "US is not supporting Ukraine" that it is the respective governments that we are discussing. The point about the "majority of Americans" is true enough (though you might say that the majority of Americans care about the price of gasoline and groceries and little else politically) but it is rather irrelevant if the administration does the opposite.
In other words, "thoughts and prayers from people" is not enough to make you an ally. Money and policy is the real thing.
Americans are fat and happy now but we are not always this way.
(1) In this back and forth I'm surprised mines in the straight are not mentioned.
(2) im having difficulty seeing how cheap drones incapacitates a carrier. They are there to project force well into enemy territory for precise strikes. The carrier can be some distance from the shore. Now, the question turns to strike what? Surely drone manufacturing plants and barracks would have to be on list or ... they'd be less effective.
(3) if drones are sub-mach speeds why not shoot down with a glorified gattleling gun as opposed to expensive missiles or lasers?
But Putin would not like that! /s
