Please read #30.
We have no more 155 shells to send to Ukraine, so we have to send 105 and 120mm mortar, which is badly outranged by Russian 152. M-777s, that were great firing a half-dozen shells a day now and then in A-stan, wear out and break down in high-tempo war. Do we have more to send? No. Also Javelins, Stingers, etc etc.
But instead of ramping up production of what we NEED NOW, we are going to shovel billions to the MIC to make a white elephant at 2+ BILLION per copy, that won't fly for 5-10 years.
And stealth is only ONE factor in finding a bomber flying over a tier-one peer adversary.
But these guys will make more billions, and that's what really matters.
Personally, for a good portion of my life, I have wondered how modern, advanced, 1st world militaries would be able to perform in a contested environment with highly advanced, expensive, and less numerous weaponry.
Especially when you don’t have an industrial base to replace combat losses.
I have tended to believe we would be more like Japan in WWII than the USA, capable of having our supply lines successfully interdicted, and being cut off from critical raw materials needed for production of advanced weaponry.
How would we be able to function, for example, if we were to experience material losses as we incurred in the Schweinfurt Raids, or even the battles around the Solomon Islands? Granted, for a buffer against aviation losses, we have the bone yard out in Davis-Monthan, but that is replacing 4th Gen aircraft with 3rd Gen. And that is just aviation.
Never mind naval losses, or smart weaponry (much of which uses materials from overseas that could be successfully interdicted)
What is going on now in Ukraine, where weaponry is being sucked from the active arsenals like ours, is that it is being used and not replaced, chewed up in combat.
Granted, I don’t put it past them to be doing this in order to justify the purchase of new weaponry and munitions, much like the jettisoning of perfectly good combat aircraft into the ocean in WWII by returning carriers who knew that newer weaponry was awaiting them.