Posted on 05/25/2025 3:29:52 PM PDT by Retain Mike
I have a hard time imagining an initial inventory of a munition is placed in a warehouse, never expended in exercises, and never upgraded.
Retain Mike wrote: “I have a hard time imagining an initial inventory of a munition is placed in a warehouse, never expended in exercises, and never upgraded.”
DoD has various computer models that are used to calculate how many munitions we need in the inventory. Usually, these models also calculate how many will be used for training. We produce to those amounts. Sometimes some are withdrawn from storage for reliability testing. Sometimes as munitions are expended they might be replaced with upgraded versions. The oldest in the inventory are the ones usually withdrawn for testing, etc.
We should be spoiling up long range drone factories - the small attack drones, not ISR stuff.
The American elite chose to offshore its industry and dis-employ its citizenry. It further worked to inundate its high tech workers with a massive influx of foreigners starting with the Immigration Act of 1990.
It is difficult to believe that the American elite would suddenly change course and have a massive expansion in jobs for citizens. On the other hand, having trouble keeping up with the Russians during the artillary war portion of the conflict in Ukraine, the Amercian elites might realize that their internal policies threaten the ability to project power.
George Patton brilliantly wrote a lengthy poem in 1917 that documented this kind of stupidity...
It’s not just manufacturing new items, it’s maintaining existing hardware. Electronic components become obsolete. I’ve been to a facility where these components are stored in climate controlled bins in a circulating nitrogen environment.
He said the factories no longer existed. But that doesn’t make sense. I would keep the people and equipment in place, produce for our allies and use profits for innovation.
That is a reason that foreign sales are so important, it keeps the factories in production while helping to cement cooperation and interaction from friends, in some cases it can even be an emergency source for additional weapon supplies and ammo if we run low and have to ask friends for ammo or equipment.
Businesses also need long term contracts to keep the factories open, short term contracts of a limited run don’t help much, all of this has been improving in the West since Putin’s invasion, while his weapon sales have suffered because of the bad results his weapons displayed on the battlefield, without foreign sales his government has to fully fund Russia’s weapon manufacturing.
We shouldn’t be deploying anything to proxy wars, not weapons, not money, not troops...nothing.
Retain Mike wrote: “He said the factories no longer existed. But that doesn’t make sense. I would keep the people and equipment in place, produce for our allies and use profits for innovation.”
Some one has to pay to maintain those factors and equipment used to make munitions. We do produce some munitions for our allies and the funds are used to maintain the production lines.
We do need to modernize much of our production base. For example, much of our explosives, propellants are produced at Ammunition Plants first built in WWII. They are expensive to maintain and inefficient in production. Some of the propellants are identical to those in civilian ammunition.
BTW, democrats are trying to prevent ammunition production from being sold in the civilian market as part of their gun control efforts. See Lake City Ammunition plant. The brass cartridge cases can be used for civilian ammunition.
Some of our precision munitions were designed years ago and use components that are obsolete and no longer produced.
I spent about forty years in the ammunition and missile business.
Drone swarm integration, a right to repair and increased forward logistical capacity are all on the table in the new proposals.
AS someone who started in defense manufacturing in the 70’s , I watched the number of machine shops dwindle as work was offshored , foundries close due to EPA regulation changes, the government cancel programs left and right due to stupidity from the procurement officers. In WW2 the government bypassed the Army Arsenals and Navy Shipyards and went straight to Chrysler and Kaiser to get things produced. The Pentagon never saw a project that it couldn’t kill just before production was about to start. Patriot production rate is 550 missiles per year, going to increase to 650 this year. That’s about 2 per day. Hey China, Iran, and Russia, can you limit your total attacks to 2 planes or missiles per day. As my dad would say, bullshit.
What's wrong with Gatling guns? An oversized radar-directed shotgun would probably work too.
Virtually everything is CNC now. Yet it's the people who used to run manual equipment that become really valuable for design and fabrication of tooling and fixtures.
What was worse was using bogus environmental laws to kill plating and coating businesses.
Most of my career was making jet engine, rocket engine, wings, and medical devices. We had our own coating shop because all of the outside ones went out of business or were bought by the prime contractors. Every blade root or vane foot was coated with exotic no stick coatings, tips were coated with cbn, and the material combinations later on used electron beam or plasma to deposit high temp coatings. crazy world. I’m amazed my lungs didn’t coated as well.
The main bottleneck in producing ‘PGMs’ is the lack of secure computer chips. We ran off most of the chip foundries.
Raytheon is on record as saying, repeatedly, that they have everything else ready to go in reasonable peacetime volume *except* the chips. No chips, no guidance and no flight controls.
They aren’t hard to spin up.. except for the chips needed to make them work. Which we don’t make.
The factories and the companies are gone. Even where the company survives, they closed down their military production. We were even stupid enough to have Congress mandate the destruction of tooling and knowledge bases.
Very short range - and we took them off of most our ships because we decided SeaRAM was better, even though the ship can only fire 8-12 of them per launcher and then it has to go back to port to reload. The Navy has been hastily putting them back on in some cases, but a lot of them got scrapped, there’s a production backlog and new production ships didn’t have provision for the mounts the old ones of the same model did.
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