Why Defense Stocks Could get Crushed in Coming Years

Townhall.com ^ | November 5, 2011 | David Sterman

[Cronos]

The Paki stuff is a joke — Chinese made and I doubt it would work. Besides which, to face off against the Chinese and Pakis, it’s not gonna be the US, but India on the front-lines. Let the Indian military pick up the tab.

[Myrddin]

The Paki subs were designed and built by the French. They can go 12,000 miles without surfacing. France built them in a Paki ship yard, then supervised/trained the Pakis to build two more. A little search with Google will turn up the complete specs.

Frankly, we are much more likely to face a cyber war. It is already underway. Stuxnet aimed at the Iranian nuke centrifuges. Our own power grid control computers are currently infected with a virus thought to be of Russian or Chinese origin. Our grid could be dropped with a few keystrokes. The big transformers used to drive the grid at 750KV and 500KV take 3 years to manufacture and that happens in Germany. We have NO spares. Nail one of those and we have a prolonged outage. Likewise, there are railroad bridges that bring coal to power plants that supply 47% of our electrical power. There is a limit to how much coal each plant can keep on hand. The resupply chain is in constant operation. Wipe out one or more of those bridges and the coal on the ground will be exhausted faster than the bridge(s) can be rebuilt.