Interesting. I thought Ukraine funds were supplemental. That is…they’re in addition to normal. So, If normal annual budget expenditures on ammunition are maintained then production lines would also maintain their normal staffing, shifts, and output. Where are the layoffs if the supplemental is not approved? Unless Biden has depleted our military stores to such an extent that we don’t have enough to protect our own land. Then I can see ramping up production for a short period to restock. But then after you’d have layoffs.
I spent over thirty years in the military industrial complex. How the funding works is complicated but I’ll try to cover just the question of where do the layoffs come in. Bill Clinton used up almost all of the bullets and bombs because he spent the budget on diapering aids babies in Africa while also bombing the hell out of the third world. When GWB was elected he personally called the CEO’s of the bullets and bomb companies and asked them to go to three shifts and, “We’ll talk price when I take office.” Our CEO send around an all-hands email saying that had happened and to go full speed ahead. We did and GWB did. I think GWB had to do this personally because there is a law that contractors can not spend any money or build anything of a military nature without being under contract. The situation in Congress was a lot less…stupid?...than it is now and it was just a risk from November to January of that year.
Some time after the last standard budget the military went to industry and said, basically, the peace dividend is over. We’re facing a major conflict we want you to double, triple, quadruple, your output. Oh, and by the way, we need you to build additional capacity ASAP. There may have been a few supplementals attached to other bills, I don’t know. But the budget is being burned through at a faster rate. Having burned the budget at both ends it is unlikely that it will last as originally intended. The idea was they’d put extra funding in the next Ukraine aid bill as that would have no problems passing. It hasn’t passed.
So, what happens when the money in the other budgets run out? Industry can’t afford to pick the slack even if doing so was legal, which it isn’t. Hence, layoffs.
The Ukraine aid bill is not all for Ukraine. It’s to make up for all the capacity we lost when the “Peace Dividend” was declared. Recall, there were not going to be anymore major wars. Now we’re facing the Wolf Warriors in the Pacific and Russia who has declared that they want to reoccupy (set the defense policy) of all the former Soviet states, many of which border NATO. It’s Cold War 2.0 but without the stabilizing influence of The Supreme Soviet which exercised policy control over the Soviet leader. We’ll have New Soviet Leader, with no internal bounds and totally isolated from reality. What could go wrong? The Ukraine war is intended to short circuit that eventuality. If Ukraine loses the world will be a LOT less stable.