A draft copy of the new National Defense Industrial Strategy says American companies can’t build weapons fast enough to meet global demand.
America’s defense industry is struggling to achieve the kind of speed and responsiveness to stay ahead in a high-tech arms race with competitors such as China, an unreleased draft of a new Pentagon report on the defense industry warns.
The first ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, which is set to be released in the coming weeks by Pentagon acquisition chief William LaPlante, is meant to be a comprehensive look at what the Pentagon needs in order to tap into the expertise of small tech firms, while funding and supporting traditional companies to move faster to develop new tech.
As it stands now, the U.S. defense industrial base “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale,” according to a draft version of the report, obtained by POLITICO.
US defense spending is close to a trillion. China’s is less than a third of that.
And how about an effin audit. No?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-year-row-2023-11-16/
The way China organizes its defense spending keeps a lot of it off the books. There are many corporations that are government controlled which engage in research, espionage and military weapons production that are not in the central government’s books.
The CCPs military spend is much higher than they let on.
Also salaries are lower.
China is still pretty far behind on all sorts of tech.
Stealth: China just figured out how to hide the exhaust inside the airframe, the US was doing that in the 70s. They don’t have stealth missles the US has thousands.
Missles: China has missles fueled with water, liquid fuel are less stealthy than solid. China is much closer here than most areas.
Logistics: US cargo planes can cary more farther. Russia has shown what bag logistics can do.
Boats: while China has more boats they are less capable. China has two aircraft carriers with one on the way US has 11 with 5 on the way.
Asymmetric warfare: US has demonstrated capability to handle drones and cruze missiles in a real world scenario, no one else has.
Mostly because the US has to actually develop and research new weapon technology and China just copies everything so they don’t need to spend as much.
I sincerely doubt the situation is as dire as they’re claiming considering our fucking defense budget.
China is imitating the US Munro Doctrine, in which the US largely succeeded in excluding the European Great Powers from the Western Hemisphere by the end of the 1800s. China is trying to do the same in their neighbourhood. In this analogy, the South China Sea is China’s Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.
However, it will be exponentially more difficult for China to achieve local hegemony given that they are surrounded by other industrialized nations on home soil who clearly see the threat and don’t want to become subjects of an authoritarian state.
The lesson that the US learned from WW1 and WW2 is that authoritarian states are very dangerous and the US cannot isolate itself from world events.
The lesson the US is learning from “winning” the Cold War is that global hegemony is corrupting and dangerous in terms of domestic politics.
stop tryin? can we move on from producing human killing devices?
Problem is, do you really want China as the military superpower?
i think one of the primary purposes of the military should be to find ways to no longer need a military.
not to justify its own existence by becoming a glorified welfare program for companies and humans that cant do something constructive.
the world is changing. colonialism is dead
i do not fear china, no
i do not fear china, no
That’s nice. Unfortunately, all their neighbours do.
i think one of the primary purposes of the military should be to find ways to no longer need a military.
How exactly would the military ever accomplish that? That’s a task for the non-military side to accomplish.
if it is not part of your mandate to not exist, you will find ways to make sure you always exist. “the military” is a necessary evil. not sure about you, but i think we should be working to remove evil… even in-house.
the trillion dollar military is not even kind of right-sized for the actual threats to our country. its so grossly over-sized it is hard to fathom.
How, exactly, would the military find a way to remove the need for a military? Short of world domination, and even then they’d still need the military force to stay in power. You can’t make a mandate when there’s no reasonable route to accomplishing it.
Fuck off.
Fight climate change, not wars.
But what about climate wars
War mongers want more weapons
I like how we got the “Pentagon slaps solar panels on its roof” piece the same day as this.
But sure, it wasn’t a puff piece to try and get you to ignore the fact that the pentagon is the singularly largest source of emissions on the planet.
