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It's actually very difficult to implement a change in our timeline on such a complex issue without causing a mix of positive and negative effects relative to yo
by mapt 5mo ago
It's actually very difficult to implement a change in our timeline on such a complex issue without causing a mix of positive and negative effects relative to your desired goal. It's very hard to impute whether anyone in the White House actually had a successful causal motive->plan->implementation->effect loop deliberately, but there are always high points, even of grotesque failure.
Obviously it's not NET positive, but if I had to highlight one positive for the US from their perspective, setting most of our guided munitions on fire overnight breaks the military, and the suspicion is that it breaks the military at a time when China is not quite yet prepared to invade Taiwan. It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; Increasing procurement rates for many systems by an order of magnitude on the low end. A year ago, and 10 years ago, and 25 years ago, it was in a severe munitions stockpile crisis according to everyone who's ever ran a wargame or tried to figure out deterrence policy for a non-nuclear shooting war
After the Cold War, we basically reduced most munitions stockpiles to a level consistent with a Desert Storm scale operation, but kept paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep defense contractors technically alive, producing a handful of units a year at costs that pay for the overhead of existing. In areas like naval procurement, the contradictions entailed by this approach combined with neoliberal austerity posturing and a lackadaisical response to delays, have combined to turn almost every major shipbuilding effort since the Cold War into an expensive failure. We are spending a remarkable amount of money on military equipment and probably getting 5% of what we would get if we spent twice that much and emphasized industrial performance rather than contractor sustainment.
A year ago, Congress and the Pentagon were carefully ignoring this for political reasons, while the MIC & foreign policy blob believes China was looking at it as an opportunity.
- watwut 5mo ago> It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; How exactly is it positive to waste munition and thus force the congress to buy new munition? You will spend a huge amount of money to ... get where you was.
- twodave 5mo agoI think the idea is that now that it's a public issue, it will have to be addressed more than just bringing us back to pre-war levels.
- deepsun 5mo agoPrinting munitions is not as long as scaling up production to print up munitions. Russian war showed that it will be too late to scale anything once the enemy trench in.
- mapt 5mo agoYou rule Elbonia. Your military have a stockpile of 10,000 arrows, and you are paying a small village to produce 1 arrow per day, which is what you lose in regular training. This village was a planned development in the last Great War to produce 500 arrows per day at an exorbitant cost of 10,000 elbomarks a year, but peace has brough dividends; While you still fund an expensive (2,000 elbomarks/yr) retirement home in the village to keep the expertise in arrow construction literally alive, you have diversified its economy to to the point that it's actually bringing in some net tax revenue, rather than requiring an entire province worth of taxes of to hold up. The consensus is "Arrows are fucking expensive now. We could never afford to build 10 arrows per day, it would obviously break our budget". You ask your military experts what would happen if your border region would get invaded by your rival neighbor, and they say that any scenario where the castle there holds out and breaks the siege would require upwards of 300,000 arrows to be expended in the first month, and you say "I hope my rival doesn't invade then. I'm so happy they're friendly now after the Great War." You're also happy that the regional lords under you are happy that they don't have to pay so many taxes. Ten years in the future, the situation has changed a bit. Your neighbor is building a massive army. You say "I hope my rival doesn't invade. It doesn't look like they're close to my military yet. I'm increasing arrow production to 2 per day," at a nominal cost of 4000 elbomarks/day, but an actual cost of considerably less. You achieve this budget change... barely. Can't ask for more - can't disrupt the regional lords right now. None of them seem to think there's a threat right now. Ten years after that, your rival is fortifying its border and building siege equipment, but your walls are high and it would need a couple more generations of larger siege tower to reach them. You hold a jousting and archery competition, and deplete your stockpiles, shooting 9000 arrows at a target in a weeklong circus of an event. This was all your idea and basically everybody criticizes you. Former supporters start talking about you retiring. You tell the regional lords through a budget request "We're completely defenseless now. You HAVE to give me the elbomarks to rebuild the arrow-making factories and start producing 300 arrows per day, starting immediately and for the next five years, or there will definitely be war. I'm not saying for sure how deliberately this scenario happened. It's unlikely that it failed to occur to every single advisor to Donald Trump, but whether it was part of Trump's personal decisionmaking calculus is impossible to say.