6 ms·

The American Missile Crisis

64 points by JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

NDlurker 5mo ago
Get some Totseans working on it https://newtotse.com/oldtotse/en/bad_ideas/ka_fucking_boom/chlorate.html https://newtotse.com/oldtotse/en/bad_ideas/ka_fucking_boom/c...
tclover 5mo ago
Turns out you can’t print rockets
- tartoran 5mo ago
  yes, it's a bit harder an more involved than printing money. Best thing is not to squander them.
- Someone 5mo ago
  https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/printed-engines-propel-the-next-industrial-revolution/ https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/print...: “Printed Engines Propel the Next Industrial Revolution“
- tim333 5mo ago
  The article: >X-Bow is an emerging player in the solid rocket motor market, using 3D printing technology to produce motors and propellants
prawn 5mo ago
Down at the bottom of the article it's revealed that Contrary Research (article host) is an investor in Galadyne and another of the discussed manufacturers. Galadyne is introduced as a company with a stake in the liquid propulsion angle that the article pushes. One of the authors is listed as CEO of Galadyne. Bit like an advertorial?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Bit like an advertorial? The author should have disclosed their affiliation more clearly at the top. But their arguments are solid, and I respect them putting their money where their mouth is. Solid-fueled rockets should not be the backbone of our missile forces anymore. That doesn’t mean we get rid of them. But we should be adding mass-produced liquid-fueled missiles to the mix. And our entire rocket force shouldn’t be able to be nerfed by hitting one plant in Utah.
  - sieabahlpark 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - oliver236 5mo ago
    > I respect them putting their money where their mouth is. More like putting their mouth where their money is.
    - junofan 5mo ago
      Haha. Honestly it’s rocks in a tube. If we need to we can figure it out.
      - oliver236 5mo ago
        what does rocks in a tube mean
        springhalo 5mo ago
        I'm assuming he means that solid-propellant rockets are conceptually simple to make; rocks being either the explosive at the end (akin to throwing stones) or maybe the basic fuel and oxidizer propellant mix. Either way it's the idea that the most well funded military on earth could make another rocket factory easily if needed.
        5mo ago
cguess 5mo ago
Before discussing anything related to nuclear missiles *[Command and Control by Eric Schlosser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)) should be required reading. More missiles do not make the world safe, and due to human fallacy it almost always make us less safe.
- ArchieScrivener 5mo ago
  [dead]
- z3ugma 5mo ago
  Well There’s Your Problem, a podcast with slides , covered this recently : https://youtu.be/NJAgvXH5H20?si=OLMJVhOPT40yzHDN https://youtu.be/NJAgvXH5H20?si=OLMJVhOPT40yzHDN
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > anything related to nuclear missiles This article isn’t about nuclear-tipped missiles outside a historical context.
- aaron695 5mo ago
  [dead]
- Paradigm2020 5mo ago
  "The world" is very abstract... Iran got invaded. North Korea didn't and won't. Cuba might. Guess what those 2 countries that are part of the world don't have that the 3rd does...
  - cguess 5mo ago
    And the US having 30,000 (or whatever absurd number) makes the world safer?
    - Paradigm2020 5mo ago
      Please read my comment again...
diogenescynic 5mo ago
We only won World War II because we could produce our tanks faster than the Germans could destroy them and we could destroy their tanks faster than they could produce them. The Germany tanks were superior but our supply lines and manufacturing capacity are ultimately why we won. If we fought a large scale war today, we would be supply constrained by China and other 'rivals' who we can't rely on. We've outsourced everything in the name of efficiency, but have left ourselves spread incredibly thin and exposed huge weaknesses. Remember how fast supply chains broke down during the pandemic? Imagine how fast that breaks down for complex logistics needed to produce complex weapons... I think America is one war away from losing its 'super power' status and being diminished to a much lower status. Look at how we've already empowered Iran into an even more powerful adversary through this war/conflict.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  And ships. We ended the war with (EDIT: practically) none of the carriers we started out with.
  - cpgxiii 5mo ago
    Famously, of course, not at all the case, with Enterprise, Saratoga, and Ranger all surviving. Yes, losses of pre-war carriers were severe (Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet, and Wasp).
- rf15 5mo ago
  Is that really true regarding what we know of WW2? I thought their designs had major flaws, not just the goldplating issues you mention. Besides, they mostly lost because they spend all their manpower and material on pointless incursions far away from their country.
  - rwmj 5mo ago
    Wars between great powers are won and lost on manufacturing base. The classic book on this topic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...
jimbo808 5mo ago
We could also just not start wars and we wouldn't need to worry about missile production
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  Which is why Ukraine, today, doesn’t have to worry about missile and drone production.
  - jimbo808 5mo ago
    America isn't Ukraine, we are a *massive country with a nuclear deterrent,* wedged between two massive oceans and two friendly countries. Nobody is going to attack us unless we go out into the world creating enemies.
    - stackghost 5mo ago
      American security, and indeed the entire pax Americana has been predicated upon your country's network of global military bases and your carrier battle groups. This is what enables the USA to decisively influence any conflict anywhere on the globe. Those bases would need to disappear in order for your comment to be true, and despite two thirds of your electorate who didn't vote against the future dementia ward patient currently in office, I don't think Americans are ready to accept a world where American foreign policy cannot be promulgated more or less at will, which is what isolationism would entail.
      - vkou 5mo ago
        No, America's influence over its globe-spanning empire is predicated on that. That's not the same thing as it's national security. It would do just fine if it weren't the head of a global hegemony, although it might have to start living within its means. Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.
        5mo ago
cpgxiii 5mo ago
Anyone who describes hydrocarbon fuels and high-test peroxide oxidiser as a stable and proven combination is a charlatan trying to sell you something questionable. If you want a proven liquid fuel combination that works in missile environment conditions with well-behaved ignition, Hydrazine/UDMH+N2O4 is the king. Solids are better from a storage and deployment standpoint in almost all cases; anyone making a sincere case for liquid fuels should be making it on the basis of munitions that are best designed around them (notably, of course, most of the long range cruise missiles that have received the most hand-wringing about stockpile depletion are already air-breathing jet-fueled). The actual stockpile issues wrt solid rocket fuel are high-performance SAM/ABM interceptors, and those would require complete redesigns to make liquid-fueled equivalents.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Solids are better from a storage and deployment standpoint in almost all cases The article says this. Liquids are better from a production perspective. In the Cold War, storage and deployment dominated. That need isn’t gone today. But it’s supplanted in priority by the need to be able to rapidly produce these munitions. > those would require complete redesigns to make liquid-fueled equivalents Again, the article acknowledges this. It’s saying we can do that faster than we can get another AP production facility online, and even then, we’d still be unfavorably production constrained compared to China.
  - nixon_why69 5mo ago
    Solving a chemical manufacturing problem in the US has GOT to be easier than taking on additional operations and mechanical complexity for every single missile in combat theatres. The article cites permitting and procurement snafus for why it's so hard to stand up new AP plants, but the same procurement process would apply for new liquid engine designs with all their moving parts, no?
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > Solving a chemical manufacturing problem in the US has GOT to be easier Why? We are currently scaling rocket-engine production for the launch industry. We aren’t doing the same for anything like AP. I don’t think anyone would blink at a well-resourced effort to build a new small-satellite launch vehicle in a couple years, for instance.
zarzavat 5mo ago
Given the misadventures the missiles are currently being used for, it seems like less of a crisis and more of a blessing that the US's capacity for self-destruction isn't unlimited.
isoprophlex 5mo ago
> Missile fuel is a binary: it can either be solid or liquid. Lol what?! No, binary fuels have two components that are both neccesary for operation. Also like commented elsewhere, peroxide fuels are... an adventurous choice What these basic errors mean for the perception of the rest of the article is left as an exercise for the reader.
- lazide 5mo ago
  I think they meant like the odds are 50/50 - it either happens or it doesn’t (lol).
- fnordpiglet 5mo ago
  It’s a bit odd as well as they then go into describing hybrid and gel systems that are both and neither respectively. But overall it’s a pretty informative article and I learned a lot.
- jbxntuehineoh 5mo ago
  I think "missile fuel is a binary" is just a very inarticulate attempt to say "there are two types of missile fuel"
jmyeet 5mo ago
This has been known for awhile and it was widely rumored but never confirmed that critically low missile inventories were the primary reason for ending the 12 day war last year [1]. If so it makes the current great misadventure a startling miscalculation and I don't believe for a second the military wasn't aware of the issue and didn't advise the administration of such. As more evidence of this, US bases in the region were essentially abandoned because they couldn't be protected and the resulting damage will cost billions and takes years to replace, including at least one incredibly expensive THAAD radar [2][3]. As further evidence there are conflicting reports that THAAD systems were re-deployed from South Korea to the Middle East. US officials have denied this, which may be true on a technicality: possibly only munitions were moved. The point is the final bill for all this is already in the hundreds of billions. What's clear here is that the US has a military designed for the Cold War, or possibly the first Gulf War, and Iran in particular has a military completely designed for this conflict. Strategic Air Doctrine has shown itself to be an expensive failure incapable of regime change or even suppressing the force projection of a vastly inferior military in a regional conflict. Key evidence of all of this is that the US has depleted so many "stand off" munitions and, even now, carrier groups are deployed far from the Strait of Hormuz. Stand off munitions are more expensive, harder to replace, less plentiful and less capable (since a certain amount of the vehicle has to be devoted to propulsion). These are also the same munitions previously earmarked for a potential future conflict with China. It's also the exact ones talked about in this article. The other are missile interceptors (also mentioned). In the 12 day war, interceptions by the Iron Dome and carrier groups (including THAAD) in the area were very high. By the end of Israel being attacked, interceptions had dropped to as low as 50%. This is more evidence that the IRGC were using more advanced missles, had learned from previous encounters and/or munitions for missile defence were running low. As further evidence of this, the US informed Switzerland that Patriot deliveries would be delayed indefinitely [4]. This is a war that was lost ovver 3 months ago at this point. We just seem to be pretending that's not the case and hoping it magically solves itself. The energy shock for all this hasn't even begun yet. There are so many problems here that inform just why there's this missile crisis. That's barely scratching the surface, honestly. The entire military-industrial complex is designed to extract wealth from the government with the most expensive weapons programs possible. And if you ever hear any servicemen talk, none of it actually works. Even things like the vehicles break down constantly. Gone are the days of relatively cheap and famously reliable Jeeps, for example. The AK-47 was a workhorse of the Red Army too for a reason. We're incapable of building ships. We keep building deep water navies that nobody needs. Our ships are designed to operate in the Pacific or North Atlantic, not the Persian Gulf. It is a trillion dollar a year scam at this point. Oh and speaking of capability, knowing something about this allows one to avoid silly theoreticals that could never happen. Most relevant here is there was a period when the media was asking "woudl the US invade?" The answer was always "no" because we can't. We don't have that military anymore. As for other parts of the article, things like Titan II probably aren't such an issue because (luckily) we don't tend to expend ICBMs and MRBMs, nor do we need to expand our capacity and if we started using them, well we'd have much bigger problems. Tomahawks however are a huge problem. I read once that every Congressional district, all 435 of them, are part of the military-industrial complex. It's designed this way so Congress will never vote to cut funding. And what's humbled this entire thing are mass-produced $10,000 drones and relatively cheap (~$1M estimated) ballistic missiles in untouchable underground facilities that can be cheaply fired and those launchers are easily fixed. I'd say the biggest missile crisis is cost asymmetry. We're using $4m interceptors to shoot down $10-20k drones and $1M missiles, sometimes multiple of them for a single target. When your opponent can produce thousands of those per month that becomes impossible to counter and economically prohibitive to do so if you could. [1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/depleting-missile-defense-interceptor-inventory https://www.csis.org/analysis/depleting-missile-defense-inte... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2yl7r8r2o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2yl7r8r2o [3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/30/us-military-equipment-worth-billions-of-dollars-destroyed-in-iran-war https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/30/us-military-equipme... [4]: https://www.reuters.com/world/united-states-informs-switzerland-delays-price-hike-patriot-delivery-2026-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/united-states-informs-switzerl...
themafia 5mo ago
> the frailty of US munitions stock There's noting frail about it. It's just unable to support the insatiable appetite that every administration seems to have for dropping them on people. Perhaps we need a "second source" for rationale, diplomacy, and the rule of law.
- ifwinterco 5mo ago
  Exactly, the issue is not that the US produces too few missiles, it’s that it uses too many
- chii 5mo ago
  Without the bombs and muscle sitting behind, diplomacy is merely just talking with no results.
  - themafia 5mo ago
    Yes and when you start dropping them diplomacy ends. Do you have a position on whether or not the US engages with diplomacy often and effectively enough to avoid dropping munitions on the third world? Do you have a position on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" or Colin Powell's missing "yellowcake?" Did we find Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? Did we win Vietnam?
jocelyner 5mo ago
[flagged]
iammjm 5mo ago
These morons wasted over 1000 Tomahawk missiles within a couple of months to achieve nothing in Iran. And that's not even the worst part. The wasted PAC-missiles for the Patriot anti-air systems are.
tim333 5mo ago
Vaguely related, Fire Point in Ukraine just released footage of a test firing of their FP-7 rocket https://x.com/iraterekh/status/2062148065360842909 https://x.com/iraterekh/status/2062148065360842909 which they are hoping to make into a Patriot alternative https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/a-ukrainian-patriot-alternative-fire-points-freya-interceptor-eyes-to-hunt-russian-iskander-class-threats-18851 https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/a-ukrainian-patriot... It would be that rocket with German or similar guidance components. They are in a bit of a hurry, hoping to start intercepting incoming ballistic missiles this year. They currently use solid fuel motors cast in Ukraine but are opening a plant in Denmark https://militarnyi.com/en/news/fire-point-to-launch-rocket-fuel-production-in-denmark-in-2026/ https://militarnyi.com/en/news/fire-point-to-launch-rocket-f...

Get some Totseans working on it https://newtotse.com/oldtotse/en/bad_ideas/ka_fucking_boom/chlorate.html https://newtotse.com/oldtotse/en/bad_ideas/ka_fucking_boom/c...

tclover 5mo ago

Turns out you can’t print rockets

tartoran 5mo ago
yes, it's a bit harder an more involved than printing money. Best thing is not to squander them.
Someone 5mo ago
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/printed-engines-propel-the-next-industrial-revolution/ https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/print...: “Printed Engines Propel the Next Industrial Revolution“
tim333 5mo ago
The article: >X-Bow is an emerging player in the solid rocket motor market, using 3D printing technology to produce motors and propellants

prawn 5mo ago

Down at the bottom of the article it's revealed that Contrary Research (article host) is an investor in Galadyne and another of the discussed manufacturers. Galadyne is introduced as a company with a stake in the liquid propulsion angle that the article pushes. One of the authors is listed as CEO of Galadyne. Bit like an advertorial?

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Bit like an advertorial? The author should have disclosed their affiliation more clearly at the top. But their arguments are solid, and I respect them putting their money where their mouth is. Solid-fueled rockets should not be the backbone of our missile forces anymore. That doesn’t mean we get rid of them. But we should be adding mass-produced liquid-fueled missiles to the mix. And our entire rocket force shouldn’t be able to be nerfed by hitting one plant in Utah.
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago
  [dead]
- oliver236 5mo ago
  > I respect them putting their money where their mouth is. More like putting their mouth where their money is.
  - junofan 5mo ago
    Haha. Honestly it’s rocks in a tube. If we need to we can figure it out.
    - oliver236 5mo ago
      what does rocks in a tube mean
      - springhalo 5mo ago
        I'm assuming he means that solid-propellant rockets are conceptually simple to make; rocks being either the explosive at the end (akin to throwing stones) or maybe the basic fuel and oxidizer propellant mix. Either way it's the idea that the most well funded military on earth could make another rocket factory easily if needed.
        5mo ago

cguess 5mo ago

Before discussing anything related to nuclear missiles *[Command and Control by Eric Schlosser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)) should be required reading. More missiles do not make the world safe, and due to human fallacy it almost always make us less safe.

ArchieScrivener 5mo ago
[dead]
z3ugma 5mo ago
Well There’s Your Problem, a podcast with slides , covered this recently : https://youtu.be/NJAgvXH5H20?si=OLMJVhOPT40yzHDN https://youtu.be/NJAgvXH5H20?si=OLMJVhOPT40yzHDN
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> anything related to nuclear missiles This article isn’t about nuclear-tipped missiles outside a historical context.
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
Paradigm2020 5mo ago
"The world" is very abstract... Iran got invaded. North Korea didn't and won't. Cuba might. Guess what those 2 countries that are part of the world don't have that the 3rd does...
- cguess 5mo ago
  And the US having 30,000 (or whatever absurd number) makes the world safer?
  - Paradigm2020 5mo ago
    Please read my comment again...

diogenescynic 5mo ago

We only won World War II because we could produce our tanks faster than the Germans could destroy them and we could destroy their tanks faster than they could produce them. The Germany tanks were superior but our supply lines and manufacturing capacity are ultimately why we won. If we fought a large scale war today, we would be supply constrained by China and other 'rivals' who we can't rely on. We've outsourced everything in the name of efficiency, but have left ourselves spread incredibly thin and exposed huge weaknesses. Remember how fast supply chains broke down during the pandemic? Imagine how fast that breaks down for complex logistics needed to produce complex weapons... I think America is one war away from losing its 'super power' status and being diminished to a much lower status. Look at how we've already empowered Iran into an even more powerful adversary through this war/conflict.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
And ships. We ended the war with (EDIT: practically) none of the carriers we started out with.
- cpgxiii 5mo ago
  Famously, of course, not at all the case, with Enterprise, Saratoga, and Ranger all surviving. Yes, losses of pre-war carriers were severe (Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet, and Wasp).
rf15 5mo ago
Is that really true regarding what we know of WW2? I thought their designs had major flaws, not just the goldplating issues you mention. Besides, they mostly lost because they spend all their manpower and material on pointless incursions far away from their country.
- rwmj 5mo ago
  Wars between great powers are won and lost on manufacturing base. The classic book on this topic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...

jimbo808 5mo ago

We could also just not start wars and we wouldn't need to worry about missile production

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
Which is why Ukraine, today, doesn’t have to worry about missile and drone production.
- jimbo808 5mo ago
  America isn't Ukraine, we are a *massive country with a nuclear deterrent,* wedged between two massive oceans and two friendly countries. Nobody is going to attack us unless we go out into the world creating enemies.
  - stackghost 5mo ago
    American security, and indeed the entire pax Americana has been predicated upon your country's network of global military bases and your carrier battle groups. This is what enables the USA to decisively influence any conflict anywhere on the globe. Those bases would need to disappear in order for your comment to be true, and despite two thirds of your electorate who didn't vote against the future dementia ward patient currently in office, I don't think Americans are ready to accept a world where American foreign policy cannot be promulgated more or less at will, which is what isolationism would entail.
    - vkou 5mo ago
      No, America's influence over its globe-spanning empire is predicated on that. That's not the same thing as it's national security. It would do just fine if it weren't the head of a global hegemony, although it might have to start living within its means. Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.
      - 5mo ago

cpgxiii 5mo ago

Anyone who describes hydrocarbon fuels and high-test peroxide oxidiser as a stable and proven combination is a charlatan trying to sell you something questionable. If you want a proven liquid fuel combination that works in missile environment conditions with well-behaved ignition, Hydrazine/UDMH+N2O4 is the king. Solids are better from a storage and deployment standpoint in almost all cases; anyone making a sincere case for liquid fuels should be making it on the basis of munitions that are best designed around them (notably, of course, most of the long range cruise missiles that have received the most hand-wringing about stockpile depletion are already air-breathing jet-fueled). The actual stockpile issues wrt solid rocket fuel are high-performance SAM/ABM interceptors, and those would require complete redesigns to make liquid-fueled equivalents.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Solids are better from a storage and deployment standpoint in almost all cases The article says this. Liquids are better from a production perspective. In the Cold War, storage and deployment dominated. That need isn’t gone today. But it’s supplanted in priority by the need to be able to rapidly produce these munitions. > those would require complete redesigns to make liquid-fueled equivalents Again, the article acknowledges this. It’s saying we can do that faster than we can get another AP production facility online, and even then, we’d still be unfavorably production constrained compared to China.
- nixon_why69 5mo ago
  Solving a chemical manufacturing problem in the US has GOT to be easier than taking on additional operations and mechanical complexity for every single missile in combat theatres. The article cites permitting and procurement snafus for why it's so hard to stand up new AP plants, but the same procurement process would apply for new liquid engine designs with all their moving parts, no?
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > Solving a chemical manufacturing problem in the US has GOT to be easier Why? We are currently scaling rocket-engine production for the launch industry. We aren’t doing the same for anything like AP. I don’t think anyone would blink at a well-resourced effort to build a new small-satellite launch vehicle in a couple years, for instance.

zarzavat 5mo ago

Given the misadventures the missiles are currently being used for, it seems like less of a crisis and more of a blessing that the US's capacity for self-destruction isn't unlimited.

isoprophlex 5mo ago

> Missile fuel is a binary: it can either be solid or liquid. Lol what?! No, binary fuels have two components that are both neccesary for operation. Also like commented elsewhere, peroxide fuels are... an adventurous choice What these basic errors mean for the perception of the rest of the article is left as an exercise for the reader.

lazide 5mo ago
I think they meant like the odds are 50/50 - it either happens or it doesn’t (lol).
fnordpiglet 5mo ago
It’s a bit odd as well as they then go into describing hybrid and gel systems that are both and neither respectively. But overall it’s a pretty informative article and I learned a lot.
jbxntuehineoh 5mo ago
I think "missile fuel is a binary" is just a very inarticulate attempt to say "there are two types of missile fuel"

jmyeet 5mo ago

This has been known for awhile and it was widely rumored but never confirmed that critically low missile inventories were the primary reason for ending the 12 day war last year [1]. If so it makes the current great misadventure a startling miscalculation and I don't believe for a second the military wasn't aware of the issue and didn't advise the administration of such. As more evidence of this, US bases in the region were essentially abandoned because they couldn't be protected and the resulting damage will cost billions and takes years to replace, including at least one incredibly expensive THAAD radar [2][3]. As further evidence there are conflicting reports that THAAD systems were re-deployed from South Korea to the Middle East. US officials have denied this, which may be true on a technicality: possibly only munitions were moved. The point is the final bill for all this is already in the hundreds of billions. What's clear here is that the US has a military designed for the Cold War, or possibly the first Gulf War, and Iran in particular has a military completely designed for this conflict. Strategic Air Doctrine has shown itself to be an expensive failure incapable of regime change or even suppressing the force projection of a vastly inferior military in a regional conflict. Key evidence of all of this is that the US has depleted so many "stand off" munitions and, even now, carrier groups are deployed far from the Strait of Hormuz. Stand off munitions are more expensive, harder to replace, less plentiful and less capable (since a certain amount of the vehicle has to be devoted to propulsion). These are also the same munitions previously earmarked for a potential future conflict with China. It's also the exact ones talked about in this article. The other are missile interceptors (also mentioned). In the 12 day war, interceptions by the Iron Dome and carrier groups (including THAAD) in the area were very high. By the end of Israel being attacked, interceptions had dropped to as low as 50%. This is more evidence that the IRGC were using more advanced missles, had learned from previous encounters and/or munitions for missile defence were running low. As further evidence of this, the US informed Switzerland that Patriot deliveries would be delayed indefinitely [4]. This is a war that was lost ovver 3 months ago at this point. We just seem to be pretending that's not the case and hoping it magically solves itself. The energy shock for all this hasn't even begun yet. There are so many problems here that inform just why there's this missile crisis. That's barely scratching the surface, honestly. The entire military-industrial complex is designed to extract wealth from the government with the most expensive weapons programs possible. And if you ever hear any servicemen talk, none of it actually works. Even things like the vehicles break down constantly. Gone are the days of relatively cheap and famously reliable Jeeps, for example. The AK-47 was a workhorse of the Red Army too for a reason. We're incapable of building ships. We keep building deep water navies that nobody needs. Our ships are designed to operate in the Pacific or North Atlantic, not the Persian Gulf. It is a trillion dollar a year scam at this point. Oh and speaking of capability, knowing something about this allows one to avoid silly theoreticals that could never happen. Most relevant here is there was a period when the media was asking "woudl the US invade?" The answer was always "no" because we can't. We don't have that military anymore. As for other parts of the article, things like Titan II probably aren't such an issue because (luckily) we don't tend to expend ICBMs and MRBMs, nor do we need to expand our capacity and if we started using them, well we'd have much bigger problems. Tomahawks however are a huge problem. I read once that every Congressional district, all 435 of them, are part of the military-industrial complex. It's designed this way so Congress will never vote to cut funding. And what's humbled this entire thing are mass-produced $10,000 drones and relatively cheap (~$1M estimated) ballistic missiles in untouchable underground facilities that can be cheaply fired and those launchers are easily fixed. I'd say the biggest missile crisis is cost asymmetry. We're using $4m interceptors to shoot down $10-20k drones and $1M missiles, sometimes multiple of them for a single target. When your opponent can produce thousands of those per month that becomes impossible to counter and economically prohibitive to do so if you could. [1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/depleting-missile-defense-interceptor-inventory https://www.csis.org/analysis/depleting-missile-defense-inte... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2yl7r8r2o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2yl7r8r2o [3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/30/us-military-equipment-worth-billions-of-dollars-destroyed-in-iran-war https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/30/us-military-equipme... [4]: https://www.reuters.com/world/united-states-informs-switzerland-delays-price-hike-patriot-delivery-2026-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/united-states-informs-switzerl...

themafia 5mo ago

> the frailty of US munitions stock There's noting frail about it. It's just unable to support the insatiable appetite that every administration seems to have for dropping them on people. Perhaps we need a "second source" for rationale, diplomacy, and the rule of law.

ifwinterco 5mo ago
Exactly, the issue is not that the US produces too few missiles, it’s that it uses too many
chii 5mo ago
Without the bombs and muscle sitting behind, diplomacy is merely just talking with no results.
- themafia 5mo ago
  Yes and when you start dropping them diplomacy ends. Do you have a position on whether or not the US engages with diplomacy often and effectively enough to avoid dropping munitions on the third world? Do you have a position on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" or Colin Powell's missing "yellowcake?" Did we find Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? Did we win Vietnam?

jocelyner 5mo ago

[flagged]

iammjm 5mo ago

These morons wasted over 1000 Tomahawk missiles within a couple of months to achieve nothing in Iran. And that's not even the worst part. The wasted PAC-missiles for the Patriot anti-air systems are.

tim333 5mo ago

Vaguely related, Fire Point in Ukraine just released footage of a test firing of their FP-7 rocket https://x.com/iraterekh/status/2062148065360842909 https://x.com/iraterekh/status/2062148065360842909 which they are hoping to make into a Patriot alternative https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/a-ukrainian-patriot-alternative-fire-points-freya-interceptor-eyes-to-hunt-russian-iskander-class-threats-18851 https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/a-ukrainian-patriot... It would be that rocket with German or similar guidance components. They are in a bit of a hurry, hoping to start intercepting incoming ballistic missiles this year. They currently use solid fuel motors cast in Ukraine but are opening a plant in Denmark https://militarnyi.com/en/news/fire-point-to-launch-rocket-fuel-production-in-denmark-in-2026/ https://militarnyi.com/en/news/fire-point-to-launch-rocket-f...