Iran War?

[crazy canuck]

Industrial Production - So anyone paying attention has known this is a problem since the Ukraine war started. Even back when we had a President willing to meaningfully help Ukraine, we had supply chain issues.

The simple reality is the U.S. defense industrial base is working under the same lean manufacturing principles the regular U.S. industrial base uses, and we have eschewed anything like industrial policy as a "dirty word" in this country for ages.

Democrats don't push it because they don't want to spend lots of money building seemingly redundant stockpiles instead of social spending.  Republicans don't push it because they are always raiding the budget to cut the upper tax rate.  The Pentagon doesn't push it because they want to steer the money to the newest and the shiniest toys, not build more of the same to just put in the warehouse. Trump just wants to build battleships because he thinks it's 1897 and he needs to send a Great White Fleet to impose tariffs and seize the world's vital coal supplies.

In the old days the defense industrial base was sustained by old fashioned pork barrel, back scratching politics - Congress backed it because every state and district got a piece and the Soviet bogeyman provided a handy justification.  It wasn't always the most efficient, but it got the job done. Then the USSR collapsed, Gingrich took a contract out on America, chummy gold ol boyism in Congress was replaced by hyper-partisanship, states split into warring Reds and Blues a la Byzantium.  No more domestic consensus.  2022 should have been the wake-up call but we all know what happened there..

There was another justification, even during the cold war.  The notion was to have enough for a reasonable defence, but not so much that an adventurous future President might be tempted to use it for purposes other than defence; or perhaps more importantly - the other side was also limited.

And I have to say, from the perspective of a country that might be invaded by an adventurous President, I am quite relieved.

[crazy canuck]

Just a complete layman here, but I wonder if the countering the drone swarm is a matter of going back to WW2-era AA systems, with updated computers.  In modern warfare AA has evolved to shoot down fast high-flying missiles, but it seems like with drones we're back to saturating by quantity strategy.  I wonder if with modern technology you can even get high hit rates with non-exploding AA ammo, just by calculating where to aim.

Gun-based interception is possible and very successful when the AA operator knows that the drone is going to enter the gun's range (e.g. protecting a point target like a single building or single radar antenna). The number of gun systems needed to defend something larger, like an airfield, gets quickly out of hand, and missile-based systems become the only option.

Plus, of course, the issue of gun system saturation by large-scale drone attacks where "they can get some of us, but not all of us."

Thanks for the explanation 

[Legbiter]

Hegseth's family tree is interesting, his last name is pure 200% Norwegian, second his immigrant ancestors spent 100 years marrying other Norwegians once in the US. He looks disturbingly similar to a close cousin of my wife.

*edit* Minus the Rumsfeld-on-crystal-meth persona of course.

[HVC]

So much for america escaping  from the crown to keep inbreds from ruining their country.