The New York Times ran a lengthy report yesterday on the struggles of the American military complex that, despite the huge profits and influence it has, cannot keep up with the demands for physical product requisition by the U.S. Defense Department. The article was headlined, “From Rockets to Ball Bearings, Pentagon Struggles to Feed War Machine.”
“The United States lacks the capacity to produce the arms that the nation and its allies need at a time of heightened superpower tensions,” the Times reported, drawing on the frustration expressed last month by Adm. Daryl Caudle, the man in charge of arming the U.S. Navy’s East Coast-based ships with missiles and other munitions. He complained that industry was not delivering the weapons he needed for his ships in a timely fashion. “Industry consolidation, depleted manufacturing lines and supply chain issues have combined to constrain the production of basic ammunition like artillery shells while also prompting concern about building adequate reserves of more sophisticated weapons including missiles, air defense systems and counter-artillery radar,” says the Times.
The Pentagon is taking steps to speed up production and expand industrial capacity but seems to be struggling to make progress. The Times notes that in the first ten months of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies delivered 13 years worth of Stinger missile production and five years worth of production of Javelin missiles. If a large-scale war broke out with China, within about one week the United States would run out of so-called long-range anti-ship missiles, a vital weapon in any engagement with China, according to a series of war-game exercises conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
One of the bottlenecks is in the production of rocket motors. Everything, it seems, needs rocket motors, from shoulder-fired weapons up to ICBMs and everything in between, but there are only two manufacturers of rocket motors in existence—compared to six in the 1990s—and one of those, Aerojet Rocketdyne, which in November cited a fire at one of its suppliers for delaying the production of rocket motors for the Navy’s SM-6 missile, reported Defense One in December.
The solution to the problem expressed in the Times report can only be found in the principles of physical economy, but that would mean the U.S. jettisoning the last 50 years of neoliberal economics that have created the mess that the trans-Atlantic world is in in the first place. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/us/politics/military-weapons-ukraine-war.html)
