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- cross-posted to:
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The administration of US President Joe Biden refuses to transfer long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, despite requests from Kyiv and pressure from US lawmakers.
The administration of US President Joe Biden refuses to transfer long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, despite requests from Kyiv and pressure from US lawmakers.
That’s a complicated one. Military tech tends to all be 10+ years old at time of deployment and the ones stockpiled are probably late 90s designs that went into production in the early 2000s. Most of the parts for the control and guidance systems are likely no longer produced at all and haven’t been for a decade+ (think the kinds of computer chips you’d find in a SNES, maaaaybe an N64) so it’s not that they don’t have the blueprint somewhere, they would have to re design large parts of it to work in a modern supply chain. Yes, they could do emulation/simulation shenanigans to get some stuff to be compatible on modem COTS hardware but they’d still need to re qualify everything because nobody wants a 500lb ballistic warhead going stupid and killing someone in the wrong country.
The inability to restart production lines must be a huge strategic problem though.
What if the USA was involved in a large scale war against a larger nation state?
We’re screwed at the moment because we do not have the manufacturing base that we used to have. We can and do outproduce most of the world when it comes to munitions in a time of peace, but we have a massive scalability problem because we’ve offshored so much manufacturing.
We used to be able to ask companies that produced mundane consumer goods to retool for producing war materials, but they don’t exist many places anymore. Much of our domestic manufacturing already produces for the defense industry and wouldn’t have enough tools to increase production much to meet demand.
We’ve seen the government take some steps to mitigate this in the electronics space by encouraging Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel to build more foundries stateside, but there’s a long way to go to solving the problem.
I don’t think this is a very valuable weapon for use in such a conflict anymore. They’re very expensive and, at this point, relatively easy to intercept. Really the whole thing is a holdover from when our idea of a large scale war was nuking the fuck out of central Europe to stop the soviets.
Generally speaking it seems us defense posture is to stockpile stuff and hope it’s enough, maybe starting production on newer systems in mass if anything promising pops up in due course.
That sounds like it might be true, but is it? I’ve heard many things in relation to this weapon, but not anything about the inability to produce them.
Shrug? This is what the budgets have indicated. The military isn’t interested in pursuing this weapon anymore. They’re actively trying to replace it but also don’t want to give up the capability until it is fully replaced.