A Hint to the Beancounters and Politicians

U.S. lawmakers are sounding the alarm about challenges facing the U.S. defense industrial base as the war in Ukraine strains weapon supplies.

It could take years to replenish certain types of weapons the U.S. has sent to Kyiv, with no easy way to ramp up production quickly. That has policymakers deeply concerned about whether the U.S. would be able to field enough weapons if conflict broke out in the Taiwan Strait.

The House Armed Services Committee is set to examine the defense industrial base during its second hearing of the year on Wednesday.

“This ought to be a flashing red light for us, and it’s shocking to me,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said during an event at the American Enterprise Institute in late January. “This is a huge, glaring problem. And right now I don’t see the sort of all-hands-on-deck commitment to try to address that.”

While it's nice that the lightbulb has gone off for Cornyn, none of this shit is rocket science. The burn-through rate of munitions in modern warfare has always been a lot higher than politicians and budgeteers have wanted to acknowledge. Building up the production capability for sustaining a war is expensive. Not only is it expensive, but then you have to keep the production lines in condidition to ramp up, which means making some of the stuff. A lot of weapon systems have defined shelf lives, requiring them to be reworked or scrapped, which adds to the cost.

That is a hard sell in peacetime. But it's fatal to not do it when war comes.

Which it always does.