What the heck is an “arsenal of democracy“

This post is about the distance between real and not real in the American indigenous defense industry and I’ll only touch upon the Monty Python’esque absurdity of the thing.

In an upcoming post I’ll break down all of the obstacles, but before then we have this:

American defense contractors knew the Ukraine war was a lie and that all the talk of weapons being produced and delivered would ultimately be forgotten, or neglected and some new distraction would fill the public consciousness.

“History stopped in 1936” – George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War

“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened”

October 18, 2023 Joe Biden did a speech from the oval office asking for additional military aid to Ukraine and new aid military aid be given to Israel,

Biden said: “You know, just as in World War Two, today, patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.”

This is an interesting phrase and meant to invoke 1950’s sentimentality, Reagan nostalgia and scripture. It’s what’s called ‘Orwellian’.

ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY?

Since the start of the Russia v Ukraine war in February 2022, America has allocated and disbursed almost $50 billion dollars in direct military aid and security assistance to Ukraine  which goes to replenish their stockpiles of ammunition, weapons and other equipment. 

DEFENSE MODERNIZATION

In a post that would be way too long for our amusement, around 2019 the Department of Defense initiated new plans to modernize its capabilities and weapons for a different combat and technological environment.

Shortly after gaining the presidency, the Biden regime:

• Withdrew from Central Asia/Afghanistan and conveniently surrendered 1/6th of America’s cache of munitions to our enemies.
• Postponed hypersonic plans Report: Hypersonics Supply Chain Not Ready for Large-Scale Production “Charles Ormsby, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s chief of manufacturing and industrial technologies division, said in an NDIA panel discussion that the manufacturing base for hypersonics is scarcely more than a number of PhDs “doing it all by hand.”

LIES vs NOT LIES

The defense industry, companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, etc, knew that despite the torrential propaganda being pushed out to the public, that the Russia v Ukraine war would have a short shelf life and that making capital intensive investments with an unsure payoff was not pragmatic.

Instead the defense contractors stuck to the risk free enterprise of tweaking their business operations to satisfy the minimal requirements of unstable government procurement orders.

But, in investor earnings calls and various public discussion panels they were more forthright with the actuals of hiring, staffing projects, training, costs/yield, robotics, real estate costs, supply chain issues, regulations that constrained their ability to timely fulfil contracts and so on and so on.

COVID MANDATES DESTROYED STAFFING

September 2021: Biden issues an executive order that gave federal contractors until December 8 2021 to comply with vaccine mandate, this injected a clause into government contracts and contract-like instruments requiring full vaccination.

There were protests, Politico – October 30, 2021: Weapons makers prepare for delays as vaccine protests flare up

“…Walk-offs involving those who work on classified programs, cutting-edge technologies, or provide skilled manual labor — skill sets irreplaceable in the short-term that represent the core of the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar modernization push.

“For some of the highly skilled workers — they work with stealth, or highly classified activities — there are no replacements either in industry, or in government.”

MARCH 2022: BIDEN VISITS LOCKHEED

The defense industry had just fired a large base of its employees and taken early retirement from its most experienced and skilled staff, so of course Biden goes to visit Lockheed Martin for a public relations stunt. This forced Lockheed to play along and pretend that Javelin missile manufacture could, or would have a sustained meaningfully production increase. 

JAVELIN

America has given Ukraine close to, if not more than, a half of its Lockheed Martin Javelin missiles to Ukraine. Lockheed ramped up production so that it can now make at most about 4,000 per year. Assuming all those are purchased and delivered to the US army, we are now at a staggering deficit for our own national security.

Will the United States Run Out of Javelins Before Russia Runs Out of Tanks?

The United States has supplied Ukraine with thousands of Javelins, but U.S. inventory is dwindling. Will Javelins inflict enough Russian combat losses to produce a battlefield stalemate before Ukraine runs out of its most effective anti-tank weapons?

STINGER

In a 2022 first-quarter financial results call with journalists, Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes said that although “we’re currently producing Stingers for an international customer …we have a very limited stock of material for bigger production. We’ve been working with the Department of Defense for the last couple of weeks … actively trying to resource some of the materials, but unfortunately, DOD hasn’t bought a Stinger in about 18 years.” Some components are “no longer commercially available… “So we’re going to have to go out and redesign some of the electronics in the missile” to substitute newer elements, and that will take time.

“We’ll wrap up production of what we can this year, but I would expect” it will likely be 2023 or 2024 when “we actually see orders come in for the larger replenishments, both on Stinger as well as on Javelin, which has also been very successful in theater.”

Focus: Shrinking U.S. Stinger missile supply faces re-stocking challenges

Shoulder-fired Stinger missiles are in hot demand in Ukraine where they have successfully stopped Russian assaults from the air, but U.S. supplies have shrunk and producing more of the anti-aircraft weapons faces significant hurdles.

JUNE 2023: RAYTHEON CALLS IN RETIREES TO HELP RESTART STINGER MISSILE PRODUCTION

“When the U.S. Army placed an order for 1,700 Stingers in May 2022, the Pentagon said the missiles wouldn’t be delivered until 2026. Kremer said it will take about 30 months for Stingers to start rolling off of the production line largely because of the time it takes to set up the factory and train its employees.

“We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger…We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

Ending this post with two recent articles, that’s it for now, cya later. Suckers

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has stalled. We need a new theor…

archived 6 Nov 2023
Ukraine’s top general, in an interview with the Economist. He pronounced that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, in which the West had invested great hopes and billions of dollars in armaments, was unlikely to achieve a decisive breakthrough

U.S., European officials broach topic of peace negotiations with Ukraine, sources say

The conversations have included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia.