It could take three to eight years for the U.S. to replenish its stockpile of high-altitude missile interceptors after the military launched nearly 14% of its arsenal during last month’s conflict with Iran, according to a new report by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
this is sort of a wild article to come from Stars and Stripes, unless the goal is to prompt a major increase in defense spending for “readiness”.
The report cited is from JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security of America) which is a neocon Zionist think tank. That’s their entire game, making reports that Israel isn’t getting enough missiles. That’s all they do.
I mean these things aren’t mutually exclusive. The intent is almost certainly to get more money diverted to the MIC. However, it’s also a fact that the industrial capacity in the US is in a dire state. The US has never taken on peer competitors before, and they’re now faced with modern weapons that outperform their own.
At some point just throwing more money at the problem doesn’t work anymore. And it looks like the MIC might have passed that point a while ago, though it is hard to say.
It does terrify me a little bit though, they really don’t seem to be rational actors, and once it becomes clear they’ll lose global hegemony, there’s no telling what they might do. I really hope the nuke maintenance is just as corrupt and broken as the rest of the US military.
America has a (estimated) deployed arsenal of c.1700 warheads, so even if 50% of them are fucked and don’t work, that’s still enough for one working warhead for every single Chinese settlement of over 10000 people, with a couple of tens of warheads left over for other targets. Don’t underestimate just how much damage and human tragedy America can still do to the world.
I wasn’t, it is still terrifying, even if 99% of their nukes didn’t work or got intercepted, the destruction of millions of people is beyond abhorrent. I think a lot of people forget this when they demand China take a more hardline stance against the US and global capital, the Chinese government doesn’t want millions of their citizens to die.
That’s precisely my worry as well.
Well, good news on that count: https://hexbear.net/comment/4458601
Even if the nukes themselves are fine, they’re not doing you much good sitting around in a warehouse - it’s delivery systems which are important. Flying over a target and directly dropping them isn’t really how most nukes are expected to be delivered anymore (although recent experience with Fordow does indicate that’s still somewhat viable with a stealth bomber, but against a country with a much less-developed air defense network than Russia or China - and even still, there’s 19 aging B-2s left, and typically expensive equipment like this is never all active at the same time, with some proportion of the fleet being in maintenance at any given moment, so the actual quantities of nukes they could deliver isn’t necessarily that much, although of course even one nuke going off is too much).
It apparently is in United States.
ah, the amazing ingenuity of… WW2-era bomb technology? (although it seems like they’re also supposed to have guide kits, so they’re somewhat more advanced)
Anyway, this seems to be more of a specialized bunker-buster (or more generally a bomb meant for hitting particular hardened bases/facilities and the like, not necessarily fully-underground ones), which is a somewhat different use-case compared to regular nukes - these do need to be gravity bombs as they have to be ridiculously heavy in order to be able to reach the necessary depth of penetration, which makes it not really viable to deliver them by missile.
And it also seems like they’ll be a pretty limited production run, and of doubtful utility: https://fas.org/publication/biden-administration-to-build-a-new-nuclear-bomb/
I remember this came out after the strings of China and Russia news about new weapons, including potential nuclear delivery systems, and after US ground based ICBM’s and their infrastructure were reported to be in shambles with barely even any hope of imrpoving the situation. So this is the best info their military can produce, and even the entire idea was taken from Russia which cheaply upgraded their huge stockpile of even WW-2 era bombs with guide kits and used them with devastating effect in Ukraine.
The sanctions / austerity against the American people for basic goods shall continue until the military budget is larget than Nvidia’s bloated ass market cap.