173 Comments

"The United States and her allies have a gift being paid for with the bodies of Ukrainians and Russians right now". That's it, right here. I hope someone somewhere in the blob honors their blood.

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Jul 19, 2023Liked by CDR Salamander

Been bitching about this since the late 90s.

In analyrical studies the Army paid for, but ignored for short-term priorities. Leave aside Bush- and Obama-era fantastical thinking.

No one wants to talk logistics.

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Jul 19, 2023Liked by CDR Salamander

"My reports were lyrical works of sublime majesty," he said, covering up his typo.

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Wow. To quote from the funniest movie ever made: "You use your tongue better than a $20 whore"

And that quote is going into my D-Day alert list, along with John's Moustache.

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Spot on. After decades of maintaining most of the industrial capability, after the fall of the Soviet Union and first Gulf War, the desire to streamline and reduce capacity began. Believing too much in ‘digital’ brought us where we are today. We have been ignoring the axiom “to preserve the peace, prepare for war” too long.

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I tried to make a cute comment "Si vis pacem, para bellum" without looking stupid and learned something today:

The phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum is adapted from a statement found in Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's tract Dē Rē Mīlitārī (fourth or fifth century AD), in which the actual phrasing is Igitur quī dēsīderat pācem, præparet bellum

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Thanks for sharing this reference. An enduring idea!

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That Pershing guy was pretty smart: “Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars.”

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Nah, if he was any good he'd have had more medals and a bigger tombstone

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Jul 19, 2023Liked by CDR Salamander

Concur Sal. To use an analogy it is 1940 all over again. Context Hitler invaded Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France within a year. By the summer of 1940 France had fallen and Roosevelt engineered the Lend-Lease Act to keep Britain in the fight against Germany. Today replace Germany with Russia. Unlike Poland et al. Ukraine has not fallen, despite having great chunks of her territory sliced off in 2014. So it is time for Lend-Lease, maybe even time to revive the War Production Board and give it sweeping powers as FDR did. Best, John

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More like 1938. In 1940 the US was spinning up production. In 1938 people were arguing that we don't need to.

But as I've said before, the only thing more expensive than the very best military, is the second best.

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I thought about using Czechoslovakia-1938 as the analogy, but per US you are correct. Totally unprepared on Army side. Navy was the most prepared for war at that time.

As for Czechs, unlike UKR they decided not to fight back. Mores the pity, I would have liked to have seen their Skoda products like t-38 and t-35 and 47mm antitank guns make mincemeat of Germanies PZ Is, IIs, and IIIs. Problem was supply, only decent supply route ran through Poland, and Poland joined in on the landgrab that occurred after Munich. Many people forget that. Czechs realized that without support they could not fight alone for very long and so they capitulated. It bought Britain barely a year to continue to rearm.

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And that is why I give Chamberlain a bit of a pass: Britain needed that year. And Thank G-D that Churchill was there, nobody else in England could have mitigated the disaster that was Dunkirk.

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I'm not sure if this is true or an exaggeration, but I remember reading,

"Every Spitfire that fought in the Battle of Britain was built after Munich"

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I bet that's mostly true - the Spit was developed in 1936, in production from 1938 on, but with lots of variants it's likely the early variants were used for training, or had crashed.

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We were only ready because the British and French paid for the new factories after Munich.

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That and we did have an industrial base that was strong and growing, with plentiful raw materials. Today? Not so much, but we do know there are more than nine genders, so overall it's a win for the 21st century Soviet

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Unfortunately, our MIC operates as a massive grift instead of a coherent system of arms production. Unlikely that this is going to change given the institutional capture that's taken place between the arms industry and the Pentagon. I'm afraid we're going to have to learn this the hard way.

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I think the hardest thing that modern generations in the US are going to learn is that if things are allowed to deteriorate far enough, wars no longer occur exclusively "overseas."

It's been almost 160 years since a citizen in a continental US state packed their SH%T up and fled their home from an army, in the south, and more like 210 in New England. [Even for our native American friends in the territories it's been more than a 100 years]

The Republic that was bequeathed to us is not in a state to ensure continued stability of that nature for our children, grandchildren, and their progeny.

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I had to do the 'bring back a retiree' thing in the 70s. I was a young test engineer that got assigned to look at an order of spare feedhorns for AWG10 antennas. We had one sample left over from a designer's desk I used to verify the test equipment. The manufacturing team couldn't make one to spec even though the old sample had plenty of margin. I asked around the old timers in the factory and got a couple of names of retired folks who had built them. Got one of them to come in and show the manufacturing team how to build them. We still never built one that was as good as the old sample (I suspected the material was slightly different) but got them shipped.

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Bringing back the retirees is also a much more expensive proposition.

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The retirees were a seed corn function.

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Only bringing back the engineers is the far more expensive proposition.

It's the fred-factor of the guy on the line who knows the fixes for the redlines which were never incorporated into the next drawing rev.

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To be fair, I hope those guys make bank as well

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OWGs to the rescue.

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Quite the conundrum when they recommissioned the Iowa-class BB's.,..and nobody on active duty had ever fired the guns or could quite figure out what the 77 men in each turret did.

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Saw a funny meme yesterday - based on "How pissed would you be if you were discharged for not getting the COVID vaccine, and then you were recalled?"

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When I was in the Pentagon 1990-`1992 we LCDRs and CDRs pleaded with senior leadership not to shut down production lines, training, education, etc. However; Congress and our leadership went after every discretionary penny they could get their hands on to support their pet projects... I couldn't believe the disdain for the military.

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The PEACE dividend!

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Now do Mk 48 torpedoes

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Congress, and even the DoD, forget how much of everything is needed in wartime. Just take escorts, as an example. By the end of the War, between the BENSONs; LIVERMOREs; FLETCHERs; SUMNERs; GEARINGs, and the various classes of DEs, we had over a thousand more destroyers than we had in 1941. We have a tiny fraction of that number now, and the threat, given the weapons pointed at us today, is much higher.

We need to make a DE that we can crank out by the dozen, not little Coffin Ships.

One of the largest producers of bomb casings has been Alan Bradley, in Milwaukee. Time for them to reopen thereblines, and put three shifts on.

I believe war is coming, and we better get ready.

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Personally, I think the bottleneck is subks and chips, but WRT bomb casings, I don't think they are critical. Seems to me you can cast them or fabricate them out of various materials, including carbon fiber. OTOH, shell casings need to handle 10,000 Gs of force. Same with high velocity cannon tubes

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Chips and REEs (rare earth elements) for engine metallurgy.

We used to make chips here. We used to dig the ore here.

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and we shouldn't pick fights that will last more than a week until we come up with other sources for both...

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You had me with your first five words

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Whether you believe war is coming, or not, we better get ready. We don't need to pound the drums of way to encourage our population that military preparedness is essential for their safety. We simply need to explain why strength is necessary to protect our democracy.

Igitur quī dēsīderat pācem, præparet bellum.

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Best military, or best loser military

Pick ONE.

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A third-world disruption has taken out all the 155mm cannon shell inventory, and damned near all the Jav and MANPAD inventory. In a year.

The only good thing about all this is that if we get the time, at least we'll have fresh ammo in storage.

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IF we have time.

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Fascinating to think that one of the biggest drivers for Hitler launching into WWII at the time that he did, was due to production line conversions and the time it would take to convert them from military production, back to civil, and back again to military. Some things never change.

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Again, "end of history" and all that BS persuaded people in power that the "peace dividend" was possible and we were on the road to the European model welfare/nanny state of domestic spending. So kill the production lines or pare them down, including the F-22 and weapons systems like the Stinger. If you don't have an alternative, replacement for the Stinger - and we sure need SHORADS for the Army - then why the heck do you shut down the line?

We've gone over this a few times on many levels and in all service supply lines...as Sal says, hopefully they are waking up to reality.

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FWIW, the Amy cannibalized all the SHORAD units during GWOT. The Taliban not having a big AF

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Probably another mistake. Were I Chief of Staff of the Army, I'd be pushing hard to make sure that we retained "seed corn" capability across the board.

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Nah, he paid many millions of dollars to get rid of the linebackers instead of putting them into storage.

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Guard SHORAD units in my state (NM) became infantry while the Patriot units became MPs

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"and we were on the road to the European model welfare/nanny state of domestic spending"

We've been on that road for decades now, and accelerating

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This is a lesson we do not seem to be able to learn. During WW II there were several obsolescent aircraft production runs kept going to keep the production lines open for later models. Back then we understood. Now, it seems, we pursue the ignis fatuus of the "Peace Dividend" and just in time logistics despite their proven failure. Alas Babylon indeed.

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Jul 19, 2023·edited Jul 19, 2023

Aside from the Republic P-43 which is a perfect example of keeping a line hot? The funny thing is that is it was French and British money that built many of production lines and many of the obsolete aircraft like the A-31/A-35 went to the British in the CBI.

The only major aerospace/naval lines that have been kept hot are the F-16 and the Burkes. One by foreign purchases, the other by a failed procurement system.

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Jul 19, 2023·edited Jul 19, 2023

The P39 was nobody's idea of a great fighter, but we kept producing them until just before D-Day.

But why pick on the P43? We only produced them in 1940 and 1941 - and the last operator, China, retired them in 1944

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The Russians loved them. (Since they used the airplane as intended.)

The P-43 is the perfect example of keeping a line hot.

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The P43 was only produced in 1941 and 1942...Not exactly scorching hot.

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It was used to keep trained folks busy as they tooled up for the P-47.

Here's the part you never read about.

https://www.warbirdforum.com/richdunn.htm#:~:text=It%20was%20fast%20(nominally%2C%20356,clearly%20superior%20at%20high%20altitude.

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Interesting, but the production of the P47 started in 1941 too.

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This is simple. Congress controls the purse strings. They toss money at whatever ensures their survival. In war it is war material. In peace it is a second Obamaphone, debit cards for illegals and pork. With a 2 year election cycle their thinking has to be short-term.

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Draft the children of elected officials.

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and elected officials

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Perhap we can put up a banner in front of the Pentagon should read "We don't learn the lessons that matter until it's too late." Logistics and supply chain always gets a vote ...

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More like “We don’t learn lessons that matter because if we did, no one would see ME as brilliant and deserving of a promotion.”

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Is anyone listening?

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a rhetorical question right?

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Not on Capitol Hill

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