FYI the contract ceiling is $400M, meaning it is the max that can be spent using the contract. DoD has not spent that much yet, to my knowledge. But, if we can help them and Govini get to the bottom of supply chain dependencies keeping DoD assets from being FMC and ready for tasking, it’s worth every penny.
For free, I will tell you. When it comes to supply chain production facilities, most people are YIOPBYs. Yes In Other People's Back Yards. Mines, smelters, chemical production facilities, etc are necessary; just not near me.
If I got to pick a half dozen fellow retirees from various 'Great Big Defense Contractors' we could have written that report in a month or so. I'd have charged DOD $50M just because no one would read it if it were cheap.
CDR Sal, a target rich environment for comment (as always), but..."you can't go to war with your factory"...unless you have an alternative source. The south learned that bitter lesson during our Civil War; they didn't have one. The current U.S. Military Industrial Complex (MID...TM) doesn't have an alternative either. Taiwan is the majority producer of the ultra high end chips, but as your chart shows, our weapons platforms are riddled with chips that have been and will continue to be produced in "not our factory". Out sourcing is largely (almost totally?) profit driven, lacking successful targeted government subsidies, the situation from five years ago remains largely unchanged now and into the future (the CHIPZ ACT? Puleeze!.
Which leads us to the options regarding conflict with "not our factory".
1) Don't fight
2) Win fast or lose
3) Go nuclear.
Consider these the limits on a spectrum, lots of overlap between them, but fair to say in all cases it would be easy to be going too fast to identify and miss the off ramp that avoids a major conflict. BUT, in our favor, the adults are back in charge! \sarcasm off.
Sal, that is terrifying! Thank you…not, for convening this morning on an optimistic footing. Now, on to the continuing quest for that elusive 50 acres and a long, LONG dirt road!
And since COVID you can no longer buy antibiotic meds from the livestock suppliers without a vet's prescription. Those meds are labeled "For Livestock Use Only" and are the same meds you'd get at your CVS pharmacy. You can thank the good people at the USDA and CDC who are not your friends anymore.
I remember a National Semiconductor rep at an IEEE conference in the mid-1990's. He was pitching accelrometers on a chip and said something to the effect of "you defense buyers will have to live with this commercial packaging, you are 1% of our projected sales." He might have said you are less than 1% of our projected sales. The company was not going to do a MilSpec variant of the chip.
I doubt many of the drones being used in Ukraine are full of milspec parts. I wonder if anyone has done the exercise of building a degraded weapons system (sidewinder, jdam, etc) that is currently in use using non-milspec parts/parts not from China and what the degradation/differences/costs would be.
I think milspec mostly impacts temperature on ICs. So you might have issues where long high flights will produce significantly less reliable missiles unless you provide some sort of heater to keep the seeker and fuze warmish.
Makes one wonder whether the calculation in certain circles (ostensibly on "our side" of the hill) was to present American capitulation as a _fait accompli_, come the day.
I took a look at sources and the board. The Congressional Research Service 2023 report is a source. An NDU study is a source. So the taxpayer paid these people to read open sources and government reports to make this report and the recommendations. There's nothing wrong with that, and the recommendations are something we all can agree on, I think. Recommendation 1: buy more stuff right away! Recommendation 2: spend more money on US suppliers and training and infrastructure. Recommendation 3: buy our software! Recommendation 4: buy parts now! Recommendation 5: build another open source center so we can get more taxpayer paid for data. I think that last paragraph is some kind of conclusion, but they forgot Iran, Yemen and North Korea. Other that than, worth a $400 million contract. What will the next "deliverable" look like?. Could have bought an OHP Frigate for that kind of money.
My thanks to Sal, however I suspect in this article Sal is preaching to the choir as we all are Churchills in the wilderness years. And, many of us are old enough to have been active in the military that President Reagan gave us in the 80's that allowed us to win, win, the Cold War. Here we are with two wars on our hands and a third in the offing in the Pacific and no on in charge speaking of winning.
I would also point out the logistical rot is far worse. Some sixty percent of our pharmaceuticals come that same factory in China. We have no domestic ability to produce penicillin. Or, what about lead? The last of our lead smelting capabilities were shut down by Obama's EPA.
We got lazy in the 1990s after defeating the USSR and Saddam. We thought history had come to an end. New World Order. We let our guard down. Then came Clinton Obama and Biden. No one told bin Laden Putin or Xi that history ended.
Once the Harris-Walz administration is installed on January 20th, 2025, Hunter Biden would be their logical choice for a chief China trade negotiator given how intimately familar both he and his uncle James Biden already are with their counterparts on the Chinese side.
Tariffs protect producers and free trade protects investors.
We see the results of free trade by our dependence on China for real stuff.
Open borders means cheap labor which results in cheap workers and cheap servants but in either case shafts the middle class who lose their jobs. That assumes the new immigrants even work and just don’t collect benefits.
It was to King George III that is for sure. The colonies were a place of opportunity both in wealth and religion. Resource rich and a perpetual labor shortage. Heck, even two colonies (Pennsylvania and North Carolina) forbade debtors prisons. Heck of a lot better than being in the British Isles.
Support for tariffs are based on Karl Marx's notion that central planners are able to out plan the market. They can't. No human can outthink the economic decisions of a billion humans. Markets move at the speed of light, markets are far too fluid to be reined in by a bureaucrat's five year tariff plan.
The folks opposed to free trade might as well swear allegiance to the communist party. They are on the same side.
AI as a fix? In a theoretical world that might work, though most AI is currenlty a joke. Don't believe the buzz. C-Level in the private sector has begun to move on.
I'll give the authors credit for identifying and quantifying the issue. Still, the authors aren't qualified to propose a solution. Because the real answer is cleaning house.
America is addicted to outsourcing. Its dangerous
FYI the contract ceiling is $400M, meaning it is the max that can be spent using the contract. DoD has not spent that much yet, to my knowledge. But, if we can help them and Govini get to the bottom of supply chain dependencies keeping DoD assets from being FMC and ready for tasking, it’s worth every penny.
For free, I will tell you. When it comes to supply chain production facilities, most people are YIOPBYs. Yes In Other People's Back Yards. Mines, smelters, chemical production facilities, etc are necessary; just not near me.
If I got to pick a half dozen fellow retirees from various 'Great Big Defense Contractors' we could have written that report in a month or so. I'd have charged DOD $50M just because no one would read it if it were cheap.
CDR Sal, a target rich environment for comment (as always), but..."you can't go to war with your factory"...unless you have an alternative source. The south learned that bitter lesson during our Civil War; they didn't have one. The current U.S. Military Industrial Complex (MID...TM) doesn't have an alternative either. Taiwan is the majority producer of the ultra high end chips, but as your chart shows, our weapons platforms are riddled with chips that have been and will continue to be produced in "not our factory". Out sourcing is largely (almost totally?) profit driven, lacking successful targeted government subsidies, the situation from five years ago remains largely unchanged now and into the future (the CHIPZ ACT? Puleeze!.
Which leads us to the options regarding conflict with "not our factory".
1) Don't fight
2) Win fast or lose
3) Go nuclear.
Consider these the limits on a spectrum, lots of overlap between them, but fair to say in all cases it would be easy to be going too fast to identify and miss the off ramp that avoids a major conflict. BUT, in our favor, the adults are back in charge! \sarcasm off.
Especially with our low magazine levels.
Sal, that is terrifying! Thank you…not, for convening this morning on an optimistic footing. Now, on to the continuing quest for that elusive 50 acres and a long, LONG dirt road!
Holy sh*t!!
On a day to day basis we also rely on China for a large % of our pharmaceutical products.
And since COVID you can no longer buy antibiotic meds from the livestock suppliers without a vet's prescription. Those meds are labeled "For Livestock Use Only" and are the same meds you'd get at your CVS pharmacy. You can thank the good people at the USDA and CDC who are not your friends anymore.
DoD's offshored supply chain is as bad as the rest of the "off shored economy".
When I got into acquisition on the gumint side thanks to the Reagan build up we were 95% plus of the integrated circuit (aka chips) demand chain.
2005 or so US DoD was less than 1%. That would be no big deal but by 2000 the chip business was off shored!
I remember a National Semiconductor rep at an IEEE conference in the mid-1990's. He was pitching accelrometers on a chip and said something to the effect of "you defense buyers will have to live with this commercial packaging, you are 1% of our projected sales." He might have said you are less than 1% of our projected sales. The company was not going to do a MilSpec variant of the chip.
I doubt many of the drones being used in Ukraine are full of milspec parts. I wonder if anyone has done the exercise of building a degraded weapons system (sidewinder, jdam, etc) that is currently in use using non-milspec parts/parts not from China and what the degradation/differences/costs would be.
I think milspec mostly impacts temperature on ICs. So you might have issues where long high flights will produce significantly less reliable missiles unless you provide some sort of heater to keep the seeker and fuze warmish.
Makes one wonder whether the calculation in certain circles (ostensibly on "our side" of the hill) was to present American capitulation as a _fait accompli_, come the day.
The mantra is "interdependent trade between countries makes war less likely." Thus the push for globalism over nationalism.
I believe that was essentially what they were saying just before 1914.
You get what you pay for, and the PRC has paid for a LOT of representation in DC
I took a look at sources and the board. The Congressional Research Service 2023 report is a source. An NDU study is a source. So the taxpayer paid these people to read open sources and government reports to make this report and the recommendations. There's nothing wrong with that, and the recommendations are something we all can agree on, I think. Recommendation 1: buy more stuff right away! Recommendation 2: spend more money on US suppliers and training and infrastructure. Recommendation 3: buy our software! Recommendation 4: buy parts now! Recommendation 5: build another open source center so we can get more taxpayer paid for data. I think that last paragraph is some kind of conclusion, but they forgot Iran, Yemen and North Korea. Other that than, worth a $400 million contract. What will the next "deliverable" look like?. Could have bought an OHP Frigate for that kind of money.
My thanks to Sal, however I suspect in this article Sal is preaching to the choir as we all are Churchills in the wilderness years. And, many of us are old enough to have been active in the military that President Reagan gave us in the 80's that allowed us to win, win, the Cold War. Here we are with two wars on our hands and a third in the offing in the Pacific and no on in charge speaking of winning.
I would also point out the logistical rot is far worse. Some sixty percent of our pharmaceuticals come that same factory in China. We have no domestic ability to produce penicillin. Or, what about lead? The last of our lead smelting capabilities were shut down by Obama's EPA.
Three wars. Ukraine. Gaza. Yemen. One already lost. Afghanistan. Stuff going on in Syria Iraq Africa. Etc.
Touche
We got lazy in the 1990s after defeating the USSR and Saddam. We thought history had come to an end. New World Order. We let our guard down. Then came Clinton Obama and Biden. No one told bin Laden Putin or Xi that history ended.
Can we all finally agree that we've now entered "the stop pretending" zone?
We can. Those in charge? <painful laugh fading to a grimace>
A real world example of Gordian's knot if even attempting to unwind what's already installed. Grimace is a very apt word in this situation.
The report may have been funded in 2019 but in 2021 there was a new POTUS whose son received a billion dollar investment from China.
Once the Harris-Walz administration is installed on January 20th, 2025, Hunter Biden would be their logical choice for a chief China trade negotiator given how intimately familar both he and his uncle James Biden already are with their counterparts on the Chinese side.
Sorry. Chelsea Clinton was promised that position.
Tariffs protect producers and free trade protects investors.
We see the results of free trade by our dependence on China for real stuff.
Open borders means cheap labor which results in cheap workers and cheap servants but in either case shafts the middle class who lose their jobs. That assumes the new immigrants even work and just don’t collect benefits.
a functional and thriving middle class is the biggest threat to an authoritarian government, and will always be reduced by same.
It was to King George III that is for sure. The colonies were a place of opportunity both in wealth and religion. Resource rich and a perpetual labor shortage. Heck, even two colonies (Pennsylvania and North Carolina) forbade debtors prisons. Heck of a lot better than being in the British Isles.
And the elites want to rob the middle class with debt cheap labor cheap imports.
Support for tariffs are based on Karl Marx's notion that central planners are able to out plan the market. They can't. No human can outthink the economic decisions of a billion humans. Markets move at the speed of light, markets are far too fluid to be reined in by a bureaucrat's five year tariff plan.
The folks opposed to free trade might as well swear allegiance to the communist party. They are on the same side.
Gee, I wonder why federal, state and city politicians make so many trips to China.
Ask Hunter when he’s sober.
“They” have been planning this since the Clinton administration. Why? They are fucking communists.
remember the buddhist monk “donation” scandal? charlie trie?
Cattle futures? Lincoln Bedroom? Graves at Arlington? Loral? The Clintons were a walking cesspool? The Clinton Foundation?
AI as a fix? In a theoretical world that might work, though most AI is currenlty a joke. Don't believe the buzz. C-Level in the private sector has begun to move on.
I'll give the authors credit for identifying and quantifying the issue. Still, the authors aren't qualified to propose a solution. Because the real answer is cleaning house.
Cleaning the house that paid them $400M for a 12 page report.
haha! we got em right where we want em!