(first time I’ve hit character limit on lemmygrad I think lol)
continued:
This is more complicated for me to answer, I’m not too deep into the operational side. But operationality is dwindling down year after year in the US army, probably because it’s expensive and they can’t justify the cost. At any time, they might have only 40-50% of their plane arsenal ready to depart. This is not huge, though you would rarely have 100% operationality. But again, they have not needed 80% operationality from their planes for a long time. Nobody in Libya was opposing their air superiority, they could fly freely. Nobody was opposing it in Afghanistan, they could fly freely.
As for rust, it’s deprioritized for other things. The US Army is clearly stretching thin. It can still attack and destroy, absolutely, but it’s being stretched. The Navy’s director of Ship Integrity and Performance Engineering has publicly admitted, “We know what to do, but we choose not to do it,” because corrosion is perpetually deprioritized for other problems.
Part of the operational problem is the MIC again. The Army buys new systems over upgrading/maintaining older ones, because that’s where the money is for the contractors. It’s possible to extend the life of a helicopter by 25 years after depot-level overhaul, but they buy a brand new one instead. Public depots get shafted in favor of new procurements from private contractors, and professionals leave and take their expertise with them. This is solved by policy, which the US technically has, but it’s not enough to fix it. They would need to really reign in the contractors and the army’s reliance on them. It’s a long, long process even if you made a law today.
Iran though has been building a fully or mostly domestic defense industry under the sanctions, so they have stuff that can target planes and helicopters. So they don’t fly freely over Iran. They have also, as others pointed out, studied how the US fights - and so have Russia and China (and perhaps this starts to explain why Russia is taking its time in Ukraine instead of trying to be faster than the US doctrines of blitzkrieg).
In terms of logistics, we could look at how they ship all of this stuff around the world (this is where a big navy necessarily comes in), but we also have to state the obvious, now, after 12 paragraphs: the US has stopped producing anything. They outsourced everything to China.
On the ground, this means Lockheed Martin only delivers 50-96 THAAD interceptor missiles (long-range interception) per year. You would use at least 2 per interception. You might say “but if this is their lifeline in terms of defense, wouldn’t you want to make 500 per year instead?” Yes, you would, and the US has contracted lockheed to ramp that up to I think 250 per year… by 2030. But they literally can’t. They don’t have the raw resources or the workforce for it. China controls most rare earths – rare earths themselves are not rare, what’s rare is extracting them from the soil.
China handles most rare earths processing - 70-90% of the world’s; the US and other countries might mine their own earths, but they send them to China for processing. And it’s not easy to scale up and increase yield of a given load of soil. And now, they have enacted export controls on rare earths to the US, so double whammy. China makes 90% of the world’s magnets, which are used in missiles and other target-seeking payloads.
With outsourced production, the US doesn’t even always have the knowledge to scale these things up. There’s entire methods of manufacturing we forgot because we’ve outsourced them for over 20, 30 years. You can see it right now not just in interceptors, but a LOT of stuff for the US defense contractors gets sourced from China. It’s short-sighted, but then again what else is capitalism but the chasing of short-term profits to ensure you continue to operate tomorrow?
edit: oh yeah I should add, we’re also working on ‘just in time’ logistics in the west, because storage is expensive. So it’s better for companies, not just in defense, to get rid of stock as quickly as possible and prevent storage build-up. This is why everything takes 2 weeks to ship to you, either as a consumer or a business buyer, and you can’t just walk out with specialized parts (you used to like with car parts, but not anymore). They need to order it, which means it needs to be made in the next batch that will be made and then shipped to them. 2 weeks.
this is why we are only ever 2 weeks away from crisis. we saw it in strikes, we saw it during covid, and we see it again in this war with fuel.
So tl;dr: US is fucked because it got too big, and it got too big because it needed to expand. many empires died the same way.
(first time I’ve hit character limit on lemmygrad I think lol)
continued:
This is more complicated for me to answer, I’m not too deep into the operational side. But operationality is dwindling down year after year in the US army, probably because it’s expensive and they can’t justify the cost. At any time, they might have only 40-50% of their plane arsenal ready to depart. This is not huge, though you would rarely have 100% operationality. But again, they have not needed 80% operationality from their planes for a long time. Nobody in Libya was opposing their air superiority, they could fly freely. Nobody was opposing it in Afghanistan, they could fly freely.
As for rust, it’s deprioritized for other things. The US Army is clearly stretching thin. It can still attack and destroy, absolutely, but it’s being stretched. The Navy’s director of Ship Integrity and Performance Engineering has publicly admitted, “We know what to do, but we choose not to do it,” because corrosion is perpetually deprioritized for other problems.
Part of the operational problem is the MIC again. The Army buys new systems over upgrading/maintaining older ones, because that’s where the money is for the contractors. It’s possible to extend the life of a helicopter by 25 years after depot-level overhaul, but they buy a brand new one instead. Public depots get shafted in favor of new procurements from private contractors, and professionals leave and take their expertise with them. This is solved by policy, which the US technically has, but it’s not enough to fix it. They would need to really reign in the contractors and the army’s reliance on them. It’s a long, long process even if you made a law today.
Iran though has been building a fully or mostly domestic defense industry under the sanctions, so they have stuff that can target planes and helicopters. So they don’t fly freely over Iran. They have also, as others pointed out, studied how the US fights - and so have Russia and China (and perhaps this starts to explain why Russia is taking its time in Ukraine instead of trying to be faster than the US doctrines of blitzkrieg).
In terms of logistics, we could look at how they ship all of this stuff around the world (this is where a big navy necessarily comes in), but we also have to state the obvious, now, after 12 paragraphs: the US has stopped producing anything. They outsourced everything to China.
On the ground, this means Lockheed Martin only delivers 50-96 THAAD interceptor missiles (long-range interception) per year. You would use at least 2 per interception. You might say “but if this is their lifeline in terms of defense, wouldn’t you want to make 500 per year instead?” Yes, you would, and the US has contracted lockheed to ramp that up to I think 250 per year… by 2030. But they literally can’t. They don’t have the raw resources or the workforce for it. China controls most rare earths – rare earths themselves are not rare, what’s rare is extracting them from the soil.
China handles most rare earths processing - 70-90% of the world’s; the US and other countries might mine their own earths, but they send them to China for processing. And it’s not easy to scale up and increase yield of a given load of soil. And now, they have enacted export controls on rare earths to the US, so double whammy. China makes 90% of the world’s magnets, which are used in missiles and other target-seeking payloads.
With outsourced production, the US doesn’t even always have the knowledge to scale these things up. There’s entire methods of manufacturing we forgot because we’ve outsourced them for over 20, 30 years. You can see it right now not just in interceptors, but a LOT of stuff for the US defense contractors gets sourced from China. It’s short-sighted, but then again what else is capitalism but the chasing of short-term profits to ensure you continue to operate tomorrow?
edit: oh yeah I should add, we’re also working on ‘just in time’ logistics in the west, because storage is expensive. So it’s better for companies, not just in defense, to get rid of stock as quickly as possible and prevent storage build-up. This is why everything takes 2 weeks to ship to you, either as a consumer or a business buyer, and you can’t just walk out with specialized parts (you used to like with car parts, but not anymore). They need to order it, which means it needs to be made in the next batch that will be made and then shipped to them. 2 weeks.
this is why we are only ever 2 weeks away from crisis. we saw it in strikes, we saw it during covid, and we see it again in this war with fuel.
So tl;dr: US is fucked because it got too big, and it got too big because it needed to expand. many empires died the same way.