Are we Ready?

[BridgeTroll]

According to some we are on the precipice of WWIII... others including myself believe we are in the beginning stages of Cold War II. Regardless...  I don't think the US, or the West, is ready...

Two very good articles outlining the issues...

https://www.18theses.com/

Around 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, China militarized the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and Iran was allowed to pursue the bomb. A decade later, we have had more than 300 attacks on U.S. bases by Iran, 1,200 people slaughtered in a pogrom in Israel, an estimated 1 million casualties in brutal combat in Ukraine, and an unprecedented tempo of CCP phase zero operations in the Taiwan Straits.

This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it.

We have a peer adversary: China. "Near-Peer" is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America's national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes. In the current environment, American industries can't produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we're in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems.

Given the vast sums we have spent on defense in these decades of Pax Americana, it would be reasonable to wonder: what went wrong?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/weapons-production-munitions-shortfall-ukraine-democracy/680867/?utm_source=msn