THE WAKE UP CALL

 Well it looks like the Wall Street Journal has finally figured it out.  This shouldn't come as a surprise since the facts have been available now for about 20 years and the facts in this case don't lie. It takes too long and too many parts to make modern anti-missiles or even missiles in the West. The article details some of why that is so and then blathers into the supply chains nonsense as if that was something totally new and unexpected and nobody saw that coming which is nonsense. The Army knew the wheels were coming off when they turned to industry for competition in their fuzes. They had to since the last American business making them announced that it wasn't going to make them anymore decades ago.

We were ordered by Congress to report how much of our Weapon System was made from non-American parts and specifically by the Chinese IIRC. It was a staggering amount of components and subcomponents and not really much of a surprise to us but some of the other Program Managers at SPAWAR were apparently surprised by how much of the final product originated in China.

Simply looking for 'known' compatible computers was hard to do and I was looking for Microsoft computers that weren't more than 2 or 3 years old. My sister (Air Force) had a good friend involved in the Space Shuttle Program and they were literally scratching into the dirt trying to find old computers and components that were identical to the gear originally flight certified for the Shuttles to use for maintenance and replacement. If anyone had at the time stockpiled some components, they were long gone by the time her friend was ordered to find them.

I remember the old Navy well. I was in a shipyard undergoing a dry dock during the course of which a couple of old propeller shafts from one of the D type Mine Sweepers were found and shipped to us and a single guy from Columbia Machine Products up in Oregon supervised their installation and alignment. These old shafts had been pulled from the Dash, Dominant or Detector long ago when the ships were decommissioned and before they were scrapped and then stored perfectly so that even decades later they were still true/round and worked perfectly once installed.

It does kind of make you wonder how many of those Minutemen sitting in silos dotted around the country will actually fly true and hit their targets if launched. It also makes me wonder about one of my old colleagues in SPAWAR who was a USNR Supply Corps Captain who would spend his 2 weeks of Annual Training every year working in the Ammo Shop at CINPAC going over the ammunition inventory reports. I sense that our 'burn rate' for exercises and training was probably just barely being replaced by new materials every year and that there is no way in Hell to spool up the production of any large caliber or missile ammunition without DoD and the Government paying for it upfront because they have a long history of burning industry.

Welcome all to 2024! May it be peaceful and friendly all year.