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I rewrote the article, it's even better now:

The tomahawk entered service in 1983, in 2026 they only produced 57. DO THE MATH!

This means the military can only have (2025-1983) * 57 = 2394 Tomahawks.

But the military says they have approximately 3000-4000 tomahawks in inventory. Is it a conspiracy? How could they POSSIBLY have more than 2394 if they can ONLY MAKE 57 PER YEAR?!

prompt: rite me article about US only can make 57 tomohok missels a year but looks lik they have moar than that

That was the goal all along.

I thought the really juicy national defense information like that was reserved for reading material in Mar A Lago bathrooms.

Yeah they do. At the end of the day the budgets are public, and when the US government wants more of something they don't make it in house. They put out a call for proposals for more of something, and private companies (e.g. general dynamics or raytheon) bid for the contract with very specifically defined requirements. I'm sure it is ripe information for foreign intelligence but it has been playing out like this for decades at this point.

https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4026238/fa...

Resiliency is good, but developing surge capacity is not free, and the US cannot afford it. Excessive military spending bankrupted the USSR.

The US has no chance of ever successfully engaging China in direct combat. China almost certainly has secret drones spread out in the mainland US that will destroy domestic US bases in a single day. As for China's own missiles, they're so spread out that they can never be neutralized.

Do you think the US has idle capacity that can be activated at a moment's notice?

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Taiwan might be indefensible at any rate of production the United States could conceivably spin up within a practical time horizon.

The volume of fire that can be generated inside the 100km line by PLAN/PLAAF/PLAARF forces is nothing less than breathtaking. Even if you parked three Ford class carriers inside optimal mission radius, and their entire complement could take off and land in near-training conditions, and they don't need DCAP or electronic warfare coverage, *AND* if every single bomb and aircraft has a glassy-perfect mission right weapon to right target - EVEN WITH all these impossible conditions satisfied . . you're still not generating enough weapon effect to suppress even half of the PRC fire generation complex vis a vis a Taiwan situation. And they don't need half.

And that is not going to be the operational situation for USN. No, not by a long shot. If we're particularly unlucky, we might not ever know for sure what happened to the USS Whoever - just that it sailed into an electronic fog past Zamami and was gone. Rescued sailors could add little more.

The powers-that-be know this, the elected politicians know this (but don't care because they often have pockets stuffed from Chinese interests), but still we have chest beaters of the unstoppable American juggernaut. Yes, we do have a very big military - it's true! - but it's a military that the largest economy in the world has spent a good deal of its resources working to counter. For twenty years.

My greatest fear is that the chest beaters do assert direct control, court disaster, and have the worst possible reaction. I'm not confident in a sane response to a major surface asset being sunk; these are not people mentally geared to handle humiliation.

We're flirting this line already with Iran - with goddamn Iran of all people - where many People Who Should Know Better have already been flapping their mouths about breaking the taboo on First Use. For Iran.

>a lot of people that have been responsible for procurement in the last 20 years should lose their jobs.

If anything I would say this means procurement has been closer to "right sized" than not.