So what were they requesting $200 Billion for?

throw0101c 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> So what were they requesting $200 Billion for?

That request was over a month ago and perhaps based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high. After the initial outburst, things may have slowed down.

That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.

	▲	jjk166 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high So they were expecting those high tempos to continue for months? > That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner. 8X is a heck of an expedite fee.

▲

swarnie 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe they expect this not war to last 7x longer?

Have any of the not objectives for the not war been accomplished yet?

	▲	Ritewut 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Funneling lots of money to the AI-Military industrial complex has been accomplished
	▲	marcosdumay 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Genociding half of Lebanon has been achieved.

▲

jmyeet 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Short answer? To ramp up production.

For any sufficiently large and complex system, you need to keep that assembly line alive to keep the system alive. Part of this is for just replacement parts and general maintenance. Take something like the F35. The engine will only last a certain number of flight hours. Then you need a new engine. That engine will need replacement blades and other parts. The frame and the stealth coating will need maintenance. And then there are all the weapons you fit to the plane and use.

A good example of how this matters is with rockets. Up until SLS, Saturn V was the most powerful rocket ever built and SLS only beats it by "cheating" with 2 solid rocket boosters. People would often ask "if we could build Saturn V 50-60 eyars ago, why can't we just do that again?" It's a fair question and the answer is we no longer have the expertise. All of the people who worked on that are long gone. Some of it was documented. Some wasn't. F5 engines were essentially bespoke. Materials science has changed. It's essentially impossible or just prohibitively impossible to reproduce now.

So back to the $200 billion. The US military has been hit by this kind of problem before where they've bought a weapons system and been unable to maintain it later. Now it essentially has to be documented and the US buys up and stores all the documentation as well as machining tools, etc if they ever have to revive it.

So for a lot of the munitions used in the war, the US has contracted them to a certain replacement rate. In the last year they've been used way in excess of that production rate. Ramping up production is expensive. New factories have to be built. New people need to be trained. And the only way a supplier would do that is if the military essentially pays for it AND guarantees purchasing. So you might end up paying 3x to double production because it doesn't necessarily scale. It's also more expensive to scale something up quickly.

Put another way, this is another $200 billion for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to replenish overpriced weapon systems.

	▲	jjk166 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> To ramp up production. This makes absolutely no sense. The $25 Billion cost would be the cost of all the munitions used, the cost of the actual usage, the cost of all the maintenance, the fuel consumption, the logistics, the wages and hazard pay of all the people involved. So the things you actually need to replace are only a tiny fraction of that number. On top of that, it's still the total. If you were spending $2.5 billion per year for 10 years to build up that stockpile, then $25 billion is already a 10X multiplier to scale back rapidly, on top of the $2.5 billion per year that has already been allocated for the usual production. Further, those are peace time prices. Munitions factories are overbuilt and then run lean during peacetime, increasing per unit cost to justify maintaining everything. Scaling up to larger orders doesn't increase unit prices, it lowers them. There may be some diseconomies of scale as you deal with some growing pains or if you need to go beyond maximum capacity, but it's certainly nothing that's going to balloon the cost 8X+. Finally, building the facilities to produce more quickly would take substantial time anyways, so it's not even advantageous to do so unless you're actually going to need that higher production capacity in the long term. Right now the munitions cost is estimated at $10 Billion with a replacement time of 1-4 years. Note that only a fraction of the US's inventory was actually used, for example the US used about 1000 tomahawks over the course of the conflict and still has about 2000 in inventory. Obviously every munition you fire is one less round available immediately - if we get into a war with China next week we'll be in a bad spot - but that's not a problem solvable by overspending. [0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...