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jjk166 6 hours ago

> 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...