Yo, I have an idea: What if we try to live out a Cold-War fever dream by ticking off our old nuclear enemy while running out of munitions?
This report comes from USAF Commander Gen. James Hecker, who recently spoke on a panel with the top air force leaders of the United Kingdom and Sweden during the Chief of the Air Staff's Global Air & Space Chiefs' Conference in London.
From Breaking Defense:
"I think it's very important that we kind of take stock of where we are in our weapons state across the 32 nations of NATO, and we're getting way down compared to where we were," said Hecker, who counted Sweden's expected accession to NATO among the collection of allied nations — a topic of heated discussion at the NATO summit in Lithuania this week.
"If you look at the US itself — and let's not just talk about the munitions we recently have given away to Ukraine — but we're [at] roughly half the number of fighter squadrons that we were when we did Desert Storm," Hecker said, pointing to a similar decline in fighter strength for the UK. "So we don't have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War. Now you add that we're giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians — which I think is exactly what we need to do — but now we're getting dangerously low and sometimes, in some cases even too low, that we don't have enough. And we need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going."
It always amazes me to see the level of logical gymnastics people play when it comes to Ukraine.
"We're giving a lot munitions away to the Ukrainians - which is I think exactly what we need to do - but now we're getting dangerously low..."
Make it make sense!
The U.S. has had this harebrained idea the past few decades that you can steamroll into a country and get rid of long-standing ethnic divisions and historic hostilities by dropping some bombs stamped with "Democracy!" on the people we deem the bad guys.
Russia's war is not just. We shouldn't be rooting for Putin. But we can also acknowledge the insanity of providing a smaller corrupt country with a ton of bullets and bombs to fight a larger corrupt country because the larger country wants to annex the eastern half that ethnically identifies with it in order to have access to its oil and farm fields.
Look at America's track record in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, etc. These proxy wars don't help in the end; they merely serve as a tool for the opportunity that war brings. But the faithful with the Ukrainian flags in their bio will be rooting for the total destruction of Russia even if we have no munitions left to fight Russia.
According to a July 7 factsheet, the US has provided Ukraine over $41.3 billion in security assistance since Russia's invasion in February 2022, much of it in the form of transfers of current stockpiles rather than new production. As just one example, more than 2,000 RTX-made Stinger anti-aircraft systems have been sent to the country, leading the Pentagon to struggle to replenish the current inventory as it searches for a next-generation replacement.
Here, I think, is the point.
Generals like Hecker don't want the U.S. and NATO to have low weapons stockpiles. They want to drain the stockpiles and then use that as a justification for rearmament en masse, because war is their business and they want business to be good.
A surging demand for weapons in the wake of Russia's invasion has stressed the Western industrial base, which had actively eschewed a wartime footing. Moves like multi-year procurement authorities have been deployed by the Pentagon to provide industry a more predictable timetable for production, but Hecker joined other top officers in calling for more action.
When they say "procurement" and "more action," they mean "take more taxes from Americans to build more bombs."
"[All NATO nations] need to start" making deeper investments, Hecker added, "because we're dreadfully below where we need to be. And it's probably not going to get better — well, it's not in the short term — but we've got to make sure in the long term we have the industrial base that can increase what we have."
"Long-term" ... "investments."
What did the Founding Fathers think about standing armies again?
Heidi Grant, Boeing's director of business development and the former top official for the Pentagon's weapons sales, said on the panel that industry needs more than just statements from military officials for production levels to meet their desires.
"As far as the demand signal, we're all talking about it. But what it really takes, what industry needs is the request. A written, on-paper request so we can start those production lines that you need," she said. "It's hard for us to make the investment unless we know that it's really there."
Still think I'm wrong?
War companies that exist under the term "defense contractors" like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer (yes, Pfizer is a defense contractor), and General Dynamics need to have a reason for business. They spend a lot to be located in the DC area near all the politicians, but with no war the last year or so, they need to restart the production lines.
Of course, their biggest client is the U.S. government, so there needs to be a supply/demand crisis that forces the suits to sign off the necessary paperwork to drain the coffers and spin up the missile factories. Pentagon leaders like Heckler seem more than willing to be the middle man, using the war in Ukraine as both an opportunity and an excuse to get the war machine oiled and ready.
I'll leave you with this handy illustration of U.S. military spending:
