Pakistan Recalls Ambassador to Iran After Airstrikes

[TGS]

What I meant was we no longer have the heavy industrial base necessary to fight a World War.

Neither does anyone else.

For that matter, neither did the US in 1941. The majority of war materiel was produced in the last two years of WW2 alone.

It takes years to build defense manufacturing capacity to the point of a fully mobilized society, and nobody maintains it during peacetime because it would bankrupt your country. This capability was never an expectation for long term peace time periods.

Back to current day, we are still the largest exporter in the world for arms and munitions. We are needing to expand production capacity in response to current demands, sure, but that's not a sign of distress or that something is wrong. That's just how the world works, and even still we have brought an offensive fed by a national mobilization of Russia to a halt for, comparatively, very little effort.

[Joe in PNG]

Arthur Herman's "Freedom's Forge" is an interesting read regarding the buildup of the Arsenal of Democracy.
One must recall that Depression era America had a view of the Military-Industrial Complex not to dissimilar to a late 60's Berzerkley radical. So most industries didn't really do a lot of military stuff until the war proper started. So, most of the WWII industrial base was built literally from the ground up during WWII

[Borderland]

Eh, we sure are dumping lots of goodies into Ukraine.

As soon as the XM30 goes into production (soon) I'm assuming more Bradley's will be surplus for UKR. They seem to be using those to good effect.


https://www.army.mil/article/267922/...to_two_vendors

I can't imagine being hammered with a 50 mm chain gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykTEElmncJI

[TGS]

As soon as the XM30 goes into production (soon) I'm assuming more Bradley's will be surplus for UKR. They seem to be using those to good effect.


https://www.army.mil/article/267922/...to_two_vendors

I can't imagine being hammered with a 50 mm chain gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykTEElmncJI

Soon? That thing is still in an R&D phase. It'll be years before that program comes to fruition. There's not even a projected date, yet...which when you get to the point of having a projected date for introduction*, you're usually still a few years out from full rate production.

*Even the original program before all the delays/restart was only projected to be in service as early as 2035.

[Default.mp3]

Soon? That thing is still in an R&D phase. It'll be years before that program comes to fruition. There's not even a projected date, yet...which when you get to the point of having a projected date for introduction*, you're usually still a few years out from full rate production.

*Even the original program before all the delays/restart was only projected to be in service as early as 2035.

FWIW, there is a projected date for initial production, last I saw from open source publications:

If the Army and industry can successfully make it through that performance period, the service intends to select one team to proceed with low-rate initial production in 2027, with the intent of achieving the first unit equipped milestone in 2029 ahead of full-rate production. Source: https://breakingdefense.com/2023/06/...t-competition/

Now, whether or not that timeline is anywhere realistic...

[Joe in PNG]

Wartime does have a way of accelerating the weapons development process.

[Default.mp3]

Wartime does have a way of accelerating the weapons development process.

A reasonable statement, but the problem in respect to the pace of development is that we are not at war. Lord knows I'm not seeing any acceleration of any the programs around where I work. There is a sense of urgency, but all it really seems to do is make management try their damnedest (usually unsuccessfully) to ensure that we don't have schedule slip, rather than actually beating schedule.

[Joe in PNG]

A reasonable statement, but the problem in respect to the pace of development is that we are not at war. Lord knows I'm not seeing any acceleration of any the programs around where I work.

And hopefully that situation doesn't arise.

[JRB]

So we're basically going to watch two dudes slapping each other in the face saying "no man, there was a fly on your face, and THAT's why I slapped the shit out of you. I totally respect you."

You have no idea how accurate that is for the majority of politics across the GCC/Middle East/Arab world.

What I meant was we no longer have the heavy industrial base necessary to fight a World War.

By June 1942 the United States was well along in fulfilling President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pledge of becoming an Arsenal of Democracy. But the hundreds of thousands of men in uniform and mountains of materiel were useless for the Allied war effort if they remained within America’s borders. To get both to the battlefields and bases scattered around the world, America needed cargo and transport ships – yesterday. Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser couldn’t turn back the clock. But he did the next best thing. He built Liberty ships – fast. Between 1941 and 1945, 18 American shipyards, either Kaiser’s or using Kaiser’s shipbuilding techniques, turned out 2,751 Liberty ships, easily the largest class of ships ever built.

https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...20ever%20built.

I find less problem with massive support to Ukraine than other support we offer to Allies, and we aren't exactly doing it on the scale of lend-lease in WWII.

We'd be selling war bonds and we'd be taking a lot of ships out of mothballed/rotting status and scrambling to get them back online. The issue in my mind isn't ships or materiel, it's motivated crews that are worth a damn.

[Caballoflaco]

Anybody have this on their 2024 Bingo Cards? All that Jihad just to end up as the meat in an Iran-Pakistan War Sandwich.

https://twitter.com/@twitter/status/1747975273352769854