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| Government Corruption |
| Why the US military-industrial complex is unable to produce weapons |
| 2024-05-01 |
| Direct Translaiton via Google Translate. Edited. by Malek Dudakov [REGNUM] The US Congress was outraged by the greed of its own military-industrial complex. Corruption scandals and allegations of misappropriation of funds constantly plague US military corporations. However, recently the situation has been aggravated by the acute technological crisis in which the American defense industry is mired. If it continues to squander money in the old fashioned way, without giving any output, then the United States risks outright losing the new arms race to Russia and China. At a meeting of the Armed Services Committee in Congress, rather boring hearings took place with the participation of US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall . And then suddenly the unexpected happened - one of the legislators, Congressman from Florida Michael Waltz, pulled out a bag of bolts and bushings. And he asked the minister straight to his face: does he know how much it costs? The Pentagon pays 90 thousand dollars for this very set of “certified” bolts for its fighter jets, and you can buy it online for a couple of tens of dollars. This results in a markup of 3,000 times, on which the military-industrial complex lobbyists and their contractors profit. The puzzled Air Force Minister could only shrug his shoulders in confusion. Waltz, who gave the minister a beating, served as a Green Beret for 20 years, visited Afghanistan several times and saw with his own eyes the corruption inside the US military machine. The most telling example is the $80 billion worth of weapons left behind in Afghanistan. Why bother with transportation or repairs if you can simply order a new one and please your “friends” in the military-industrial complex. Unscrupulous apparatchiks and lobbyists have always profited from military contracts in the United States. This happened from the very beginning of the military-industrial complex, during World War II and immediately after, during the era of Truman and Eisenhower. However, during the Cold War, Washington had to be in a state of very tough competition with the socialist camp. Therefore, they tried to moderate the greed of military manufacturers by forcing them to work for results. The situation changed dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of a unipolar world under the auspices of the United States. There was no longer any need to compete with anyone - Russia was weakened by internal crises, China was not yet the current industrial giant. But the Europeans did not have the proper subjectivity and were dependent on the United States. At that moment, the process of monopolization began in the American military-industrial complex. The Pentagon itself largely condoned it - there was an idea that large defense giants would be better able to fulfill military orders than mid-level companies. As a result, the number of major military corporations in the United States decreased by about ten times. Moreover, they themselves became bound by joint contracts so that competition actually grew into cooperation. Competition, the engine of progress, simply disappeared from the American military industry market. This immediately affected the quality of products, which went down sharply, and the cost of contracts, which began to go through the roof. Moreover, there are contracts for literally everything. Let's say an oil pressure switch for NASA rockets costs $100 at retail, but they buy it for 10 thousand. They had to spend $120 million on valves for Apache helicopters, and a subsequent audit found that they should have cost 4-5 times less. And this is still a relatively small investment. What can we say about serious equipment - the same F-22 or F-35 fighters, the maintenance of which cost several trillion dollars. As a result, the Pentagon had to purchase much less of them than previously planned. Fighters turned out to be too expensive and constantly broke down: F-35s spend almost 60% of their time on the ground and under repair. This is straining the American military budget, which simply cannot keep up with all the spending. Problems for the American military-industrial complex have been accumulating for years, but have become especially aggravated in the last four to five years. The deadline for delivery of almost all weapons is seriously increasing. For example, it now takes an average of nine years to build one submarine in the United States instead of six. The next generation of frigates will be launched with a lag of three to four years. Things are even worse with new aircraft carriers, which are completely behind schedule. Lockheed Martin Corporation was able to assemble only half of the promised number of new F-35 fighters in 2023. Deliveries of the new upgraded F-15EX are also severely delayed. At the same time, spending on all defense programs is growing rapidly. Take, for example, the replacement of old Minuteman III missiles with new Sentinels. Spending on new intercontinental missiles has already increased by 35% to $120 billion. Now Congress is threatening to scrap the program altogether, leaving the United States with old Cold War-era missiles for decades to come. This state of affairs is affected by a whole set of problems. US military corporations have become too large, clumsy and bureaucratic. They have nowhere to rush and there is no need to save money, because they understand perfectly well that the Pentagon has no choice: the contracts will have to be placed with them anyway. Inefficiency at all levels of decision-making leads to long-term construction, inflated estimates and total sloppiness. In recent years, new misfortunes have begun to emerge: there is an acute shortage of engineering personnel - many qualified workers quit during the pandemic, when production stopped. Problems remain with logistics and supply of many categories of raw materials, especially rare earth metals from China. And each submarine or fighter requires tens and sometimes hundreds of kilograms of rare earths. That is why the process of increasing arms production is going so hard in the United States. They almost doubled the production of shells to 30 thousand per month. But, for example, it was not possible to double the production of Javelins from 2 to 4 thousand per year during two years of conflict in Ukraine. And to resume assembly of the Stingers, old retired engineers had to be brought back to work. There are also big problems with the growth of missile production, including for air defense systems like Patriot. Now only 500 of them are produced per year - on the Ukrainian front this can be used up in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, China has already overtaken the United States in terms of naval size. China has launched 17 destroyers and frigates over the past two years. The US will need more than six years to do the same. Russia and China already have hypersonic weapons in various forms. The latest hypersonic tests in the United States ended in failure, and the promised adoption of the first American hypersonic missiles by 2028 may not happen. The current crisis within the American military-industrial complex has erupted at the most inopportune moment for Washington. The US military machine is mired in the Ukrainian conflict and the Middle East wars. At the same time, there remains an urgent need to increase the production of weapons and at the same time compete with two opponents, Russia and China. The states have to literally be torn between all the challenges. Their example shows that even with the world's largest defense budget, maintaining a military empire and presence around the world is becoming unaffordable. And, most importantly, money alone cannot solve all problems, engineers from all over the world cannot be assembled, and technological chains with lost competencies cannot be set up. There is no way out of the current crisis yet. There are calls to split the military monopoly giants into smaller companies, but at the expense of their lobbyists they will try to avoid this. In the meantime, the number of problems is growing rapidly. And the moment quantity turns into quality, the position of the US military machine can become truly bad. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #7 ^ War is their business and business appears to be very good. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2024-05-01 14:51 |
| #6 Look, they knew back in Eisenhower's time that failing to dismantle the military-industrial complex after WWII would lead to them ruling us. Now, they do. They have enough power to start wars to drum up business for them. Ukraine has clearly lost, and yet we're going to deploy our own troops there to continue the war. Heck, the Federal Reserve can pay for it all with the click of a keyboard to add a few more zeroes on the debt owed. We can't afford it, but hey, they profit we pay, what a great deal (for them). |
| Posted by: Uleremp and Company7042 2024-05-01 13:09 |
| #5 Would you want to dive in a submarine, or fly in a fighter jet, with components from Harbor Freight? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2024-05-01 09:53 |
| #4 Short version: They're not in the business to make weapons, they're in the business to steal the money for the weapons. Important distinction. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2024-05-01 08:45 |
| #3 If you bought bolts, bushings, screws, nuts, etc. on line you wouldn't really know if they were all precise enough to work. Or made in China of off-brand metals. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2024-05-01 05:25 |
| #2 Translation from old Soviet: The Timur Ivanov story is going to grow into a major scandal re RF military/industrial complex. |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-05-01 04:56 |
| #1 The Pentagon is trapped by procurement rules and also by the requirements of precision technology. If you bought bolts, bushings, screws, nuts, etc. on line you wouldn't really know if they were all precise enough to work. In any event, the USA is now in the process of transitioning to a 'lots of smaller, unmanned, easy to hide' weapons and weapon platforms. Also, in some ways it is fortunate that the USA can't build submarines fast enough because there is a shortage of trained sailors. |
| Posted by: Lord Garth 2024-05-01 02:04 |