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Bud Lite does not mix with the various types of trans sexual types to the tune of $3 billion of wiped a way value. When you have a winning combination it does not pay to add more froth. Fire them all.+++
New Details Emerge Over ‘Mistake’ That Led To Bud Light’s Paid Marketing Engagement With Trans Influencer. Read
By Ryan Saavedra
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Those who are entering the run for the GOP 2024 nomination, ( i believe, at this point there are 5 such candidates,) they are likely to all lose and allow Trump to get the nomination. They will spend a lot of money, probably wind up attacking each other and end by weakening all the candidates, This is what the Democrats are hoping for. The GOP need to return to the back room, select the best candidate, forget democracy and take The White House.
I seriously doubt they can agree to this because they are driven by huge egos and that works against something called unity and winning.
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Joe confused once again.
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By The First
Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was on full-display this week while touring Ireland and Northern Ireland, telling a group of students that the Oval Office was situated inside the US Capitol complex.
“As you walk into my office in the Oval Office in the United States Capitol…” stammered the President.
Sen. Sam Nunn helped our son get an intern position with Dr Tony Cordesman of CSIS one of DC's better think tanks.
Many of our major cities are now run by black administrators (Mayors, police chiefs and city commissioners and they have all gone to hell.) Now the Pentagon is increasingly run by top black generals and it too as gone to hell. etc. Call me a racist but this is a fact.
Education is liberation.
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WTH: Where has US military power gone?
A depressing conversation about the not-so-superpower with
Seth Jones
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
Three things from a really outstanding pod this week with CSIS’ Seth Jones:
Absent the war in Ukraine, the United States wouldn’t have realized it is seriously unprepared prepared for a conflict with China.
The U.S. government has talked a good game on China, but we don’t have the industrial base to deter, let alone defend against China.
The defense budget can’t begin to cover what we need to do.
Americans have gotten used to thinking about the United States as a superpower. But the United States hasn’t faced a superpower military in a very, very long time. For that reason, the defense industrial base has atrophied to the point that even when the Pentagon realizes things have gone seriously wrong, and they can’t produce enough munitions to stand up to Beijing for more than a week, the problem will be very difficult to fix.
Absent the war in Ukraine and the demands on U.S. stockpiles, those revelations about supply chain problems and a shrunken defense industrial based may have gone unlearned. Now before our readers retort with an “aha - that’s why we shouldn’t be using up our precious weapons on Ukraine,” — that’s not right. The munitions we’re supplying to Ukraine aren’t what we would use in a fight over Taiwan unless we had already lost the battle to keep Chinese troops off the island in the first place. We’re not sending subs to Ukraine, or long range fighters, or bombers.
So now that the Biden administration has woken up and smelled the coffee, what’s being done to rev up the defense base? Precious little, that’s what. The defense budget request the Biden administration submitted to Congress doesn’t begin to address serious structural problems in defense manufacturing. Nor does it begin to address the peacetime procurement habits in place at DoD, better likened to buying things from Amazon than a plan to deter the a formidable and growing adversary. And there’s another problem too: Critical parts of the American defense supply chain are in… you guessed it… China. Is there a plan to deal with that? Not a serious one.
As Seth explains, “My general suggestion is all of us collectively have to hold the administration's feet to the fire on this issue, because the US will be in a very bad position vis-a-vis China if it does not have a defense industrial base that can fight or deter a protracted war. And that means we can have a lot of national defense strategies that say we're prioritizing China. But if we don't have a defense industrial base that actually shows that, then these are just words. These are hollow words.”
If you’re nervous reading this summary, go and listen to the podcast. It’ll set your hair on fire.
HIGHLIGHTS
Are we ready for a conflict with China?
Well, I think the challenge is right now that the US has certainly talked an important game about China as being the primary threat, what the Department of Defense calls the pacing threat. And so, it is at the front of the National Defense Strategy.
Do we have an industrial base ready for conflict with China?
SJ: The challenges we see with the industrial base is it is an industrial base that is largely prepared for a peacetime environment, or at least an environment that is better suited to the counter-terrorism operations that we were involved in running, including I was involved in running when I was in the government for the last 20 years.
CSIS, MIT and the US Naval War College in Rhode Island ran a China war game. What did it tell you?
SJ: We did 24 different iterations of a war game. And one of the interesting things that resulted [was] that we ran out of some of those key precision guided munitions like LRASMs in roughly a week in virtually all of the iterations. What it means is we just don't have sufficient numbers of key munitions pre-positioned in important locations. And if you don't have those numbers right now, it raises a lot of questions, and they're not very good ones, or at least very good answers about how much we can actually deter a Chinese invasion if we don't have what we need to fight a war.
So we’ve talked a good game, but…
SJ: But the reality has been that it is one thing to talk about balancing China, competing with China, and then preparing for war or deterrents against China. It's a very different issue to get one's defense industrial base in a position where it can fight a sustained conflict.
So in some ways, the Ukraine war has woken us up to serious defense problems…
SJ: [T]he war in Ukraine was a very clear reminder. We didn't necessarily need this reminder, but apparently for most policy makers, they did need this reminder that a conventional war is a possibility We see that with the Russian invasion, that a conventional war may be protracted, and that what a protracted conventional war looks like is you run through large amounts of munitions, that equipment, including weapon systems break down, you need spare parts, stuff gets destroyed. So this is a very different from dropping some JDAMs in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is about the need for long-range strike, integrated air defense, long-range fires. So this is where we've seen the importance, not just of HIMARS and the weapons systems, but all the munitions that go into them.
And it's even more the case in the Indo-Pacific where the Chinese do have a lot of power projection capabilities that will push US forces far outside of that anti-access air denial bubble. And so there's a lot of reliance in that kind of context, in that kind of war setting, on longer range missiles that would strike Chinese targets, amphibious ships, airplanes, bringing in PLA soldiers into Taiwan as part of an invasion.
But we’ve been talking China for years!
SJ: And we talked a big game, but we had not fully prepared. I think in the Indo-Pacific, what I think really started, at least for me, and my discussions with Senior Department of Defense officials started to change, is that when the timeline start shrinking in China and a range of US officials start arguing that it's not inconceivable that a war happens much sooner than any of us anticipated from a few years ago, that 2025, 2026, 2027, 2024, that if those are your timelines and we don't have the munitions in place right now, we have a big problem. So I think that the war in Ukraine was a big reminder of what a protracted conventional war, and that's the arena we're in right now, what it looks like and what's required.
It’s an axiom that generals prepare to fight the last war, but apparently the defense industrial complex does too…?
SJ: And it's not just the defense companies, I think in general it's the entire Department of Defense acquisition system, and it's the state department's foreign military sales and ITAR, the technology sharing, they're all on a peacetime footing. And what does that mean in practice? It means that our services have not generally bought munitions for a protracted war. So the O [operational] plans are war plans that our combatant commands put together and that are run through the joint staff. Those O plans are often short duration, not protracted ones. So I think the problem is much deeper even than just defense companies. It's how the Department of Defense has tried to connect its O plans, its operational plans to the acquisition system, and then just the challenges in providing some of our allies and partners, some of these critical weapon systems is that we're really slow. So I think there are a range of challenges that have all come to light in the last couple of months with the war in Ukraine.
Tell us about the problems with procurement?
SJ: So some of your long range precision weapons systems like JASSMs and LRASMs, which you absolutely need for both deterrence and war fighting, that they are what the Department of Defense calls bill payers. So what generally happens is the services may say they're going to buy a certain number of them in a given fiscal year. And what happens with a lot of munitions by the end of the fiscal year is they decide, "Well, we're not going to fight a war this year. We may not fight one next year. We are going to instead take that money and push it to programs X, Y, or Z."
So munitions have become a bill payer, and if you're a defense company, if that's kind of the state of munitions, that every year the services end up yanking parts of the funding, these are single year contract for many of them, not multi-year, no incentive to build the numbers that really go along with some of the operational plans or O plans. And then if you look at the timeline it takes to build some of these missile systems, you can't do just-in-time for Javelin, which is about almost 30 months of production. That's just to get the first Javelins produced. Tomahawk Block IVs are about 25 months of lead time from beginning to end just for the initial deliveries of those tomahawks. JASSMs and LRASMs are both just under 25 months to produce, same thing with PAC-2, PAC-3 missiles just under two years for those.
We’re also dependent on China for some critical parts of our weapons supply chain, right?
SJ: We're dependent in part on China, but again, it's bigger than that. If you look at rare earth metals, China has a near monopoly on rare earth metals. China dominates the advanced battery supply chain across the globe. That includes things like lithium hydroxide cells, electrolyte, lithium carbonate, anodes, cathodes. If you look at broader cast products, China produces more cast products than the next nine countries combined, including five times more than the US. And cast products, large cast and forge products are utilized in defense systems, machine tools, manufacturing systems which are critical for Department of Defense weapons systems. So if you take a step back, there's a lot of vulnerability in the broader industrial base in some areas with which China has either a near monopoly on rare earth metals, energetics, lithium hydroxide, anodes, cathodes. It's a situation where the US has to figure out a better way of either producing them itself or finding other partners, trusted partners and allies that have access to them.
The war in Ukraine has helped energize the industrial base, then?
SJ: The war in Ukraine has definitely energized the industrial base. I think what's less clear is how long that energy stays with us. I think it's certainly clear, and I think people do have to realize when we're talking about giving assistance to Ukraine, and we're talking about producing Javelins, Stinger anti-aircraft systems, any of the 155 millimeter howitzers or artillery rounds, Excalibur, Precision guided, any of the armored personnel vehicles or tanks or harpoon, coastal defense systems, these are produced by American or Allied and partner countries. They are produced by General Dynamics, by Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, by Boeing in some cases with harpoon. And they're being built in most cases in the United States. So these are certainly helpful for jobs for Lima, Ohio produces some of the key tanks. A lot of the Rock Island arsenal has produced 105 millimeter howitzers. A lot of the Boeing is produced on the west coast of the United States. So these are going to American jobs.
But I want to come back to the timing. If the war in Ukraine were to slow down, we were to get some kind of a stalemate. And there was, if not a negotiated settlement, which I think is unlikely. But if you're to get a pause in the war, it would probably still raise questions among some policy makers about whether we need to continue funding the industrial base to the degree that we're funding right now.
And the challenge, frankly, it's different about that pre-World War II period to today, is you could take some of the manufacturing automobile plants and turn them into factories that produced aircraft. The challenge with some of the sophisticated weapon systems we see today with very significant, very complicated electronics stealth technology for some of our advanced aircraft like F 35s, is it's going to take a lot more to shift our industrial base in a very different technological environment. So this really gets back to starting to internalize what it really is required to deter and war fight. And again, the Russians went into the war in Ukraine hoping it would be short. It's been a year, and the industrial base of both sides have been heavily taxed. And I think that's a real good evidence for us today of where we need to move in the Pacific.
What are the lessons learned for us vis à vis Taiwan?
SJ: I think there are two critical components. One is to get Taiwan what it needs to deny China an invasion. And frankly, if denial fails, then to punish the Chinese. So I think we should be thinking about this both in terms of deterrents by denial, but also deterrents by punishment. What does that translate into? That translates into providing the Taiwanese from a weapon systems perspective, with I think a key artillery, harpoon, missiles, with GMLRS and with a range of other weapons systems that they would need to fight a air, sea and land battle with China. And there's a second issue too, which is the US then also needs the right kind of munitions and capabilities including platforms to deter and fight as well. So that is enough LRASMs, JASSMs and other longer range weapon systems. Not just enough stockpiles, but prepositioned in the right locations in Kadina, in Japan or in Australia. And it's not really an and, it's an or. It's not an or, it's an and. So we need to preposition in multiple places.
Do we have a defense budget that’s going to answer the need to preposition in Taiwan and the Pacific and deter the Chinese?
SJ: The defense budget is going to have to be pretty big because we're talking about state-based competition. We have a Russia that has invaded a neighbor Ukraine, and then we have China that is building significant capabilities. And as we've already seen, is building power projection. We've seen Chinese interest in the Solomon Islands. They continue to build in Djibouti. They've got a port access on the west coast of Africa. Now we've seen Chinese interest in port access in the United Arab Emirates.
This all suggests not just a much bigger Chinese military, but one that is projecting power globally. And then when you add on to that all the other things China's been doing globally as well in terms of belt and road initiative, and it's some of its other global activity. It's trying to be a global power. And so, that means in order to counter that the US defense budget, because much of this is military competition, if not all, it's going to have to be significant.
Now, I would say regardless of whether you're talking about a big increase or even a rough flat lining with the defense budget, I think at the very least there has to be a reprioritization of how the department is spending its money. We cannot be, in my view, in a position where we do not have sufficient weapon systems and munitions to fight a war in China. Currently, we're out in a week or so of some key munitions. We cannot be in that position. At the very least, you're going to have to make some tough calls. Some programs are going to have to be shelved for the time being, and you're going to have to focus on getting some of your key munitions up, stockpiled and put in the right places. And I think you're going to have to really prioritize your B21, some of your key submarines and a few other assets that are going to be important in this kind of a competition. At the very least, I don't know quite what the defense budget looks like in the end. I haven't run the numbers, but it's got to be pretty big.
You got to have the services and everybody else making changes. I worry that US isn't going to be able to do this quickly, but it can do it. It can do it if it sets its mind to it. We saw it in the late 1930s that the US can do it. Whether we will do it, we'll have to see.
My general suggestion is all of us collectively have to hold the administration's feet to the fire on this issue, because the US will be in a very bad position vis-a-vis China if it does not have a defense industrial base that can fight or deter a protracted war. And that means we can have a lot of national defense strategies that say we're prioritizing China. But if we don't have a defense industrial base that actually shows that, then these are just words. These are hollow words.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
The U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China (Seth Jones, CSIS, February 22 2023)
Ukrainian Innovation in a War of Attrition (Seth Jones, Riley McCabe, Alexander Palmer, CSIS, February 27 2023)
Arms manufacturers struggle to supply Ukraine with enough ammunition [Included in news clip] (PBS News, March 10 2023)
U.S. Weapons Pledge to Ukraine Exposes Cracks in Defense Supply Chain (WSJ, February 25 2023)
Reviving the Arsenal of Democracy: Steps for Surging Defense Industrial Capacity (Cynthia Cook, CSIS, March 14 2023)
The West is struggling to forge a new arsenal of democracy (The Economist, February 19th 2023)
Catch Up: China Is Getting New Weapons Faster Than the U.S. (National Interest, July 7 2022)
Affordable Mass: The Need for a Cost-Effective PGM Mix for Great Power Conflict (Mitchell Institute, 2021)
US tells Ukraine it won’t send long-range missiles because it has few to spare (Politico, February 13 2023)
US focuses on training Ukrainian troops to use less ammo (Politico, February 14 2023)
Four steps the Pentagon can take to fix the munitions industrial base (The Hill, October 17 2022)
How Free Enterprise Saved Civilization (Forbes, 2012)
Graph on defense sector consolidation over time from War on the Rocks
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