Over the last few decades, the US has meandered through a variety of military capability plans such as the original ‘2-1/2 wars’ plan[2] which was successively downgraded over the years and through various stages to the current ‘1 regional conflict and hold in another’[3]. The main factor in the successive downgrades was the recognition that the US was steadily losing military capability and, quite simply, couldn’t achieve the previous goals. In other words, the strategic situations and absolute requirements didn’t change but the US military capability did and the downgrades were simple rationalizations of the reality that our military was growing steadily less capable. This rationalization is absolute nonsense, of course. If you believe that your national security depends on being able to win 2 wars and hold in another, you don’t downgrade the requirement just because you haven’t got the ability to achieve it – you keep the requirement and figure out how to achieve it. You don’t rationalize away the requirement. But, I digress …
What all those plans (and planners) failed to recognize is that they were all fundamentally flawed. What was the fundamental flaw that rendered every plan invalid? It was – and still is ! – wartime production. It was the failure to recognize the fundamental truth that you don’t win a war with the capability you start with; you win a war with the capability you build during the war. We won WWII with a 6,000 ship Navy but we started with just 233 carriers and surface ships and most of those were old, obsolete, and unfit for modern (at the time) combat.
Yes, you might win a small, single state conflict against a hapless foe, as happened in Desert Storm, with just existing forces (note, however, that we could not assemble the Desert Storm force today !) but not a war or even a real regional conflict. Even existing forces may not be available. For example, the 22 Marine MEU/ARG was unable to deploy in response to an urgent request early in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.[4] The Marines, our crisis response force, was unable to respond to a crisis.
If you want to be able to win a full war, you need the capability to produce what you need in a very short time frame during the war … while the need is still relevant.
Thus, the previous goals stating a desire to be able to win X number of wars should have been a goal to be able to produce enough to win X number of wars.
Here’s a truism that planners fail to recognize:
The equipment you start the war with is, by definition, largely obsolete.
You need the ability to quickly produce modern, relevant, combat effective equipment. Again, those Pennsylvania class battleships that we were so proud of the day before the war were already obsolete on December 7th. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get some temporary, desperate service out of the existing equipment … you’ll likely have to! But, it means that the equipment you win the war with won’t be what you start the war with.
In WWII, the United States was not the ‘Existing Army of Democracy’, it was the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’, in recognition of the country’s vast industrial capacity which is what actually won WWII.
Frankly, our unceasing efforts to build large standing fleets of aircraft and ships are somewhat silly and ill-directed. A mindless pursuit of larger fleets is counterproductive beyond a point. We could have built 50 Pennsylvania battleships prior to the war but that would have just given us 50 obsolete BBs instead of the 15 or so we had and we would have had a lot less cash for the war. Every ship you build before a war is one more obsolete ship to start the war.
Existing equipment serves only to buy time for industry to gear up. Thus, we should be sizing our existing military not for winning a war(s) but for buying adequate time to allow industry to gear up. Of course, hand-in-hand with that is that we should be producing viable wartime production plans. It’s pointless to buy time if you still can’t produce what you need.
As we contemplate wartime production, consider this: today, we totally lack the rare earths needed for all of our sensors. We won't be able to make ANY sensors when war comes. Our computer chip supply is severely limited and we won't be able to make ... well ... anything when war comes because almost everything depends on chips. And so on. Worse, war inevitably brings on additional raw material shortages. I have severe doubts that we can build much of anything during a war. We simply lack too many critical items and raw materials.
If we'll need 6000 ships to win a war, the answer is not to build them before the war, it's to build our supply lines and industrial capacities while developing simple, easily produced, ready to go, ship/aircraft designs. We need F6F Hellcat designs ready to go, not some complex hybrid battlecruiser-helicopter ships with COGASDIESELWARP infinitely cross-connected propulsion drive that will fail every ten feet and that are going to soak up all our funding that should be going to supply line development.
Think I’m being overly dramatic about this? Consider this current example of wartime production problems (and we’re not even in a war!): having supplied a quarter of the US Stinger air-to-air missile inventory to Ukraine[5], we are now finding out that we can’t produce any replacements.[1]
Raytheon Technologies this week announced that it will take multiple years before the company is able to manufacture new Stinger missiles due to "a very limited stock of material.[1]
You don’t win a war with the Stingers you have on hand, you win with the tens of thousands of Stingers you produce during the war. Unfortunately, having no wartime production plan, we now have no capability to produce more Stingers.
Similarly, for Javelins,
The U.S. already has provided at least 7,000 Javelins, about one-third of its stockpile, to Ukraine, according to an analysis by Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies international security program.[5]
And these are just partial supplies to an ally (Ukraine is not really an ally, they’re more an enemy of my enemy). We’re not even in a war!
The Navy, and many naval observers, are focused on ever bigger and more multi-function ships such as the Burke flight 27 or whatever it’s at now, Ford, and Zumwalt. Aside from all the problems inherent in those programs, the worst characteristic, arguably, is that they cannot be produced during a war in any useful time frame. Even if they all worked perfectly, they’re unbuildable in any useful time frame. Throw in the inevitable shortages of rare earths, computer chips, etc. that would occur during war, and it’s quite likely that we can’t produce any new ships.
In contrast, recall that we produced 157 Fletchers during WWII (laid down and commissioned during the war). By comparison, it takes an average of about 4 years to produce one Burke.
One of the issues that we’ve all identified is the lack of shipyards in the US. Without a doubt, that’s a problem and we need more. However, the number of shipyards is a much lesser problem compared to raw materials, rare earths, computer chips, and other supply issues. We could have a hundred shipyards but without large, assured supplies of raw materials, rare earths, computer chips, etc. those shipyards couldn’t produce a single ship.
Summary
We need to stop our obsession with quantifying how many wars we want to win and how big we can make our fleet and armies and start planning for how we’ll produce our way to victory. We lack many critical raw materials and, worse, have no coherent plan to secure our raw material supply lines. Now, during peace, is when we should be building our industrial capacity and supply lines. We need to end our dependence on China for rare earths. It’s beyond insane to depend on your number one enemy for your number one raw material !
Hand in hand with production capacity is the need for simple, basic ship and aircraft designs that have been prototyped, proven, and are ready to go. All the raw materials and industrial capacity in the world is pointless if it takes us five years or more to produce a single ship due to its complexity. We need Hellcats and Liberty ships, not Fords, Zumwalts, Burke Flt 27s, and next-generation-warp-capable-invisible-drones.
Yes, we need a standing fleet, and a highly capable one, but its purpose is not to win a war but to hold the line until production can gear up.
____________________________________
[1]Newsmax website, “'Years' Before New Stingers Made”, Theodore Bunker, 27-Apr-2022,
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/raytheon-stinger-missiles-supply-defense/2022/04/27/id/1067459/
[2]This set as an objective the ability for the US military to simultaneously win two wars and while holding in another, smaller, regional conflict.
[3] This set as an objective the ability for the US military to win a single smaller, regional conflict while holding in another regional conflict.
[4]Defense One website, “‘We Should Have Been There’: Marine General Laments the State of the Amphib Navy”, Caitlin M. Kenney, 29-Apr-2022,
[5]Newsmax website, “Push to Arm Ukraine Putting Strain on US Weapons Stockpile”, 2-May-2022,
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/russian-ukraine-war-biden/2022/05/02/id/1068140/
Good points. Where is the push to get technical data rights and the tooling and manufacturing procedures as part of the procurement? Leader Follower is a forgotten acquisition strategy that no one wants to do anymore (or even knows what it means). There is no incentive to develop multiple sources or lines and to keep them open for long periods of time at low rates. At least then you will have the capability to produce more of what your correctly point out is obsolete. However, existing lines can be retooled much more easily than standing up new ones, and it can help provide a base of trained machinists. If you then also incentivize that new untrained workers have to be rotated in, trained and put on the line then you can help have a workforce that is available and used to training new folks. Heaven forbid you team wit the trade schools and run their students through the lines.
ReplyDelete"Where is the push to get technical data rights and the tooling and manufacturing procedures as part of the procurement?"
DeleteJust for the sake of discussion, do we (the Navy as consumer) have any reasonable expectation/right to acquire the data, tooling, and procedures? As an analogy, when you buy a car you don't get, or have any expectation of acquiring, the data and tooling for the car. Why would we expect the manufacturer to give up his hard learned/earned proprietary secrets as part of a sale to the Navy?
Of course, if we made the surrender of data and tooling part of the purchase in the solicitation for bids, then that's fair because the manufacturer has the opportunity to decide whether the sale is worth the loss of proprietary data and he can bid or not, as he sees fit.
Of course, if giving up proprietary data is part of the purchase then we should expect a massively more expensive cost to purchase since we're asking the manufacturer to give up all future advantages he has developed in the field and possibly be at a disadvantage in competing with other companies for future sales.
In my mind, this is not a straight forward issue with an easy answer/solution. The problem is compounded by the Navy's cavalier attitude towards protecting a company's data. I've seen multiple examples of the Navy revealing a company's data, costs, etc.
Any thoughts?
"Just for the sake of discussion, do we (the Navy as consumer) have any reasonable expectation/right to acquire the data, tooling, and procedures?"
DeleteSlightly different concern: I'm very concerned about the notion of relying on the builder to maintain the equipment. What happens during a war when stuff gets damaged in combat? Can we really order civilian contractors to go into a combat theater to work on it? And even if we could, is it moral to do it?
"Can we really order civilian contractors to go into a combat theater"
DeleteNo. Unless drafted, civilians are not under the authority of the military. However, this becomes blurred when the military contracts for civilian support. Civilians working on ships, for example, are subject to various laws and regulations in the Geneva Convention, UNCLOS, USMCJ, etc. The presence of civilians on ships of war raises legal questions about the status of the ship and its rights as a warship, the status of the civilians who risk their non-combatant rights (if captured, could be tried as spies, pirates, etc.), and general violations of the various rules/laws of war. I'm not a lawyer so I can't go any deeper than that.
Suffice it to say that it's a poor, though increasingly necessary practice brought about by our embrace of technology too complex to train regular sailors for and our desire not to 'demean' ourselves by doing routine maintenance and support work.
"Suffice it to say that it's a poor, though increasingly necessary practice"
DeleteI wonder if it might make sense to make the civilian contractors naval reservists, so that they could still have their civilian career but activate during wartime to avoid legal problems.
-- Bob Nagele
"make the civilian contractors naval reservists"
DeleteWell, we can't 'make' them and I suspect that few would voluntarily do so.
CNO
Delete"Well, we can't 'make' them and I suspect that few would voluntarily do so."
That is what press gangs are for.
The steam Navy could learn a few things from
the sail Navy.
"Well, we can't 'make' them and I suspect that few would voluntarily do so."
DeleteObviously I oversimplified, or perhaps the word "make" does too much work here. I envision a specialized reserve status covering the duties they'd normally do as civilians. Wouldn't give the ship's captain the right to order them to paint the hull or whatever. Plus of course some additional compensation. Perhaps it might even be a condition of getting the military contract.
Primarily a way of ensuring legal status during wartime.
If they won't do it, that also suggests that they won't agree to work in a war zone, which of course is the time when their work would be most critical. In that case, what's the point of hiring them?
-- Bob Nagele
"what's the point of hiring them?"
DeleteIndeed. The habitual use of contractors creates a dangerous dependency that robs us of the ability to maintain our own equipment. It also makes us institutionally lazy. We contract instead of doing the hard work of training ourselves to do our own maintenance.
As you say you can put anything you want in the solicitation. For example, Government Data Rights are in most contracts and are often bid as no charge by contractors because they see it as a competitive advantage and the Government doesn't build anything. Furthermore, in 230 years of acquisition I have not run into one case of a contractor citing copyright or patent exclusions. The proprietary claim is just a smoke screen to keep the money flowing.
DeleteAs far as requesting physical tooling remember that on Cost Plus contracts, which most design development contracts are, the Government owns EVERYTHING developed or purchased. You merely have to have a PMO that knows what they are doing to get it. So, at the least if the drill press was capitalized and only used on the contract, the settings or CNC code belongs to the Government. So the most the Gov has to do is buy the same drill press and apply the code.
"Government Data Rights are in most contracts"
DeletePerhaps we are talking about two different things? The GAO annual reports contain frequent references to the Navy being unable to obtain proprietary data on equipment. A specific example is the Freedom class radar which the Navy wanted to model and simulate but were unable to obtain the manufacturer's data.
GAO has cited repeated examples of specific pieces of equipment the Navy would like to have considered for purchase but had to bypass due to unwillingness on the part of the manufacturer to provide proprietary data.
I think we are talking about the same thing. I believe the GAO cases are either for items previously developed on the company's own dime and the Gov PMO didn't recognize in the proposal that contractor was excluding that from the Gov Rights. Ignorant or untrained people can always make uninformed decisions. On a Cost Plus Contract the presumption is the paying entity owns everything unless it is clearly agreed to be separate. With a Gov Right Clause even on Fixed Price Contract, the Gov is purchasing the right to use that information.
DeleteThe case you cited can be slightly different. If the Government did not put modelling data in the CDRL package then it is not purchased. Modelling data and manufacturing data are often different.
Again the smoke screens are incentivized to keep the contractor in the money. But the Gov has the rights and ability to get data they ask for, they have to know what to ask for and enforce their rights, otherwise you get taken to the cleaners.
As we have discussed before, the Government Acquisition knowledge base is seriously depleted. The ones left in charge don't know how to do their jobs and are there only to get cushy retirement jobs.
I can't speak to where the fault lies. I have no idea. What is apparent from the GAO reports is that the end result is that the govt/Navy is being excluded (or excluding themselves) from a significant portion of the world arms market due to inability to obtain manufacturers data.
DeleteAlso, to be clear, the data I and the Navy are referring to is performance data and source code which are required for modeling and simulation. As you know, the Navy is, misguidedly, attempting to forego actual field testing in favor of simulations. They cannot do this without the manufacturer's data.
My feeling from reading the GAO reports is that around 25% of the market is unavailable to the Navy due to data transference issues. If I'm anywhere near correct, that's a significant limitation.
"Suffice it to say that it's a poor, though increasingly necessary practice brought about by our embrace of technology too complex to train regular sailors for and our desire not to 'demean' ourselves by doing routine maintenance and support work."
DeleteThe fascination at the highest levels with minimizing manning, leaving ships too short of manpower to perform regular maintenance, much less damage control, cannot help the situation.
Production capacity, lack of. Lockheed saying they expect it to take two years to nearly double output of the Javelin ant-tank missile from current 2,100 to 4,000.
ReplyDeleteHas anyone ever done a study on how we ramped up production in WW2 compared to now? Did we start wartime production 1, 2 or 3 years before the Japanese attacked or did we do it in stages?
ReplyDeleteClosest I can think of are the Green Book series published by the US Army in the years directly after world war 2. There are several that get deep into the details of defense procurement and the planning that went into it, pre-war and during.
Deletehttps://history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/usaww2.html
The other major issue is that the US and west openly promotes deindustrialisation - ie offshoring manufacturing to overseas locations.
ReplyDeleteIn 1970 Harvard rated Australia as a diversified economy. It is now counted as a limited complexity economy - literally the only productive industries left are agriculture, mining and building houses (service economy doesn't produce anything - coffees and wiping old people butts doesn't count). According to the Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity, Australia's economic diversification and is on par with Uganda, Senegal or Pakistan. Manufacturing is nearly dead including such basics as oil refining, fertilizer production let alone manufacturer of sophisticated products.
So in a war Australia might have a "potent" on paper military force but it's inability to produce spares or new equipment or even refuel it's military means it quickly degrades to nothing.
(I did write to Australian politicians about this and received virtually no responses. They talk about combating China whilst allowing Chinese and others to take over industry, land, ports etc or allowing Australian companies to offshore to those countries.)
The whole current western defence model is based on deterrence which is increasingly of dubious value.
Excellent comment.
DeleteWe can't build armored fighting or infantry vehicles during a war now. Period. Much less arty. The Marines, leaving aside BAE's failure to design the ACV so it actually works, are constrained by an ultra low rate facility that can't be expanded.
ReplyDeleteThe Army TACOM still owns the tank plant, but it had not made a hull in 30 years and it is mostly glorified federal employee make work offices and lab spaces now. Auto plants no longer have massive overbuilt machines that can be repurposed quickly into new lines, they are complex custom lines that require three years lead time for products from Germany and China.
Plus Taiwan is not going to be sending us chips, starting the day the war starts.
There are so few machine shops left we can't even make machine tools any more in the US.
We emptied out many of our forward stocks for the forever war, then issued contracts to refill them, only to divert most of the stocks to 'joint' forward staging areas in Israel. Who will never let us retrieve them.
"leaving aside BAE's failure to design the ACV so it actually works"
DeleteI get that you're frustrated and offering a bit of a rant. That's fine. I've been known to do that, too. However, let's be fair and objective. The ACV problems are not 100% the manufacturer's.
Let's start with the purchase requirements which were generated wholly by the Marines. The specs are challenging, to say the least. That makes producing a satisfactory product very difficult.
Then, there's the design frequency. When was the last ACV type vehicle designed? The AAV was designed in the late 1960's. Even the aborted AFV was designed in the mid-1970's to early 1980's. That was 40-60 years ago!!!!!
The engineers and designers who were asked to design the ACV had never done so before because the Marines had no produced a new vehicle in decades. The engineers had no experience. What do you expect from people who have never performed a task before?
Given the above, the ACV works fairly well. Yes, it has some teething problems but so does every major project of any kind. The ACV DOES WORK. It can transport troops through the water to a shore - which is its main job. There are peripheral problems and some questionable design features but it does function.
Let's also note that had the Marines requested a few prototypes and then thoroughly tested them before committing to production, we'd have had time to find and eliminate the various problems. Instead, the Marines pushed hard to get production going before the vehicles could be thoroughly tested.
Had the Marines pursued a more reasonable program of new vehicles on a regular basis, with prototypes leading the way and feeding back into design, we'd have fewer problems with the ACV today.
So, let's be fair with the criticism.
Rant aside, do you have any analysis or solutions to offer?
DeleteChange the tax law on options so that grants only vest 10 years after the exec completely leaves the corporation.
DeletePlace a 5% environmental damage duty on all Chinese and Indian produced goods, and an additional 5% religious oppression duty on Chinese goods.
Ban all retired officers from working directly or indirectly for defense contractors. Fire all defense SES and their family members.
This is actually a terrifying post. Highlighting our lack of resources and ability to build things quickly, if at all, is the large, mostly invisible base of the iceberg that is our military train wreck/dumpster fire. I dont believe that the Arsenal of Democracy will be anything more than a one and done historical footnote. Theres no sense of urgency to rebuild or restructure our capabilities. That Arsenal started working years before we went to war, and was already producing significant materials before Dec 7th. Today, I dont see any push towards any expanded capabilities. Anyone trying a Kaiser-esque project would probably be mired in impact statements and red tape for longer than WWII lasted before ground was even broken... If a suitable shipyard site could even be found since so much prime, heavy industrial acreage has been turned into waterfront developments. Of course, our lack of a heavy industrial base means that we would struggle to supply a shipyard that had, say, a 30 destroyer a year order, even if we could build the ships that quickly. What if we had a few yards with orders like that?? Maybe we DO have the ability to produce a few hundred thousand tons of steel a year for shipbuilding (heaven forbid that it needs to be thick or armor-spec), but Im not convinced we do. I dont think we have the base industry for wartime production anymore, and we certainly dont have anyone looking to change that, or the sense of urgency needed to do so.
ReplyDelete"Today, I dont see any push towards any expanded capabilities"
DeleteThe Trump administration, recognizing the strategic folly of depending on China, initiated a rare earth independence program. I don't know what has become of that effort.
Trump initiated similar efforts for a few other raw materials.
Of course, that's only a drop in the ocean of what we need to do but it was a beginning.
"This is actually a terrifying post. "
DeleteSo, I should have saved it for Halloween?
Well halla-freakin'-lujah! Thanks for saying the unsayable! In simple terms, the purpose of war is to break the other guy's stuff. So he who can produce more stuff than the other guy probably wins a war that lasts more than 2 weeks or so. This leads neatly to a couple of your points. 1. Simpler is better. You can make more simple things faster...your Liberty ship example. 2. Supply chain is the name of the game. Who do you bet on...US with maybe a 6 viable shipyards building a handful of fantastically complex ships full of wonderfulness (the survivability of which, in combat is an...ummm..open question). Or China, which pumps out 15,000 TEU container ships like popcorn? Further, in WW2, WE owned the supply chain. This leads neatly, again, to the chip thing. China rakes in Taiwan in about 2 weeks and POOF!, there goes TSMC, one of the few sources of high end chips, on which our whiz-bang stuff depends.
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, I see a few weapons full of "wonderfulness", but not much interest in developing the capability to produce stuff needed to win a protracted conflict.
I'm bummed...
First, excellent post.
ReplyDeleteA peer or even near-peer war is a war of industrial production: USA and JAP had similar "quality", but USA could win 20:1 when it came to "quantity", which meant JAP never really had any hope.
But...
If, as you say, "You need the ability to quickly produce modern, relevant, combat effective equipment", and I 100% agree, can America win such a race with China?
Is it possible to out-produce them?
"Is it possible to out-produce them?"
DeleteAs noted in the post, production is not a matter of number of factories or number of workers - it's about raw material supply lines. China would face the same type of problems we do. They can't build a single ship without computer chips (they have no semiconductor factories), and other critical raw materials. All the critical resources they import (and, to be honest, I don't know what those are) are potentially crippling vulnerabilities. We have more friends in the world that we can trade with to obtain what we lack than they do. That's a strength of ours and a weakness of theirs.
We need to build up and secure our raw materials while cutting off and isolating theirs.
Can we out produce them? Yes, but it requires a national strategic raw materials plan which, currently, we sorely lack.
Very good points.
DeleteAnd I can't help but think that USA lost a huge opportunity when it failed to separate Russia (which has lots of oil/gas) from China (which will need lots of oil/gas in war).
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no need for us to turn Russia into an enemy. Perhaps we couldn't have turned them into friends (we did with Japan and Germany, though) but we certainly could have kept them neutral. We should have immediately disbanded NATO, brought them into trade partnerships with us and Europe, provided some economic assistance, etc.
DeleteToday's Russia is a problem of our own making.
"They can't build a single ship without computer chips (they have no semiconductor factories),"
DeleteNot quite. They actually do have semiconductor factories. They're just a generation or two behind ours.
"When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no need for us to turn Russia into an enemy."
DeleteThis is certainly a plausible theory, and it might be true. But since we never ran the experiment, we don't really know.
As an alternative view, I recently read an interview with an eminent historian of Russia. Regrettably, his name escapes me, although I do recall that he wrote one of the major biographies of Stalin. He disagrees. At risk of oversimplifying, his view is that, for this to happen, Russia would have had to stop being Russia.
A little more depth: If you look back through Russian history, for hundreds of years (nearly a thousand years) Russia has almost always been:
- internally autocratic, often tyrannical and dictatorial, and oppressive, and ..
- externally expansionist, aggressive, violent, and angry and resentful towards the West.
So they would have had to reverse all that in order for your theory to be correct. An alternative theory might be that they would attempt to rebuild their empire when their strength returned.
Which theory is true? Who knows? I sure don't
-- Bob Nagele
"they would have had to reverse all that in order for your theory to be correct."
DeleteIf you asked a Japanese historian before WWII, they would have said similar things and that Japan could never be friends with the West.
One of the theories of trade with dubious friends is that if you closely entwine them with trade, it becomes in their best interest not to antagonize you. This is what China has done to us. At the worst, we could have done that with Russia after the collapse. Not a friend but not an enemy.
Even now, once Putin dies, we'll have another opportunity to engage with Russia. Maybe this time we should avail ourselves of it. It can't turn out any worse than what we've been doing !
Bob, Russia would have kept doing what Russia does but that could have been contained by letting them exert influence over their own periphery. Note they do this anyhow - eg their influence in Azerbaijan-Armenia, intervention in Kazakhstan etc. Everyone from Kissinger and Kennan to current CIA Director William Burns warned against expanding NATO especially into Ukraine or Georgia (or even further).
DeleteUkraine and Georgia weren't key to NATO. Countries can apply to join NATO but NATO reserves right to say no.
US started working at undermining Russian deterrent in early 2000s with withdrawal from ABM (this before any Russian rearmament occurred)
I know people call NATO defensive but it has not been defensive since 1990s, when it first started conducting military operations outside of NATO territories. Some of these operations were actually contrary to NATO security operations eg Libya or support of jihadis in Syria.
Not justifying Russia's behaviour. But US and NATO are responsible for alienating Russia from 1999s onward. Russia could have been contained in its own play ground.
(Any defence of Ukrainian democracy is also a cruel joke given US etc supported recentish military coups in Egypt and Tunisia and to some degree Thailand).
Let's leave the geopolitics for other blogs. Thanks.
DeleteWhile I looked satellite photos of China's under construction type 003 carrier, most shocking parts were a much larger under construction container ship next to it. Last year, China's military ships launched (include export to Thailand, Pakistan, ..etc.) was ~0.53% of its total launchment.
ReplyDeleteDuring wartime, these civilian ship building capacity can be converted to build naval ships.