The Army is ramping up its munition production, both to continue supporting partners such as Ukraine and Israel and for the US's own dwindling stockpiles.
@Ulara the US and pretty much everyone in the world became spoiled about how warfare should be fought. Probably there’s also the memory of WW2 when entire cities were leveled to 0 in bombings and shelling, so the alternative of carrying an urban fight became more desirable. Despite this, Russia seems to not care about this fact and actually bomb and level entire cities and other settlements to the ground instead.
The US knew that our small arms ammunition stockpiles were inadequate after the second battle of Fallujah. I don’t think they realized that extended all the way to our heavier munitions.
The other problem is that our European allies have woefully inadequate stockpiles of everything. If a shooting war broke out they would be a liability. France and Britain proved this during their air campaign over Libya.
The US just doesn’t have an artillery-centered military like Russia and Ukraine though. It’s very unlikely they’d be in a war like this. It makes me wonder if the headline is overstating things and that ramping up production is primarily about topping up allies. Another interesting thing about this war is that air denial has been more significant than air superiority. Russia should (on paper at least) have been able to establish air superiority and they just haven’t been able to at any point. I’m curious how much that is seen as a new reality of warfare and whether this represents a slight change in US strategy, which is focused so heavily on air power and air superiority.
We don’t but no nation except the US is capable of SEAD operations that allow uncontested control of the air. Against a near peer we might not be able to suppress air defenses across all fronts and would need to fall back on artillery.
Another reason is that it is much more interesting and impressive to create some super advanced and costly tech instead of maintaining huge stockpiles of simpler materiel.
@Ulara well, it’s more effective to have one shot-one strike than to try getting collateral damage all the way until you hit the target, so getting high-tech in normal weapons does make sense from this point of view.
@Ulara the US and pretty much everyone in the world became spoiled about how warfare should be fought. Probably there’s also the memory of WW2 when entire cities were leveled to 0 in bombings and shelling, so the alternative of carrying an urban fight became more desirable. Despite this, Russia seems to not care about this fact and actually bomb and level entire cities and other settlements to the ground instead.
The US knew that our small arms ammunition stockpiles were inadequate after the second battle of Fallujah. I don’t think they realized that extended all the way to our heavier munitions.
The other problem is that our European allies have woefully inadequate stockpiles of everything. If a shooting war broke out they would be a liability. France and Britain proved this during their air campaign over Libya.
The US just doesn’t have an artillery-centered military like Russia and Ukraine though. It’s very unlikely they’d be in a war like this. It makes me wonder if the headline is overstating things and that ramping up production is primarily about topping up allies. Another interesting thing about this war is that air denial has been more significant than air superiority. Russia should (on paper at least) have been able to establish air superiority and they just haven’t been able to at any point. I’m curious how much that is seen as a new reality of warfare and whether this represents a slight change in US strategy, which is focused so heavily on air power and air superiority.
We don’t but no nation except the US is capable of SEAD operations that allow uncontested control of the air. Against a near peer we might not be able to suppress air defenses across all fronts and would need to fall back on artillery.
Another reason is that it is much more interesting and impressive to create some super advanced and costly tech instead of maintaining huge stockpiles of simpler materiel.
@Ulara well, it’s more effective to have one shot-one strike than to try getting collateral damage all the way until you hit the target, so getting high-tech in normal weapons does make sense from this point of view.