8 thoughts on “Estimates of Current Inventories of Patriot and THAAD Interceptors”

  1. baffling

    makes no sense that we went into a war without a plan to restock munitions that would be needed for the war. incompetence from the top.

    on another note, you can use senators who are leaving office in January as a proxy for right and wrong decisions. seems the only republicans going against Todd blanche to run justice are Cornyn and Tillis. note they are leaving office. trump still seems to have a stranglehold on the rest of the republicans, who cannot seem to confront trump and do the right thing. the Republican Party has no values or moral strength. trump was right, his party would support him if he shot a man dead on 5th avenue in broad daylight, no questions asked.

  3. Macroduck

    It has been obvious at least since Ukraine drove the Russian navy out of Crimean waters that naval warfare has changed. It has been obvious since Russia and Ukraine entered into a drone slug-fest that land warfare has changed. The U.S. has been slow in responding. It doesn’t help that our war-criminal-in-chief thinks a giant floating target with his name on it is a good way to spend our military budget.

    There is, however, a bigger problem. Since the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “The Influence of Seapower on History” in 1890, U.S. military doctrine has recognized the need to prepare for two simultaneous wars. A two-and-a-half war doctrine was formally adopted as part of the Kennedy/McNamara Flexible Response doctrine and has with us ever since.

    It’s not clear from the war criminal’s gassy 2026 “National Defense Strategy ” document whether we still maintain a 2 1/2 war doctrine. That’s a problem – we don’t actually have what can be identfied as a doctrine, just some slogans. What is clear from the quagmire in the Persian Gulf is that we are absolutely unable to sustain even the 1/2 part of the 2 1/2 war doctrine.

    And everybody knows it. The joke about Russia is that it has the second best military in Ukraine. What we’re seeing is that, for strategic purposes, the U.S. has the second best military in the Persian Gulf. In the 2 1/2 war doctrine, Iran should be the “brushfire war” we might need to fight while also taking on Russia and China, but we’re runing out of ammo fighting the brushfire.

    Know who isn’t running out of ammo? Iran.

    The Iran war is stupid and criminal, but the problem with our war-fighting doctrine goes well beyond the stupid 2026 NDS document. We had trouble with our dumb munitions stockpile during Shrub’s war in Iraq. Drone swarms turn cruising the Persian Gulf into suicide by attrition. Hypersonic missiles – which Russia has and China has, but we mostly don’t – hypersonic missiles quite possibly make big naval vessels obsolete, and a big navy is a big part of our current structure. The war criminal wants a 50% increase in what is by far the world’s largest military budget, but we have absolutely no credible plan for dealing with the modern battlefield, as revealed un Ukraine and Iran.

    Remember all those black, female, woke officers the war criminal and his alcoholic side-kick have driven out of the military? Sure, they were part of the problem, but also our best uniformed hope for thinking our way out of it. Testosterone treatments won’t hack it.

  4. Macroduck

    OK, one last thing. The absolute superiority of U.S. and Soviet conventional forces, and colonial forces before that, induced the evolution of unconventional war fighting. Vietnam is, for the U.S., the best known example, but African wars of independence, drug wars in Central and South America, heck, anything with “guerilla” tacked on, is what happens when better-armed militaries face resistance.

    Iran has been preparing for a David-vs-Goliath battle for decades. Ukraine has been at it for less time, giving evidence of how quickly and under what dire circumstances it’s possible to confront a massive conventional battlefield military. Tanks and mobile artillery, naval ships, anything requiring dedicated supply lines, all have lost capacity in the face of scrappy basemwnt warriors.

    That’s how evolution works. Adapt or die. Testosterone supplements? Bad sign.

    1. Ivan

      The old thing was that the superior military won the invasion but lost the occupation. Now they can’t even win the invasion (well maybe Greenland would roll over and wait for a new administration). That is why people are asking what exactly is Putin’s endgame. I think that maybe both Trump and Putin were victims of their military-industrial complexes promising easy “glorious” victories – now they face unacceptable humiliations if they want to get out again.

  5. ottnott

    MacDuck wrote: “That’s how evolution works. Adapt or die. Testosterone supplements? Bad sign.”

    It wasn’t too long ago that the US right lamented the devastation that diversity had brought to the US military. We were told that the manly soldiers of Russia put us to shame and represented the ideal we needed to return to. In most of the world, that would be called pre-Ukraine thinking. The Trump administration calls it strategy.

    Military diversity is being pushed out, the budget is skyrocketing and, yet, our military has been floundering against anyone who can shoot back. Why? Because we have a cosplaying DOD Secretary who measures military readiness by counting pull-ups and testosterone levels, and the personal flaws that led our Commander In Chief to blunder into a war with Iran are the same flaws that make it impossible for the CIC to resolve the situation. I’ve lost count of the two-day special military operations we’ve had so far in Iran–all ending in total victory, according to the White House.

    1. Johnnydean

      What is military “diversity”. Pure slop. It never existed. After the Iraq war, the military was so desperate for bodies, women were pushed for roles just to fill procurement quotas. Just the flat truth. Never had any racial quotas at all. That testosterone stuff is nonsense and irrelevant. Just marketing psyops.

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