It’s hard to stockpile things when your warehouses keep blowing up
we’re told this is basically what the US does, too, and why the pause with Iran.
in the end, it’s never true and just more prop while people keep dying.
Its more a lag of transporting them to the front. Most of them are moved by ships and it takes a couple of weeks to resupply them when they are halfway across the world.
The build rate of u.s. missles are in the months or even years long timespan.
seems so interesting from a “just in time” inventory pov. i have friends who left that industry (mainly sw engs in the navigation space) and yeah … it’s dilbert all the way up.
Just in time manufacturing is a good thing. Why would you want to launch missiles from 1995 - todays technology is better in important ways. For that matter why would you want to launch 2026 missiles in 2030 - who knows what advances will be made (you should have a good guess about what they are working on based on the current Ukraine situation)
Mostly because build times are slow. If you have a stockpile you can make a big splash right off the bat, and keep the tempo up while drawing both from new stock and from stockpiled stock.
Which is to say we need the ability to quickly scale production. I said a couple years ago the US needs to have the ability to produce 1000 patriot interceptors per month - many said I was wrong then, but today looking at Ukraine and Iran it seems like I was low. (Ukraine is an example of how sometimes nothing your diplomats do is enough, Iran is an example of how sometimes you are stupid)
Not that we shouldn’t have a stock pile. We need the ability for every city to defend itself for a week based on what they currently have in stock (remember those stock piles will be an early target and interceptors are not perfect). However after a week we should be making new interceptors as fast as they are used.
And this I believe is where public and corporate interests diverge.
Corps like the current situation of boutique production. Nice margins, easy to manage processes and they can selfimportantly hobnob with politicians and military brass. Apparently a lower cost to produce patriot variant was cancelled. I can’t see how corporations want something like that.
I believe easy and cheaply mass producible munitions need to be engineered differently. But why develop such munitions, if the old paradigm produces so much gravy and influence?
Regretfully they make a lot of them so it doesn’t really matter as long as they are able to.
Completely wrong, firing them in a cluster has a much much higher success rate. Anti Air defense always struggles with saturation attacks. Ideally you would fire all your missiles at once.
r*ssia makes a lot of missiles, as long as they are able ro make them they willfire them. Nothing wrong in this statement. Ballistic missiles are fired largely in ones or twos and they are mostly successfull at reaching the target. AA struggles with ballistic missiles since V-2. SAMs in UA are imported, there is no homegrown system yet unless you count soviet upgrades (which aren’t being made anymore).
Most missiles aren’t ballistic, those are generally the highest tier ones.
And? They fired at least two ballistic missiles yesterday, they will fire similar number today, and tomorrow, and the day after. AA is cool, destroying engine plant and killing 50+% of workers there - no more missiles.
