There's a great article in The Atlantic called The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military. It is a very sobering look at how far the war fighting capability of the USA has shrunk over the last thirty years. The war in Ukraine has put this into very sharp focus.

It turns out that a lot of America's industrial production of things like 155mm howitzer shells (see right) is via a process almost unchanged for a hundred years. Slow and expensive. The article notes that when Russia invaded Ukraine :

At that time, the U.S. was manufacturing about 14,000 shells a month. By 2023, the Ukrainians were firing as many as 8,000 shells a day. It has taken two years and billions of dollars for the U.S. to ramp up production to 40,000 shells a month—still well short of Ukraine’s needs.

There is a huge amount of dysfunction, inefficiency and cost involved throughout the supply chain. The USA is having to seriously consider a future conflict with a "peer" adversary, not armies like Iraq or the Taliban. They can produce technically advanced weaponry but at massive cost: the Houthi's launch drones that cost a few thousand dollars each. Tomahawks that are fired to intercept these are expensive :

When American ships began striking Houthi targets in Yemen in January, they fired more Tomahawks on the first day than were purchased in all of last year.

How inefficient and sclerotic is the industry? This was a painful read :

One of the most famous examples of this dynamic was an unmanned aircraft invented by the Israeli aerospace engineer Abe Karem originally called Albatross, then Amber, and finally the GNAT-750. He won a Pentagon contract in the 1980s to design something better than the drone prototype offered by Lockheed Martin, known as the Aquila. And he delivered, building a machine that cost far less, required just three operators instead of 30, and could stay aloft much longer than the Aquila could. Everyone was impressed. But his prototype vanished into the valley of death. Although it was a better drone, Aquila looked good enough, and Lockheed Martin was a familiar quantity. But Aquila didn’t work out. Neither did alternatives, including the Condor, from another of the Big Five, Boeing. Only after years of expensive trial and error was Karem’s idea resurrected. It became the Predator, the first hugely successful military drone. By then, Karem’s company had been absorbed into General Atomics—and Karem lost what would have been his biggest payday.

The Atlantic article is worth reading in its entirety.

It is a new and very dangerous world, much easier and cheaper to sow destruction and hard to defend against. The best thing we can all do is to avoid going to war, not at all costs, but certainly make extra effort not to. Wars have a habit of going in very different directions than the one we expect. I have just been listening to the brilliant podcast The Rest is History and their talks on the diplomatic failures that lead to the First World War. We need to learn from history and be much cleverer in how we deal with threats. We can't afford not to.