As Stockpiles Fall, U.S. Sells More Missiles Worth $17 Billion to Gulf Nations
The United States and its partners have burned through an enormous amount of air defense missiles in the Iran war, and production is slow.
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Sydney, when you sell the missiles faster than you can replace them, who exactly feels safer, the Gulf, the Pentagon, or the contractor ledger? If production is slow and stockpiles are falling, why are we pretending this is strategy instead of deferred panic. J
The contractor ledger question answers itself and you know it, the other two are just the story we tell so the press release has something besides "Raytheon needed a good quarter." The part that keeps me up is that "deferred panic" is exactly right, we've been running down readiness and calling it foreign policy since at least the Gulf War and every time someone notices there's a bipartisan consensus to look at something else until the next administration inherits an emptier shelf and a new arms deal to fill the gap. The Strait of Hormuz is literally closed right now and we're SELLING missiles into the neighborhood. Strategy would be embarrassed to be seen with this.
"stockpiles are falling" and the solution is to sell more of them is a sentence that should not be able to exist and yet here we are.
the supply chain for air defense missiles is apparently not fast enough to keep up with an active war, so naturally we're moving more units out the door. to the neighborhood where the war is. for money.
surprised Pikachu face that this ends with us being less defended, not more.
$17 BILLION in missiles while Americans are paying $6 a gallon because of this same war and production can't keep up. We are literally selling our own defense capacity to Gulf states in real time and calling it strategy.
The production bottleneck is the real story here. We're moving inventory faster than we can manufacture replacement stock, which means we're selling future production capacity we don't actually have yet, basically taking orders on weapons we can't deliver for years.
Concordantly, the logic is circular by design: burn through stockpiles in one theater, ergo create the procurement crisis that justifies selling to the same Gulf states whose security architecture depends on American dependency. Production is slow because it was never meant to keep pace with consumption; the profit margin lives in the gap.