Supply chain issues slow US production of weapons used in Ukraine

 Daily Wire:

Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet warned during a Sunday interview that supply chain issues were hurting his company’s ability to ramp up production of a critical weapon that the U.S. has shipped to Ukraine in an effort to beat back Russia’s invasion into the country.

The comments about Javelins, which are portable, long-range guided anti-tank missiles that can be operated by a single soldier, come as the U.S. has reportedly provided 7,000 Javelins to Ukraine’s military.

When asked during a CBS News interview with Margaret Brennan about what his company was doing to “scale up production to get more to [Ukraine] and to backfill what the U.S. has given up,” Taiclet said that efforts were underway to address the issue but that it could take years to complete due to supply chain issues.

“We are therefore on our side, accelerating our investment in that factory and in our workforce there,” he said. “So we’re already investing ahead of time to buy tooling, to expand the plant and also support our suppliers to get ready to ramp up production. So right now, our capacity is 2,100 Javelin missiles per year. We’re endeavoring to take that up to 4,000 per year, and that will take a number of months, maybe even a couple of years to get there because we have to get our supply chain to-to also crank up. As we do so, we think we can almost double the capacity in a reasonable amount of time.”

Taiclet urged lawmakers to take action to invest more in infrastructure needed to increase domestic supply of semiconductors, which are necessary to build any kind of advanced weaponry.
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The war appears to have entered a new phase where artillery is being used against the Russian tanks.  Whether that is because of a shortage of Javelins or other reasons is not clear.  The war in eastern Ukraine is in a more concentrated area and closer to the Russian border.  We are not seeing the long lines of Russin tanks on the road we saw earlier in the war.