US needs to replenish weapons stockpile after Ukraine support

 Breitbart:

Bank of America analysts issued a report on Friday warning that America’s military support for Ukraine in the conflict with Russia has pushed United States military stockpiles to “dangerously low levels” not seen for decades.

As part of $16.2 billion in support committed to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February, the Department of Defense (DoD) has sent approximately $8.4 billion worth of military equipment from its own weapons stockpiles through an authority known as “presidential drawdown.”

The analysts wrote in their Friday report:

Presidential drawdowns have pushed US weapons stockpiles to dangerously low levels that have not been seen for decades. On several ground systems, DoD officials have indicated that ammunition stocks have dwindled to levels that would be considered problematic during wartime.

The analysts wrote that as the United States continues to provide military assistance to Ukraine, major defense contractors have been tasked with meeting demand throughout Europe and restocking United States military inventories depleted as a result of the 20 presidential drawdowns since August 2021.

They forecasted that Raytheon Technologies (Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s employer before he become defense chief), Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics are best positioned to benefit from the demands, given their experience in producing “legacy ground-based systems.”

They wrote that the DoD was actually expected to pivot away from those systems as it looked to shift away from the ground-based wars in the Middle East to preparing for war in the Pacific, but that the Ukraine conflict has renewed their importance.

“The DoD’s shift in focus to the Pacific and away from ground conflicts in the Middle East previously cast doubt on the fate of some ground-based defense programs,” they wrote. For example, they noted that Raytheon almost stopped producing High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) in 2021, but now efforts are being made to ramp production back up.

...

The supplying of Ukraine fighters has taken a toll on the US weapons stockpile that should require a ramping up of production.  It is not clear whether the Biden administration is doing so. 

On the upside, it looks like the Russians are running out of their best conventional weapons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more