• CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOPM
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    2 years ago

    Yeah, it’s important to understand the US does not produce weapons for self-defence. If you look at Russia for example, or Belarus, they’ve outright told weapons manufacturers that they’re doing their duty for the country and if they fail they would be jailed. The US is in a strategic position to prevent its soil being attacked, and they are the main purveyors of war today, so they don’t need to actually be efficient with their military tech and production.

    In the end the bloated military budget just gets redistributed to the contractors who make a ton of money on it and deliver subpar weapons and equipment.

    We see now that Russia, for example, is not anywhere close to running out of ammo and missiles in Ukraine, but NATO is finding it difficult to keep pumping equipment to Zelensky.

    It’s the same thing in China – amplified by the fact that China also produces a TON of things. They know how to get supply lines going. The PRC has never started a war, what they produce in their military is for local use and for actual defence purposes.

    That’s why when people tell me you can’t beat the US because they spend trillions on the military, I tell them this is not an indicator of efficiency. If anything, it’s an indicator of inefficiency.

    Some years ago, they had to replace so-called “dumb” bombs (just the plain old bomb that you drop from a plane to hit a land target) with “smart” bombs (that could essentially hit their target with 100% accuracy or close to). The US spent billions of dollars retrofitting every single bomb in their arsenal with a device that could steer the bomb and report its location on GPS in real time. This means every bomb manufactured in the US today, as well as the whole existing arsenal, needs this single-use device to be manufactured, bought, attached, and spent.

    Russia instead developed software for their jets that would calculate a trajectory for the bomb, using surrounding data (like wind speed) and their GPS variants, and then drop the bomb at the right time. It works just as well.