Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?

Weapons have a long shelf life (on the order of decades) and slow production but as long as that slow production exceeds peace time/training use you can build up a stockpile, they blew through that stockpile fighting a war they didn't need to fight and it turns out that "Throwing money at the problem" isn't enough to solve it quickly.

Maintaining industrial capacity to make a thing at a higher scale than you need to make it at currently isn't free, it costs money and so the companies simply don't.

Because they've used up all their complicated, expensive weapons obliterating middle eastern children

The Iran War was a war that even the military industrial complex had resisted starting for decades. This should tell you what a generally bad idea it was.

Normally, if such a war had been started anyway, it would have resulted in distributed adaption from the military / intelligence bureaucrats each working within their own constraints/incentives - a scaling of the aims to reflect prudent for scope/intensity/etc for an elective war.

But instead, the war is being prosecuted for maximalist aims by an aging con man. He was fundamentally incapable of understanding the concept of "no" - real constraints, difficulties, problems to be solved - even in his heyday of the 90's. Never mind the additional confusion that 30 years of neurological degeneration has wrought. Any sort of feed back or judgement from people experienced in topics is considered "woke", and so experts are sidelined in favor of yes men for Dear Leader.

And so rather than any dialing back of scale (or perhaps even planning ahead to defend expensive military assets sitting around like ducks), the "plans" are to just push ahead harder, commit harder, expend even more of our resources, etc - surely winning, and the validation that it carries, must merely be weeks away. Similar exceptional entitlement is seen in supporters of the con man, who champion some idea that success can be assured if we merely have the will to take it - hence the constant discussions of the form "which crimes against humanity do we need to commit?"

Fundamentally, this is what happens when people foolishly elect autocrats - autocrats promise simplicity and expediency, but these qualities only exist in their own limited mind that cannot fathom the complex realities of situations. And so what autocrats actually bring is incompetence, inability to adapt, and ultimately ruin.

If the US and its military do recover from this, it will not be due to the simplistic cheering of the rash destructionists, regardless of how much "fresh energy" they bring. Rather it will be long, slow, boring work done by everyone else picking up the pieces after their catastrophic reign is over.

I found Noah Smith's piece on this a good read. It's from November 2023 :

"People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone" [1]

"It’s important to clarify, by the way, that the phrase “Arsenal of Democracy” doesn’t refer to the size of our existing military, nor does it refer to our military spending. It refers to our military production potential — how much military equipment we could make in the event of a long conventional war against a major power like China."

[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-the-...

Because all of the plants like this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Castings) have been torn out.

The economic asymmetry of this particular engagement should be worrisome to most countries. Using 6 and 7 figure(per use) defensive systems to engage 4 to 5 figure adversary systems is not sustainable, even more so considering the economic cost of the damage said 4 to 5 figure platforms can inflict.

They are at war but have not switched to wartime production so the replenish rate seems slow. The media are making out like they are low by when they say they are low it doesnt mean overall low usually they're talking about the specific region's supply. But I hate Trump so doesnt bother me if they want to use this to attack him.