That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive
In previous conflicts the US military could get a lot done with bombs, but that's risky if you can't get air superiority and take out all enemy anti-air systems. Which is more difficult against an enemy who can shoot at your air bases and aircraft carriers. But those previous conflicts might have contributed to a false sense of security about required missile stockpiles
Doctrine never intended for these bombs to be used almost exclusively as means to wage wars. These are meant for strikes that need to be precise and carried in a short notice.
If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
The fault in the decision process was starting this war in the first place. Everything follows from that.
We all know Operation Epstein Fury has been an extremely successful employment of weapons of mass distraction.
We all know there's something very wrong with this administration and their decision making.
All things considered, it appears it's working as intended by the administration.
> something wrong
like waging a war while insisting they aren't really waging a war and it's just a special military operation and as a side effect having effectively no access to a lot of the resources/means normally used
>If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
but AI generated that target list so its all good!
"900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours"
"1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours"
"2,000 targets in 96 hours"
keep shooting, Im sure those are all good targets and totally not a waste of ammo
Air superiority was established fairly early on in the conflict. Flying F-15 and F-16s now. Not even stealth and they drop more than just missles - they carry bombs. B-52s weren’t sent in to carpet bomb the area of that’s what you mean.
US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.
> Flying F-15 and F-16s now.
Except not really. If they were willing to risk sending many aircraft deep into Iranian airspace with SDBs and JDAMs they wouldn't be running out of ballistic missiles.
There have been 60-70 F15 and F16s operating in Iran (could be more just found via public sources).
And when an F-15E was shot down they got spooked. They're relying heavily on missiles because it doesn't cause a multiday story in the news when one is shot down on its way to the target (and because they're incapable of thinking more than one move ahead, and because it's not their money...).
[dead]
This is hilarious. Yeah. Air superiority. Last I heard they moved all their equipments to Jordan to stay out of range from Sijjeel and they are still getting hammered in Jordan.
Saw the video taken by the US service men. In movies you see US soldiers yelling "go go go" while in the battlefield we saw them scream "run run run".
Your confidence in claiming air superiority is commendable. Keep it up.
You can't really stockpile missiles, their explosives and fuel needs to be replaced with some interval, so having a massive stockpile doesn't make that much sense, because it's as you suggests expensive to maintain.
In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers (but it won't be cheap). I would however like to see what Ukraine does, if they get the go-ahead to start making Patriot missiles. They probably won't just do a run of 50 or 100 missiles and call it a day.
> In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers
Source - trust me bro. Have you seen the videos of Iran's underground missile cities. Tell me about missile stockpiles again.
I think you should avail yourself of this thing called the Internet to research before you beclown yourself.
US missile production is extremely, painfully slow. From Standard missiles used by the Navy to Patriot. From THAAD to PrSM. LRASM, Tomahawk, you name it, we have a Tiffany weapons arsenal. We're winning so much, we just put the F-15 back into production; a plane that entered service 50 years ago.
Historians used to mock the Nazis for continually developing wunderwaffe; while the Allies overwhelmed them with Sherman and T-34 tanks. Now we've become the Nazis (in so many more ways than one.)
>the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers
Evidence? Genuinely curious. I read that for every ship the US can build, China can build 200. Our drones come from China. Have we got a magic tomohawk cruise missile factory that can be dialed up to the rate that China can produce? We have the raw materials pipeline and know-how still?
You have the same issue with the conventional bombs and their guidance kits, which when delivered in contested areas are not usually cheaper.
The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.
JDAM's are a lot cheaper. They are a guidance kit bolted on to a MK-82 gravity bomb. There are a lot of MK-82's in stock, as they have been made since the 1940's.
Problem is you put a crew and an expensive airplane at risk.
We are out of missiles because the current administration wants to minimize combat losses. Looking at the dollar cost; it seems like a bad idea. But is this war worth any of our soldiers / sailors / airman ? (no)
Also, you can jam JDAM (GPS) guidance. The Russians are masters at jamming and I'm fairly confident they've shared some systems with Iran.
The issue is restraint, an all out bombing campaign with no regard for civilians or international condemnation would do the job in a month
I think it takes a wilful ignorance of the history of industrialised warfare to believe this.
> That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive
I don't think so. This observation completely misses the root cause, and it ain't missiles.
Armed forces size their stockpiles in terms of their short term needs focused on rapid reaction and deterrence. The goal is to be able to react to immediate threats and then shift the economy to a war economy to supply the effort in economically efficient ways.
What failed this time is that the trump administration was hoping to attack Iran without having to declare war, effectively starting a war without preparing for the war.
The results are obvious: the peace time stockpile was depleted at a time where the country was not prepared to replenish it. Trump shifter the us armed forces to deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies.
And so they ran out of ammo.
There are further compounding factors such as a lack of plan and lack of exit strategy. But placing your military in a state where they spend their ammo without any plan to ressuply it... You will have the same problem if you replace hellfire missiles with sticks and stones.
Those are interesting points. The US military is optimised for limited strike "special military operations", which it does all the time, and deterrence. Neither of those require a super deep arsenal, just enough to complete a limited intervention, or blunt an initial assault. Initiating a long deep ongoing offensive campaign is a whole other thing the US never planned for.
> Initiating a long deep ongoing offensive campaign is a whole other thing the US never planned for.
I don't know that that's the case. There are almost certainly plans for a long deep ongoing offensive campaign. But you can't do an ongoing campaign and keep saying it's a short term thing and expect logistics to work.
> Those are interesting points. The US military is optimised for limited strike "special military operations", which it does all the time, and deterrence.
I don't think so. The US military still has the same Gulf War kind of punch. It's the same armed forces that supported multiple large scale military engagements and outright invasions without requiring changes to it's economy.
But that requires preparation and planning.
Trump did nothing of the sort, and forced the us military into an untenable position. The same armed forces that could easily occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq can't even support a limited engagement with Iraq until they started running out of ammo. That tells you everything about the level of planning that went into this mess.
"...deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies."
And blames Biden for this mess. "Oh... the cupboards were bare when I came back...". If you KNEW you were running low on supplies, why start a war? There's enough general answers to this, all revolving around his immaturity, lack of intelligence and the cult around him - the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that...
This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years. This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles. The idea of a war economy is wildly outdated. Either you have enough stockpiled until your weapons manufacturers can scale their production, or you're just out of missiles. Being out after some weeks of a "military operation" is frankly a damning indictment of the US military's logistics and manufacturing.
> This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years.
You're missing the whole point. The point is not that missiles are easy to build. The point is that military interventions planned not only to prop up logistics but also to accommodate for supply constraints. There is no plan on earth that consists of firing a constant barrage of expensive missiles, and instead you have armed forces planning around using dumb and cheap alternatives that are easier to source and provision.
And Trump did nothing of the sort. There was no plan, no exit strategy, nothing. Not even a war declaration to kickstart the country's logistics infrastructure. Of course ammo runs out if there is no plan to provision it.
> This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles.
That's also another point you missed. Trump even failed to mobilize the infrastructure to supply with basic ordnance. There is no plan.
Pay attention to what you are saying yourself: how do you start a war when you don't even secure your own supply needs for the first weeks of the engagement?
There was no actual plan that could have been made short of one that spanned multiple administrations over at least a decade to spin up enough missile or interceptor manufacturing for such a thing.
It’s just silly to think that the US has the domestic manufacturing base left to do such a thing short of generational scale timelines. The line workers you need in those plants are in grade school today. Better start introducing machine shop again!
Trump could have decided day one of his admin he wanted to do this, told everyone, and held off until the last day of his presidency to fire the first shot. At best you’d get a couple more weeks of ammo.
It’s a pure fantasy to think US arms manufacturers - even given a blank check and nationalized - could get a supply chain going in under a few years. We do not even have the semi-skilled manufacturing talent to spin up such a base, much less the latent capabilities to easily pivot.
Sure there is no plan. Having one would not have helped much either. You can’t plan your way out of having spent three generations outsourcing your industrial base.
The WWII comparisons are laughable. Today the US would still be getting factories on-line by the same time the atomic bombs were dropped. We would have a whole cycle just learning how to build things again - much less actually build them.
To build ammo at a “all out war” scale you would need entirely different weaponry designed foremost to be rapidly built. You cannot rapidly scale up manufacturing of current designs. If we could, we already would have since there is effectively an unlimited decade out backlog of demand for just Patriot missiles and has been for close to half a decade already. The common rebuttal that a factory would need 30 years of increased demand to make the investment worthwhile proves the point.
[dead]