ts5641 said:

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Who is this dude? How would he know this information?

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CSIS put together the report…munitions numbers can largely be out tracked through congressional budget reports and OSINT tracking of impacts.

It's not an exact number, but the think tanks tend to be good enough.

2026NCAggies said:

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LOYAL AG said:

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Well fortunately China isn't going to take Taiwan because they need oil and food and they don't have anywhere close to the amount they need to survive a U.S. blockade of their shipping lanes.

This is simply a non-issue. The "fear China" narrative is played out.

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China's economy is not in good shape and is largely dependent on us and the west. To top it off we can cut them off from their oil imports.

Also they have never invaded another country by sea and their military is not battle tested.

They would be looking at another Russia/Ukraine war, losing A LOT just to gain an island that will be destroyed by the time they take it

Would be pretty dumb and a massive mistake

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China is the biggest beneficiary of the U.S. lead world order and has the most to lose if we stop supporting that world order. Iran and Venezuela were not so subtle reminders of the fact that they can't maintain their way of life without us.

Hegseth downplaying any munitions shortage and that halting arms sales have been predicated on any reported shortage.

NEW: U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, just confirmed the pause in Taiwan arms sales is not due to munitions conservation concerns owing to the conflict in the Middle East.

Hegseth: "Yeah, on the Taiwan arms sales I would decouple the… pic.twitter.com/7db5Cf53Du

— Taiwan Security Monitor (台灣安全觀測站) (@TaiwanMonitor) May 30, 2026

Rossticus said:

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Hegseth downplaying any munitions shortage and that halting arms sales have been predicated on any reported shortage.

NEW: U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, just confirmed the pause in Taiwan arms sales is not due to munitions conservation concerns owing to the conflict in the Middle East.

Hegseth: "Yeah, on the Taiwan arms sales I would decouple the… pic.twitter.com/7db5Cf53Du

— Taiwan Security Monitor (台灣安全觀測站) (@TaiwanMonitor) May 30, 2026

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That his SecNav said something contradictory in testimony last week isn't helping this narrative shift.

YouBet said:

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May be notable that there was an article a few days ago about Trump reaching out to Ford, GM, and others to discuss their participation in ramping up military resources ala WWII.

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Why? They are already a supplier. I forget the terminology, but govt contracts typically have a clause where they can prioritize production and change demand at will. This isnt news to them and demand is regularly reviewed.

LOYAL AG said:

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Well fortunately China isn't going to take Taiwan because they need oil and food and they don't have anywhere close to the amount they need to survive a U.S. blockade of their shipping lanes.

This is simply a non-issue. The "fear China" narrative is played out.

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I think people keep forgetting about the coup Xi put down a few months ago where he purged/killed almost his entire staff. The analysis coming out of that was that his inner circle were mad at him because he hadn't moved on Taiwan yet so they tried to overthrow him for being too soft. Which is ironic considering it was his own statements that reunification would happen by 2027.

But, to your point, I think he has since realized that to actually try and take Taiwan while it is still of supreme importance to the rest of the planet would be stupid especially while Trump is POTUS. Trump is far too unpredictable to roll the dice on that while he's in office.

If/when we replace Taiwan's chip capabilities, then all bets are off.

80085 said:

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YouBet said:

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May be notable that there was an article a few days ago about Trump reaching out to Ford, GM, and others to discuss their participation in ramping up military resources ala WWII.

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Why? They are already a supplier. I forget the terminology, but govt contracts typically have a clause where they can prioritize production and change demand at will. This isnt news to them and demand is regularly reviewed.

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Because it's just been words on a paper until now:

Quote:

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The Trump administration is turning to automakers and U.S. manufacturers to ramp up weapons production in a World War II-style push, a Pentagon official confirmed to FOX Business.

"The Department of War is committed to rapidly expanding the defense industrial base by leveraging all available commercial solutions and technologies to ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage," a Pentagon Official told FOX Business.

"The Department is aggressively pursuing and integrating the best of American innovation, wherever it resides, to deliver production at scale and drive resiliency across supply chains," the official added.

Senior defense officials have discussed producing weapons and other military supplies with top executives from several companies, including General Motors and Ford Motor, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the discussions.

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YouBet said:

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80085 said:

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YouBet said:

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May be notable that there was an article a few days ago about Trump reaching out to Ford, GM, and others to discuss their participation in ramping up military resources ala WWII.

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Why? They are already a supplier. I forget the terminology, but govt contracts typically have a clause where they can prioritize production and change demand at will. This isnt news to them and demand is regularly reviewed.

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Because it's just been words on a paper until now:

Quote:

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The Trump administration is turning to automakers and U.S. manufacturers to ramp up weapons production in a World War II-style push, a Pentagon official confirmed to FOX Business.

"The Department of War is committed to rapidly expanding the defense industrial base by leveraging all available commercial solutions and technologies to ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage," a Pentagon Official told FOX Business.

"The Department is aggressively pursuing and integrating the best of American innovation, wherever it resides, to deliver production at scale and drive resiliency across supply chains," the official added.

Senior defense officials have discussed producing weapons and other military supplies with top executives from several companies, including General Motors and Ford Motor, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the discussions.

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that's propaganda for the masses, GM, Ford, and everybody else all knows what's going on and what could be expected of them at a moments notice. It's why they had to be bailed out and are allowed to keep making ****ty cars.

Ford didn't take a bailout like GM and Chrysler did.

EFR said:

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Ford didn't take a bailout like GM and Chrysler did.

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maybe thats why there is a tactical version of the colorado and not the ranger

https://www.gmdefensellc.com/site/us/en/gm-defense/home/integrated-vehicles/infantry-squad-vehicle.html

i personally believe we are in a bad hole with our industrial base. there absolutely is a surge capacity problem right now in the supply chain, and there is a lot of focus right now in the DoW on the topic. the issue is multilayer and the comments about freedom's forge / WWII / willow run bomber plant run by ford reveal the problem and are damning about what we're doing about it.

Bill Knudsen (immigrant to Ford to president of GM) quit his job to serve the USG in 1939 as the director of production for the department of war. His realization was that you can't bend the supply curve fast enough simply by ordering. you have to build the capacity ahead of demand. Since we didn't have time to build capacity from scratch, the only available option was to convert existing commercial industrial capacity to wartime needs. there were four basic moves he used - pre-position factory construction and equipment orders out ~2 years before the demand needed them, use existing private capacity with deep manufacturing expertise as the production backbone, leave profit motive in place, and focus on supply networks to support final assembly.

the short version is we can't recreate what Knudsen and others did in 1939 to speedrun industrial capacity. there was a massive amount of latent civilian industrial output in the US that was leveraged into dual-use to support planes, ammunition, small arms, tank production. we don't have it. it's gone. we have lost our industrial depth in machine tools, tool and die making, castings, forgings, machining, electronics. it was cost optimized and outsourced.

and even if we did, if we look to freedom's forge as the (incredible) example of what can be done by leveraging the US economy we're talking two years to ramp.

the same supply chains that feed transformer manufacturing, gas turbine production, and all the inputs required to build data centers (steel, copper, etc) are dual use for war materiel. we can't meet the civilian AI surge even with effectively infinite demand pressure. what makes people think we can conjure up the ability to 10x or 100x our tomahawk production?

perhaps people don't know what goes into a tomahawk. you need semiconductor manufacturing, printed circuit boards and assembly, passive components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) for the electronics; you need composites for the bodies; castings and forgings for the titanium and other alloy structural components; more and different castings and forgings, as well as machining for the small turbofan gas turbine powering it; solid rocket boosters for the initial launch which themselves have supply chain exposure.

two thirds of the foundries (castings and forging suppliers) have closed in the US over the past fifty years. as recently as the 90s we had over 3000 domestic foundries, with less than half of that today. and along with them went the necessary input supply chains - pressure vessels and fabrication for their melters, vacuum systems, induction coils (specialty copper) and induction power supplies (electronics, specialty capacitors, specialty transformers), AND the know-how to design and build them. a lot of this stuff is just gone.

forging capacity is much the same - our really heavy forge capacity, like what's used to make aircraft bulkheads or gas turbine wheels (for power gen or jet engines) was made in the 50s. we literally do not have the ability to make the very heavy forges that we rely on today.

so - focusing on castings and forgings because i am "in" it - just take Knudsen's approach that it's two years to get the factory online, and now add two MORE years because that's how long the lead time is for the equipment that goes in it.

now do the same for the specialty heat treatment equipment, the coatings, the machine tools for finishing.

now think about the labor force that used to operate those machines - not only did we outsource and lay those off, not only did we double-bounce them out with layoffs in industry in 2008 and again in 2014-2019, we also have a massive contraction of available layer as a simple consequence of demographics. AND we didn't train labor - instead our best and brightest went into finance instead of engineering and manufacturing, and our skilled labor workforce was told to get silly college degrees. we lost a generation of manufacturing ability ON TOP.

AND we severely curtailed our defense contracting base after the cold war.

so yes - the shortage in the ability to manufacture so-called exquisite missile systems is very real. drones are no better (you cannot make a US manufactured input drone today, the supply chain doesn't exist). this is a MASSIVE concern for us, and the DoW and President Trump's administration broadly is taking this issue very seriously. the problem is they are (in my opinion) not learning the lessons Kudsen taught the USG in '39. you just can't bend the supply curve with orders. you HAVE to invest in capacity up front.

Yet we're so far ahead of everyone else….imagine what we could do!

I don't know what you mean by "ahead".

K2-HMFIC said:

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It will take 5+ years to replace 39 days of munitions used in the Iran war

What an absolute disaster pic.twitter.com/QRhK1f2hi8

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 28, 2026

Hope China doesn't decide to invade Taiwan anytime soon…we're basically going to be in the **** chair for that one.

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You really believe that we have shot our wad and have nothing to show for it? That is exactly how you sound, almost as if you are the same room as DJT and if he would just open up the updated appendix he would see out inventories are at zero. No one is telling the president and advising him there are zero quantities within the master weapons list.

So in my world, from my space I thinks we will be just fine.

When it comes to democrats and Trump, the dems want a failure. Talking points.

Nobody is saying we're at zero for anything. They're saying we shot a lot of stuff and it will take a while to replace. Hopefully we have sufficient stocks for whatever comes up in the next few years.

https://breakingdefense.com/2026/04/pentagons-munitions-acceleration-council-identifies-14-criticalweapons-for-2027/

Example of concern, and also the stupid tone-deaf quote from the finance guy (of course) at the pentagon showing the self defeating approach being taken.

It won't take near as much time as it will take for Iran.