Tag: Missile launch facilities

America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion.

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

To understand how America is preparing for its nuclear future, follow Melissa Durkee’s fifth-grade students as they shuffle into Room 38 at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School in Preston, Conn. One by one, the children settle in for a six-week course taught by an atypical educator, the defense contractor General Dynamics.

“Does anyone know why we’re here?” a company representative asks. Adalie, 10, shoots her hand into the air. “Um, because you’re building submarines and you, like, need people, and you’re teaching us about it in case we’re interested in working there when we get older,” she ventures.

Adalie is correct. The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.

…

Though the new Columbia-class subs are primarily being built in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia, the Navy is going to tremendous lengths to recruit talent across the country. Over the past year, a blitz of ads has appeared at various sports events — including major league baseball games, WNBA games and even atop a NASCAR hood — steering fans to buildsubmarines.com. The website connects job seekers with hiring defense contractors as part of a nearly $1 billion campaign. Some of that money will go toward helping restore the network of companies that can supply the more than three million parts that go into a Columbia sub. Like so much of the nation’s nuclear infrastructure, those supplier numbers have plummeted since the 1990s.

America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion.

Now this is grooming!

Recommended Reading:

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

US: Not Ready for the Big Leagues

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Not Ready for the Big Leagues

To prosecute war against Russia, China, or Iran, protection of the major forward bases of the United States Air Force would be the prerequisite upon which success would be predicated.

To adequately cover even one of these large airbases against missile strikes of just 100-200 units of high-performance drones, cruise-missiles, ballistic missiles, and hypersonic missiles — plus numerous decoys — would easily require an entire Patriot battalion.

Even with a 100% interception rate, a pair of 100-missile strike packages over the course of a day would still compel a PAC-3 burn rate of at least 300 missiles, given that, as a general rule, two PAC-3 missiles are launched at every incoming target.

But of course, the interception rate would be considerably lower than 100%. And given that the Patriot command, radar, and launcher units — along with missile storage sites — would be primary targets, there would be a substantial attrition rate of the highly immobile Patriot systems themselves. (The Russians have already clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of the Patriot systems to counter-battery missile strikes. At least three Patriot batteries have been destroyed in Ukraine.)

In an attempt to cover just three large airbases against a series of salvos of 100+ missiles of various types, the entire US stockpile of PAC-3 interceptors could very conceivably be exhausted in little more than a week or two.

Current annual production could easily be consumed in little more than a day or two.

This is the reality of 21st century high-intensity conflict against an adversary with the capability to shoot back — a kind of war for which the United States military is woefully ill-prepared, both materially and doctrinally.