Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.
Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.
The munitions shortfall doesn’t just affect the current war. It also sends a worrisome message to allies around the world: The United States has been caught off guard by the latest evolution of warfare and lacks the armaments-production capacity to adapt quickly. Suddenly, relying on American military technology looks far less reliable as a security strategy than it did before President Trump went to war with Iran. And in the long run, governments that counted on the United States to equip their military are going to need a Plan B.
Because the military had been enshittified just like everything else. Contractors have realized there’s more profit in making small numbers of extremely expensive weapons that large numbers of cheaper weapons. It’s the exact same reason the American car market is fucked. The same MBA class runs all of these companies.
Aside: not sure “MBA class” is different from working class in theory. Petite bourgeoise maybe, like individual landlords, but the wealthy in control of the MI complex have no need for credentialing like an MBA. Not disagreeing, or defending MBAs, just reconciling the notion of them as an elite socioeconomic group.
There’s more to society than economic classes. Marxist class analysis is fine, but often it can be extremely myopic, focusing on just a single variable that divides a society. This is more about cultural class rather than economic class. It’s as much as as discussion of differences within capitalists as between capitalists and workers. This kind of distinction is lost when you collapse all of society down into working class/owner class.
When I say the MBA class, I mean the managerial social class that is inculcated in a certain set of shared values by American business schools. They’re trained to run businesses in a way very different from historical industrialists like Ford and the other early 20th century robber barons. Historical industrialists often focused on producing mass market goods as cheaply as possible. They made their profits through volume. They focused on maximizing total profit, rather than percentage return on investment. People like Ford came from humble backgrounds. They valued producing things for the common man. The assembly line was invented so that it would be practical to make a car cheap enough for an average person could afford. These industrialists weren’t humanitarians. They absolutely tried to maximize their profits, but they also saw a value in employing large numbers of people and producing vast amounts of goods that improved people’s lives. Maybe they just wanted to employ a bunch of people to lord over them, but employment itself was seen as a virtue. It was this economic system that powered the Arsenal of Democracy that served the US so well in WW2.
In the 1980s or so, a new business philosophy came about, the Cult of Shareholder Value. This belief system rejected generations of capitalist thought and said that the only thing that matters is maximizing the rate of return for stockholders. It doesn’t matter how many people you employ. It doesn’t matter how many goods you make. It doesn’t even matter if you’re maximizing raw total profit. All that matters is the percentage rate of return. Companies were to be run in whatever way maximized the stock market return. For this class of leaders, it’s better to make $1 million at a 7% rate of return than $2 million at a 6% rate of return. You’ll leave money on the table if it means a higher rate of return.
If all you care about is percentage return on dollars invested, then you are going to try to achieve the highest profit margin on every item you sell. It’s better to sell a smaller number of items at a higher profit margin than a larger number of items at a smaller one, even if the latter would generate larger total profits. This Cult of Shareholder value is also why enshittification has shown up in so many businesses. Maximizing rate of return encourages you to value-engineer every single product for maximum profit margin.
When it comes to weapons, this encourages the building of small numbers of Wunderwaffe rather than the mass production of cheap weapons. The exact opposite philosophy to something like the AK-47. The earlier business philosophy gave us hundreds of B-52s. . The Cult of Shareholder Value gave us the B-2 stealth bomber, which cost $2 billion each, and we never made more than a few dozen of them. Sure, the B-2 is as technical wonder, and in a certain military environment, it works wel. If you’re fighting the wars like we did in the 90s and 2000s, against small countries like Afghanistan or Iraq? Small numbers of high tech super weapons is a viable strategy. But this strategy struggles even against countries as capable as Iran, let alone China.
But we’re now entering the era of mass drone warfare. Little Ukraine is making 20 million drones a year. China could make tens of billions. And for an American defense sector that long ago abandoned ideas of mass cheap weapons production? We could be in real trouble…
OK I think I understand better your overarching point. The MBAs are more like representative acolytes in the capitalist movement, which itself is responsible for the deterioration of the military. Sorry I got snagged on a red herring.
For sure, the MI complex isn’t run by MBAs. It’s almost entirely corruption, greed, and fraud. The fact that it’s been made so controversial to allow the military to negotiate prices and even repair their own stuff shows how fucked it all is.
MBAs extract money where rampant corruption in favor of the company may not yet exist. MI complex is run by nepotism and bribes.
And the Pentagon is convinced we’ll never be in a war of attrition ever again. They’re planning like it is still the early 90s and the Gulf War. Completely ignoring what is happening in Ukraine and how even mid-sized armies like Iran can still be functional after high tech strikes. And the orange buffoon isn’t helping by demanding a return of the Battleship instead of millions of cheap air and sea drones.
Between missing the drone wave and the fact that the private sector has massively outsourced our industrial capacity, could we even sustain a war with a near peer? How long before shortages got dire? Few months?
The drone production capacity of China in a true total war scenario is frankly terrifying to imagine. Imagine the Workshop of the World converted to drone production. Little Ukraine is making millions of drones per year. China could make tens of billions.
At sufficient numbers, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete. Nukes are singular expensive objects. It’s always been assumed that nuclear weapons couldn’t be intercepted, but countries around the world have gotten really good at building missile interceptors. And suddenly nukes aren’t so scary if you can launch a hundred interceptors at every incoming nuclear missile. And new interceptor technologies are coming onboard that will allow interceptors to fly back to their launch points if they don’t strike a hit.
We’ve always assumed mutually assured destruction will prevent conflict between great powers, but I worry nukes may not be so scary in the future. Imagine if China built a billion missile interceptors and had them stationed around the country. (If the production can be fully automated, this isn’t an absurd number.) No missile could ever get through. Each one would be swarmed by a million interceptors. And only the interceptors that actually find their target will be consumed. The rest just fly back to their launch pads to refuel. To prevent your cities from getting nuked, a billion autonomous interceptors is not an absurd investment.
At the same time, drones could easily do nuclear bomb levels of destruction at sufficient scale. Imagine if you unleashed a million incendiary drones onto a city with a hundred thousand buildings. Each is programmed to scan for standing structures, land on them, and ignite an incendiary charge. The firebombing of Dresden is the model here.
Or here’s a terrifying weapon. Imagine an autonomous, solar-powered, AI-operated drone swarm. You unleash a million of them on a city. Each drone has an explosive charge in it and a simple mission: find and destroy any vehicle or human being you find within a geo-fenced region. The drones follow a simple algorithm:
- Fly around looking for a target.
- If a target is found, make a suicide attack.
- If no target is found, land somewhere and recharge batteries via solar cells.
- Once batteries are charged, fly back up again.
They might only get 20 minutes of flying time and require 10 hours to charge, but that wouldn’t matter. You could have the swarm coordinate the charging cycles of the million drones so that there are tens of thousands of them in the air at any given time. The ones on the ground recharging would be completely helpless, but no one could go out and deal with them with tens of thousands of active drones flying around. Plus you could rig them to explode if someone approaches them while they’re in their charging cycle.
We have not even begun to see the horrors of drone warfare.
In 2017, Future of Life Institute made a short film about the possibilities of autonomous killer drones. It seems even more likely now that it did then.
