Running out of HARM

For the Russians, that is, as the US depletes its stocks of its own critical weapons to support Ukraine:

Some sources also raised concerns about US production of additional weapons systems, including HARMs anti-radiation missiles, GMLRS surface-to-surface missiles and the portable Javelin anti-tank missiles – although the US has moved to ramp up production for those and other systems.

The article has a lot of bluff from our government, but…

One reason for the concern about low stockpiles is that the US industrial base is having difficulty keeping up with demand quickly enough, the sources said. In addition, European allies cannot sufficiently backfill Ukrainian military requests due to their need to maintain to their own forces’ supplies.

Because I was involved in the development of the HARM (High Speed Anti-Radiation, AGM-88 and its progeny) missile, I’ve used that as a sort of “interest benchmark” for the application of American weapons systems in this war. But the basic problem is that we’ve let our industrial base run down to the point where we cannot produce the weapons necessary to sustain either a long war like this one or a two-front one (think Taiwan.) The great moral cause that our elites have made out of the Ukraine are belied by our inability to back it up with the industrial might–at all levels, I might add–to sustain it, and for us to be the “Arsenal of Democracy” that we were in the two World Wars.

Ever since the 1960’s the “hippie dreamers” and their progeny have have had an instinctive aversion for a manufacturing-based economy, primarily because a) it was seen as a running environmental disaster and b) it produced the suburbs with all of the “phonies” that lived there (and those too were seen as an environmental disaster with their urban sprawl.) Now that we don’t live in a unipolar world any more, those sensibilities have come to haunt us–and the Ukrainians fighting the Russians.