The military industrial complex is so used to insane levels of graft now that this makes total sense to me. If it costs $10.000 to ship a hammer to a base in Iraq, I don’t even want to imagine the margins munitions manufacturers are making on things.
Which then of course means they can make fewer bombs, since the armed forces can’t afford them and have stocks of ammo anyway and the end result of it is that Iran can make a drone bomb for 10K while intercepting it costs potentially millions of dollars.
But think of all the sweet sweet margins
Probably 10 different middlemen each collecting their 20% cut. Lots of beautiful boats
All doing their part to end this sham of an empire sooner, yes.
That’s the major irony to the USA’s world historically high military spending. It’s sort of like a reverse Jevons paradox: there has been so much money pouring into the MIC, and at such an increasing rate, that the entire industry re-oriented towards optimizing graft. So now every new contract is optimized for Maximum cost and Minimum deliverables. And you do really want to minimize the deliverables - after all, every dollar you’re spending on an actual piece of military equipment is a dollar not going into someone’s pocket. And that’s lead to the rapid de-industrialization of the MIC, focused on delivering small quantities of uber complex uber technological wunderwaffe (or more blatantly, just super expensive konventionelle Waffen). When an actual war breaks out, you have counter-intuitive situations like Russia out-producing all of NATO because they prioritized and planned for how to ramp up industrial output.
In fact, I’d argue there’s a systemic pressure to produce expensive weapons in artisanal batches. The only thing companies care about is maximizing profits. Producing cheap and reliable weapons in large volumes means low margins, needing warehouses to store them, hiring lots of workers for assembly lines, building factories, etc. It’s much better to build stuff like F35s that take a long time to design, then you produce a handful of them, and charge a huge maintenance contract for decades to come.
Oh yes, absolutely. The money is in moon shot projects that might not even bear any fruit at all. Like researching how to railgun when basic physics tells you those things break after 5 uses or indeed the clusterfuck that is the F35. I think the B2 stealth bomber was the first project of this kind and the corporations learned very well from it.
IMHO this belongs in c/bloomer
I guess it’s not years worth if it got burned thru in a few days but I’m no math genius.
