Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan

(archived)

The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. … Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.

https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1780850610864267756

The US Army cancelled the XM1299 Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system last month. … The only way I can describe it at this point is total organizational failure. We’re now on our third failed program to replace the M109 155mm self-propelled howitzer, and as usual for the US Army the interim solution - the M109A7, basically dropping the existing M109A6 Paladin turret onto a Bradley chassis - is going to end up as the permanent fix.

Let’s walk through the history of this generational procurement failure. The M109 has been the US Army’s 155mm self-propelled howitzer since before Vietnam, with the original short-barreled version (rather resembling a Russian 2S3) upgraded to sport what was then a very modern 39-caliber* cannon shortly after that war with the M109A1. Further upgrades followed, culminating in the M109A6, a modern weapon of the late Cold War era that was in some way groundbreaking but in some other ways quite dated. It had a lot of new electronics… and a manually-loaded cannon from the 1970s. When the Paladin entered service in the early 1990s the then-Soviet Union had already introduced the 2S19 in 1989 (featuring an autoloading 47-caliber 152mm cannon), and the Germans were hard at work on the PzH 2000 (with a semi-autoloading 52-caliber 155mm cannon). Both of these competing systems could fire three times the rounds of the Paladin at considerably longer ranges.

It wouldn’t be an issue because the Army was working on a replacement already - the XM2001 Crusader, a thoroughly modern self-propelled gun with a 52-caliber 155mm cannon and an automatic transloader vehicle. It was the ultimate cannon to defend the Fulda Gap against the Red Tide… which was problematic at the time because that threat didn’t exist any more and doubly so after 9/11. So like many Cold War legacy programs it was cancelled by Donald Rumsfeld during his apocalyptic tenure as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

Not to worry, the Army had a backup plan! Enter Future Combat Systems, a program that happened because the Army brass saw the Air Force make the F-35 too big to fail and thought that was a good procurement model. The XM1203 Non-Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C), developed as one of the FCS “family” of tracked combat vehicles, sporting a lightweight 39-caliber 155mm cannon with a high-speed autoloader and minimal crew requirements. It would have been the ideal cannon for the lightweight expeditionary Army of the post-Cold War era… and then Iraq happened. The bad part of Iraq where we were losing a hundred guys killed every month with no end in sight. After the Republicans were routed in the 2006 elections and Rumsfeld shown the door his successor, Robert Gates, axed the entire program as yet another Rumsfeld-era boondoggle with no value to win the War on Terror.

This left the Army’s fleet of increasingly-worn out M109A6s soldiering on into the 2010s, and replacement vehicles were needed. Enter the M109A7 - basically a program to drop the existing M109A6 turret onto a suitably adapted Bradley chassis to ease maintenance and recapitalize the fleet. The M109A7 didn’t offer any actual new capability, but it would keep the Field Artillery in business until a new cannon could be brought into service, because it was now the late 2010s and most serious armies on the planet had moved on to autoloading long-barrel systems.

Enter ERCA, the US Army’s plan to leapfrog the competition with a fantastically long 58-caliber 155mm cannon… mounted on the same Bradley-derived chassis of the M109A7. If you take a short survey of modern tracked, armored, long-barrel SPGs - 2S19, 2S35, K9, PzH 2000, etc. - you’ll notice that they’re all quite heavy, with most of them built on a tank chassis or a specialized heavy artillery chassis. That capability isn’t free. The Army was trying to stuff an even longer autoloading cannon onto an IFV chassis, and ran into easily-predictable issues with weight and then - once they cut capability to fix it - into equally predictable issues with bore wear given the extreme ranges they were trying to drive this cannon to (70+ kilometers for a gun about 10% longer than cannons maxxing out at half that). So that program got cancelled last month for what were basically technical feasibility issues.

In any event the US Army’s current plan seems to be to go to war with the M109A7 and, if the performance of similar 39-caliber systems in Ukraine is any indication, lose the counter-battery fight and get a lot of artillerymen killed manning obsolescent guns.

Xi Jinping held a ceremony to welcome the President of the Federated States of Micronesia to visit China.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1779037694783627336

People often say that China is not very good in soft power but this is an example of something that they unarguably do much better that the West: treating all countries, no matter how small (we’re talking Micronesia here, about 100k inhabitants), the same when their leaders visit China, with all the State’s honors and personal reception by the President.

I don’t think Micronesia - or any similarly small country - got the same type of welcome in Washington. In fact I checked and the President of Micronesia visited Washington in 2023 and was received by… the White House’s Indo Pacific coordinator.

This sends a clear message of respect, and of abiding by the principle inscribed in the UN Charter that all nations are the same.

As often with China, their messaging isn’t so much in grand declarations but rather symbols that shows their commitment to certain principles. As such we often don’t get the messaging ourselves because interpretating symbols is not soo much in our culture. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an impact. If you’re Micronesian for instance in this case, you understand the messaging extremely well.

https://twitter.com/S_Mahendrarajah/status/1778804475618107467

‘Iran will bomb Israel tonight!’

Nah. That was an attention grabber. Daily headlines that an Iranian strike is ‘imminent’ or ‘in 48 hours’ prompt me to explain military and intelligence purposes that lead Iran to feed data to U.S. intel sources. This in turn generates news headlines. These purposses include PSYOPS, concealment (by Iran of their plans), and deceit (of Israel). The Russian terms Maskirovka (concealment; маскировка) & Dezinformatsiya (deception; дезинформация) are popular—among an older generation of intel analysts—given KGB’s superlative use of Dezinformatsiya to advance Maskirovka. Iranians are no slouches in this respect if IRGC’s operations in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria are yardsticks. But this will be IRGC’s biggest op yet.

Psychological Operations (PSYOPS)

Israelis are bullies unaccustomed to being punched in the mouth. They are wearing adult diapers and begging Washington for help. ‘Please daddy, don’t let the mullahs hit me.’ Fear of the punch is damaging Israelis’ mental health. U.S. has been begging Iran not to hit their ‘baby,’ but refusing to chastise the bully for violating the Vienna Convention. It behooves Iran to maintain a high level of psychological pressure on Israelis. When the blow falls, Israelis may be relieved! Meanwhile, they are swallowing Immodium, Valium, and Ambien like M&M’s.

Concealment and Deceit

The goal is for Iran to conceal its activities while deceiving Israel and USA. Disinformation is used as an ‘active measure’ to advance deception.

Preparations for war generate electronic communications (‘chatter’) and physical movements of people and equipment. ‘Chatter’ are the electronic signals and communications captured by SIGINT (signals intelligence) services (NSA, GCHQ, etc.). Even if an intercepted signal (e.g. email) is encrypted and the ciphertext cannot be decrypted, its existence suggests ongoing activity. To illustrate, if an officer at a missile depot in Camp X rarely receives a call from Tehran, but now receives calls daily, pattern analysis indicates that something is going on. Thus, it benefits IRGC to generate activities—electronic chatter and physical movements—that are harvested by enemy electronic intelligence systems. The best place to hide a needle is in a stack of needles. IRGC will generate needless activities to feed the enemy. Hence headlines like ‘Khatm al-Anbiya base is on high alert’; and ‘Iran is deploying air defenses around Tehran’ (this was done long ago, although more units may be added). Somewhere in the midst of these ‘needles’ is hidden the real ‘needle.’

An added benefit is that IRGC intelligence and the Ministry of Intelligence will be able to identify leaks by individuals (human intel; HUMINT) and compromises to their electronic communications systems. If, for example, a headline appears that ‘100 drones and missiles will be launched,’ this will help intel officers identify the source(s) of the information.

https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1778682534123172215

The MV Dali collided with the Key Bridge in Baltimore three weeks ago and so little has been done for remediation that if this was happening in Russia or China we’d have people writing Ph.D dissertations on this website about poor state capacity and shaken trust in “regimes.” ⬇️

Let’s look at the current status of things three weeks in:

• M/V Dali remains aground and has not been freed from bridge debris, let alone unloaded, refloated, and evacuated to drydock
• Practically no progress has been made clearing debris, because:
• The handful of small floating cranes on site are obviously not up to the task, because:
• Apparently the Biden Administration decided this would be an ALL AMERICAN salvage effort and refused to bring in foreign crane ships with far greater capacity, thus:
• Workers are being endangered by being ordered to cut the bridge debris into small chunks manageable by the low-capacity cranes on site, complicated by the fact much of this work must be done underwater
• The Port of Baltimore remains closed to all heavy traffic and authorities expect it to remain closed through at least May, which is very optimistic
• Officials expect a replacement bridge might be inaugurated in a decade, which could itself be optimistic

Let’s be real - if this had happened in China the port would have been open in days and construction on a replacement span would be underway as we speak. This incident is beginning to illustrate the decline in the real state capacity of the United States of America in the starkest possible terms.