(C) Common Dreams
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Military Spending Surges, Creating New Boom for Arms Makers [1]
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Date: 2022-12-18
And none of this counts an estimated $18 billion of planned but now delayed weapons deliveries by the United States to arm Taiwan against a possible future attack by China.
The combination of the Ukraine war and the growing consensus about the emergence of a new era of superpower confrontation is prompting efforts to ensure the military industrial base can respond to surges in demand. The issue has become urgent in some cases as the U.S. and its NATO allies seek to keep weapons flowing to Ukraine without diminishing their own stocks to worrisome levels.
The Ukrainian military has run through years’ worth of the missile production capacity of Western suppliers in a matter of months. At the same time, contractors remain concerned about investing to meet growing demand for weapons that could dry up again when the war ends or politics shifts course.
“The difficulty of starting a production line back up, that doesn’t come for free,” Tom Arseneault, president of BAE Systems, which is now considering restarting its M777 howitzer manufacturing line, which the company had been in the process of shutting down. The M777 is a highly accurate, towed gun that fires 155-millimeter artillery shells, which are also in diminishing supply.
The annual military authorization bill that passed the Senate on Thursday prevents the Air Force and Navy from retiring aging weapons systems that the military would like to take out of service, including certain C-130 transport planes or F-22 fighter jets. At the same time, it includes billions of dollars in extra money to build even more new ships and planes than the Pentagon itself asked for, including $2.2 billion alone for an extra Navy-guided missile destroyer, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
And there is $678 million to expand ammunition plants in spots such as Scranton, Pa.; Middletown, Iowa; and Kingsport, Tenn., where contractors work with the Army to manufacture the ammunition that Ukrainian artillery crews have burned through at an alarming rate. (The money for these programs is expected to be included in a huge appropriations bill that appears to be on track to pass Congress and signed into law by Mr. Biden by the end of the week.)
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/us/politics/defense-contractors-ukraine-russia.html
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