So recently with the reports of Israel running low on AD missiles, I’ve been thinking. Why is it that during the “war on terror,” equipment stocks never seemed to be as much of an issue. From my memory in Iraq and Afganistan and such it was more of a logistics issue vs literally not being able to produce enough. Idk, maybe my memory is just wrong here. But I wanted to ask
The capital composition of the US military industrial complex has evolved quite a lot since its birth during the preparation for WWII and the primary industries involved that produced basic high use materiel like artillery shells and bullets had to diversify and switch operations to other commodities, primarily more high tech (although not necessarily useful or quality tech), less quantity, higher price stuff because they’d go bust after the stockpiles and quotas for shells etc were full.
If anyone did an economic history of US MIC companies there would be a lot of merges and repurposing of the old shell factories etc since they’re very useful for long term combat in land warfare, not so much for just restocking a standing army that uses some in exercises.
Basically you have vampiric companies diversifying outside the war economy context that created them so there’s no need for industrial scale production on a war economy level and they switch to producing far fewer but more Gucci missile systems and components.