The US has been giving away ordinance freely to the likes of Israel, Ukraine plus starting several wars that is using up the existing stockpile….
Trump administration officials have privately told lawmakers they’re weighing use of the Cold War–era Defense Production Act to push weapons makers to crank out more munitions as the war with Iran burns through US stockpiles, three sources tell NBC News. The law would let the government force defense firms to prioritize specific weapons, largely to refill air-defense and interceptor inventories. Sources tell the Washington Post the stocks are being depleted at speed: Those sources say the US military could be just “days away” from needing to prioritize which targets it intercepts. What you need to know:
- Publicly, the White House and Pentagon insist the military has what it needs, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying stockpiles are sufficient to achieve Trump’s current goals “and beyond.” President Trump, however, has called on defense contractors to speed things up.
- Seth Jones, the president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, paints a different picture for NPR: “The reality is neither Israel nor the United States have sufficient munitions, either offensive or defensive, for a war that really lasts weeks into months.”
- Business Insider focuses on Patriot missiles, reporting the US is “leaning hard” on them to neutralize Iranian missile and drone bombardments. It flags a late 2024 assessment from Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, who said conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine had “eaten into” Patriot stockpiles, “and to say otherwise would be dishonest.”
- Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, echoes that in comments to NBC: “We now have a lot of partners using Patriot systems,” among them Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “Those are all American systems, and so the backlog of countries that are going to need replenishment is going to be extraordinary, and they’ll need it quickly.”
- NBC points out that the Defense Production Act has been invoked in recent years: by Trump during the pandemic to accelerate the manufacturing of personal protective and medical equipment, and by President Biden to deal with a baby formula shortage. Trump actually invoked it last month to boost the supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides.
Defense Production Act?
The Defense Production Act gives the federal government broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of national defense.
The act was signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1950 amid supply concerns during the Korean War. But over its now decades-long history, the law’s powers have been invoked not only in times of war but also for domestic emergency preparedness, as well as recovery from terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
One of the act’s provisions allows the president to require companies to prioritize government contracts and orders deemed necessary for national defense, with the goal of ensuring the private sector is producing enough goods needed during war or other emergencies. Other provisions give the president the ability to use loans and additional incentives to increase production of critical goods, and authorize the government to establish voluntary agreements with private industry.
The DPA is “one of the government’s most powerful and adaptable industrial policy tools,” said Joel Dodge, an attorney and the director of industrial policy and economic security at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.
Anthropic is the last of its AI peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network. CEO Dario Amodei repeatedly has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.
The Defense Production Act gives the federal government broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of national defense.
The act was signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1950 amid supply concerns during the Korean War. But over its now decades-long history, the law’s powers have been invoked not only in times of war but also for domestic emergency preparedness, as well as recovery from terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
One of the act’s provisions allows the president to require companies to prioritize government contracts and orders deemed necessary for national defense, with the goal of ensuring the private sector is producing enough goods needed during war or other emergencies. Other provisions give the president the ability to use loans and additional incentives to increase production of critical goods, and authorize the government to establish voluntary agreements with private industry
If the Defense Department does invoke the DPA to give the military more authority to use Anthropic’s products without its approval, that could mean forcing the company to adapt its model to the Pentagon’s needs without built-in safety limits, or remove certain ethical restrictions from the company’s contract language.
Remove ethical restrictions….well that fits into Donny and Pistol Pete’s wheelhouse.
A side note: the US lost about $2 billion in inventory the first few days of this stupid war,,,,
The US has lost nearly $2 billion worth of military equipment amid its military operations against Iran since Saturday, according to estimates and data compiled by Anadolu.
The chief driver of the cost is a US AN/FPS-132 early warning radar system at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, valued at $1.1 billion, which was hit with a missile strike by Iran on Saturday. Qatar confirmed that the radar was hit and damaged.
Here is crazy idea take all the promised ordinance away from parasite states like Ukraine and Israel and tell them to buck up…..or better yet stop all these unnecessary wars as well.
Just a thought.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”