The U.S. Military is a Paper Dragon
War with Iran Uses Up More Missiles Than the U.S. can Produce In Several Years
If there’s one thing the war with Iran has revealed, it’s that the U.S. government is woefully underprepared for any sustained conflict, despite spending more on its military than China, Russia, and many more countries combined.
In the first few months of the war with Iran, the U.S. military used up over 1,000 tomahawk missiles, leaving only 2,000 in stockpiles. A third of its inventory, for a war with no strategic benefit to the U.S., that Americans are paying for at the pump and Iranians are paying for with their lives.
The U.S. military budget is now over $1.5 trillion dollars for 2027. An eye-watering amount for a nation running an annual deficit of $1.9 trillion, exceeding the entire annual spending of the British government.
You’d think that money would be going towards actual preparations for future wars. Instead, it appears to be largely corruption and graft. It is well known that the Pentagon routinely overpays for everything from missiles to toilets by orders of magnitude. That would be bad enough if at least the average American was getting something out of it.
A Pentagon official said last week, “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.” They know it, and they’re continuing this pointless war anyway. Trump can’t think more than about a week ahead. Despite saying “America first” in his campaign promises, he’s left the U.S. more vulnerable than it has been in decades.
America’s annual Tomahawk production is about 86 per year. That means in this pointless war with Iran, the U.S. consumed over 10 years of Tomahawk missile production.
And it’s not just Tomahawks. The THAAD interceptors the U.S. military uses to shoot down enemy missiles are in even worse shape. There were exactly zero delivered between July 2023 and now, with none expected until April 2027.
U.S. batteries fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first 4 days of the Iranian war, using up 1.5 years of Lockheed and Boeing production. There’s such a backlog for missile orders that most of them won’t be getting fulfilled until 2030 and beyond. The stockpile picture is bleak.
Being Israel’s puppet has serious consequences.
The U.S. military is now even more vulnerable to China and Russia. China has been eyeing a ground invasion of Taiwan for years. They run annual drills. Taiwan’s TSMC produces 70% of all the world’s chips. The U.S. military has committed to protecting them, but how would they? They’re tied up on the other side of the world, using up their missiles to fuel Trump’s ego and bravado. China gets to sit back and watch their enemy make a mistake, and as the quote goes - they’re not interrupting.
What happens to all those extremely expensive aircraft carriers the U.S. government likes to intimate other countries with when a barrage of Chinese missiles hits them and there’s no interceptors left to protect them?
China, having spent the past 30 years industrializing, can build 5-6x as many missiles as the U.S., and has a shipbuilding capacity 230x that of the U.S. In any prolonged war the U.S. would run out of supplies in the first few months and then be completely unprotected. Major wars last for years, not months, and neither the U.S. military stockpile nor its industrial base can support this.
The corrupt politicians in D.C. have spent the past few decades invading countries around the world under false pretenses and stealing taxpayer money, while depleting the military’s actual reserves, leaving Americans less secure than ever before; while making everyone around the world hate them.
The U.S. military is a paper dragon, and it won’t take much adversity to knock it over - and with it, the U.S. empire.
Prepare accordingly.
The Exit
We can’t do anything to stop the government’s out of control spending. We can’t vote our way out of this mess. The U.S. will go bankrupt, and its enemies are waiting, patiently.
What we can do is become so independent of the system that when bad things happen, their impact is minimized on us. Move out of the city, grow a garden, start exercising, connect with your neighbors, go off the grid so grid disruptions don’t affect you.
I’m writing a series on prepping here and a series on homesteading here. Don’t wait for things to get bad, by then it’s too late. You can’t buy fencing and get chickens when supply chains snap. You’ve seen what happened during COVID. Don’t let yourself get caught by surprise.