Radio War Nerd EP #581 — Missile Warfare, feat. Jennifer Kavanagh

Had the joy of explaining to someone the Millennium Challenge 2002 the other day.

Her comment about Israel’s “need” to defend itself from Hamas’ “poor” rockets truly stopped me in my tracks

Very informative I just found the comment about the USA going full ww2 production mode to be kind of odd. To steal someone’s phrase “we aren’t those people anymore”

I need you, Mark and JD. To understand that the West is right and they know they are right and they are winning and know they are winning. They are right for the wrong reasons, but for now their delusions are cushioned by trillions of dollars and the most effective and massive hard and soft power machinery of control that has ever existed in history. The Carney speech wasn’t a concession speech like Arnaud Bertrand said. It was a warning: the gloves are off. The Trump Administration was given power because he’s the man those in power need and want to take the gloves off and take the heat for it. They get to look principled while “reluctantly” and “slowly” reverting all their actions and all their power moves to the ways that worked before 1945. And this time they are going to take everything or destroy it. That means the western hemisphere, Africa, near east, south and Southeast Asia, Eurasia, and the final bosses are Russia and China. As it was and as it always will be. But they are going to do everything to destroy both and they’re not going to fuck up like the Nazis did before NATO took the reich’s place or the way Japan fucked up in China.

RWN should get Ted Postol on some time to talk Patriots etc

One of the better episodes in a while. Thanks War Boys!

Did anyone chiming in to hate on the guest even bother reading her article? Or listening to the episode? The point of interviewing her was to get an idea of the current reality of U.S. logistics, the political mechanisms through which aid is being delivered to Ukraine, etc.. This is the first time on the show that someone has been able to talk in detail about these things. I'm willing to believe she's wrong about certain things, like the quality of this interceptor vs. that interceptor, or how great the THAAD is. But that's not the main point of the interview, or her article. It's a snapshot of the American empire's ability to manufacture missile defense systems, the leadership's political priorities and commitments (and how they changed from Biden to Trump 2.0), and some of the ramifications. It's genuinely enlightening to know just how few Patriots are manufactured a month, and how fast our stockpiles of certain materiel gets cleared out when they're actually needed. The stuff about Europe being potentially stronger than Russia if they just worked together and the U.S. needing to be more careful in shepherding its resources so it still has gas in the tank for other potential crises is whatever. A matter of opinion.

Some of yall really continue to surprise me “Why does this person, whose entire education and career has been inside an ecosystem that takes its first principles from established foreign policy blob precepts, not understand these obvious contradictions??” Yeah. I wonder

The “imbalance between the unit cost of offensive and defensive weapons” is a puzzle piece I’ve been looking for, for a while. I think it fits in with the pendulum swing from “highly and expensively trained professional soldiers” (ie French knights/heavy cavalry) to cheaply trained & armored conscripts/levee on masse soldiers (idk, crossbow men). Spitballing, I guess one way you can look at the changing dynamics of the battlefield is by calculating the disparity between the number of man hours put into a soldier on one side and the number of man hours put into the counter for that soldier, or piece of equipment

Jennifer is wrong to take European leaders at their word that they genuinely doubt Europe's ability to defend itself against Russia. These are not (generally speaking) stupid people, and they fully understand that Russia is no threat to any NATO country. They're just paid well to pretend otherwise.

Told you. Rubio just made the U.S. position to Europe clear: Be our Eurasian Israel and wage covert war on Russia for the next century or we will leave you to be gobbled up by your former colonies. https://xcancel.com/BenjaminNorton/status/2022877849300988392#m

Every midwit who talks about how the U.S. ramped up industrial production for WW2 is oblivious to the status of American manufacturing, power generation, and the literal nuts and bolts of what would be constructed now vs. what was being constructed in 1942 as a matter of complexity and as a matter of what raw and processed materials we have in the U.S. for what was being built in 1942 vs. what we need to build our toys now. Sure, if you need to construct 200 million new AR-15s in a month you can reprogram every CNC in the country. If you need to build one F-35, you need raw and processed materials from China that in a war we are not going to have and if we're lucky we can figure out how to build a single F-35 100% domestically in 16 months. The reality is that if the U.S. ever needs to ramp up wartime production, it's already over. Manufacturing has remained stagnant for 25 years. The shift to a wartime command economy requires political, economic, legal, and social leadership and investment that does not exist and will never exist again in this country absent this level of shock, which will not bring anyone together. It will have everyone tearing each other throats out. Whatever is left will have to pick up that burden/responsibility, but at that point you will have a much bigger problem just in terms of who is going to keep the lights on and who is going to deal with the debt collectors now that the dollar is dead.

i can't say i learned much from this one

May need an Ukraine update soon. I know we’ve been sticking to general negotiations/strategic updates, but as far as I can tell Ukraine is having a legitimate counter offensive in Donbas. For February they may have even equaled or outgained russia in terms of square kilometers. But even if that’s inaccurate we’d all appreciate an update lol

20:40-20:50 Its interesting that this view still dominates the defense discussion. People think that industrial capacity is something that you can just turn on with the press of a button. Did people collectively forget that the elites sold off our domestic industrial base decades ago?

Thank you for limiting it to 40 minutes. Such a waste of time. Bachelor & PhD in Political Science and Government. Has very little idea of the substance of what she is talking about -- physics, manufacturing, mass production, technical characteristics of the weapon systems. Claimed that THAAD is the best of the best (face palm), that U.S. could ramp up military production a'la WWII (not possible no matter the money), that Ukrainians've been successful in intercepting Russian missiles (!) and drones, that U.S. just didn't give its better systems (name one that actually exists) because of the concerns of the U.S. deeper involvement in targeting (can it get any deeper?), "because Russia is a dictatorship" (double facepalm). Bollocks from start to finish. A typical D.C. think tank parasite. Worse than Sam Bendett because I felt Sam was aware of his grift while she came across as a true believer in her own B.S.

Giving WW2 as an example of how production can be ramped up when they really need it? Production capacity , skilled labour, supply chains , critical minerals , a capable political class , a willing population? Just an opinion, but does anyone think that just because of necessity the current USA could morph into WW2 USA in short notice? It would have to be a concerted effort by society to get into that kind of shape. Otherwise it sounds like magical thinking.

I don’t think many people who listen to this podcast are particularly interested in the strategic interests of the United States.’

First.