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In spite of the rough lessons on the importance of mass in the Korean and Vietnam Wars in the second half of the 20th Century—and even the cold bucket of sand thrown in our face about what is required for even heavy imperial policing like we had in Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of the first decade of this century—a large segment of the national security nomenklatura was content with boutique-levels of warstocks in our relatively shallow magazines. We’ve discussed this here and at the OG Blog for a long time, as have others, but until recently the need to purchase and stockpile the weapons we know we will need in the big fight—heck, like we’ve seen in Iran recently, even for extended punitive expeditions—simply has not been getting the support it needs. It is nice to at last see a shift, but let’s not celebrate it until we understand how we got here. If we don’t have a good understanding why we forgot the need for the magazine depth that is inefficient in peacetime but essential in war, then we are condemned to repeat it when the immediacy of the crisis starts to fade and the accountants, backed by hucksters selling sketchy theories, start clawing back supremacy in the argument. Generations have grown to positions of power in our defense establishment riding on their success of selling the shallowness of our magazines as a reflection of modern natsec theory. It started before the guns from WWII were even cold. Most famous was the nuclear club that convinced everyone, because they were the Smartest People in the Room™, that ‘war was new’ and that they knew that the future was nuclear. No need for large navies, armies, or tactical air forces taking up space with ‘old think’. No. Nuclear war will either be the new normal, or would prevent wars from happening at all. Oops. We don’t really need to cover the Jesus Jones Era and the peace dividend that didn’t even last a decade. After Desert Fox and the Balkans conflicts, at least to me, it became clear that the few hundred TLAM expended were a shockingly large dent in our precision stockpile. Once I got a peek at the numbers, it had me nosing around everything from Light Weight Torpedo inventory to small arms ammo. Then at the end of the century I got a peek at some of our OPLAN requirement…and even then, there was no there there. JOs would ask questions like: “What happens when we run out of XXX and YYY. There is only enough for about two weeks at the rate we will expend them.” The answer from those trusted to be ready to fight, “That is not our job here.” It never got better because the issue never had the top cover it needed. No accountability then or now. Then 9/11 happened. It has been a quarter century since then, and we still have the problem of numbers. The vanity of our ‘Deterrence by Denial’ vs. ‘Deterrence by Punishment’ debate was, as Bryan pointed out in the link, largely an argument by those trying to wrap their desire to under-resource the military in a pseudo-intellectual wrapper—roughly from the same school that thought a ‘light footprint strategy’ was a smart strategy in GWOT. Cheaper for the accountants, disastrously expensive for strategists. The worst school of thought was being sold by highly credentialed and self-referential natsec luminaries to gullible people lusting for a sage to give them an easy fix to a hard problem: the concept of a ‘72-hour War’. Anyone who thinks there is an easy and cheap solution to hard national security challenges is at best not a very good student of history, or at worst a fool, most likely thinks the people who buy their Theory™ are fools. Someone briefed Putin the 72-hour CONOPS in February of 2022, and we all know where that led to. The Russians clearly had an industrial scale problem with optimism filters in the buildup to their 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but they are not the only ones with that problem. Effective militaries are not cheap. The desire to save money on a military you might needs is only encouraged for the very real need you have to sate the appetites of your political allies who want that money for something else now. If some bright guys with solid reputations from All the Right People™ can tell you this is also the ‘smart power’ and ‘modern thinking’ approach to war at the same time, then all the better. For those who do not have the spine to take the pressure and the wisdom to listen for hard truths, people offering comfortable vignettes that help justify smaller investments will allow you to work backward from ‘less’ to justify the smaller purchases justified by the assumption that the war might never come. Well, not ‘you,’ since someone else will be holding the bill when it comes due. What is the opposite of stewardship? Neglect? Exploitation? Pick one of those or another more fitting. This is very much a ‘feeling and believing’-centered worldview encouraged by a willingness to be an agent of neglect, that won the argument for a long time against a ‘reason and knowing’ world view attempting to execute responsible stewardship. The kindest view, and probably describes some or not all of our situation, is that good people in hard jobs did the best they could do, and tried to keep as much as possible on life support until opinions—and funding—change directions. That’s the past. Can’t change it, but what do we do now? Time to look at our elders’ bar tab. Over at The Dispatch earlier this month, our friend Mackenzie Eaglen lays some sobering numbers on the table using clear and direct language. Art. A beautiful music to my ears. Credible institutions and war colleges all come to the same war-gamed conclusions: The U.S. military consistently runs out of critical long-range weapons within the first weeks of a major war. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Hal Brands has warned, without immediate investment, America can “get ready for ‘missile famine’ if there is a great-power war.” Operation Epic Fury offers a real-world preview of exactly that scenario. The American military reportedly fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles over a few weeks, even though this weapon is built at a rate of just 90 to 100 units per year. Absent acceleration, replenishing this key armament from one short but intense operation would take roughly 10 years. And the offensive munitions shelf is only half of the problem. Stocks of defensive weapons protecting our troops or territory, such as the Patriot interceptors or THAAD missile defense system, are running either very low or nearly empty. Since 2021, we have produced around three dozen or fewer THAAD interceptors per year, but fired off 150 during last summer’s 12-Day War against Iran. On the current schedule it would take three-and-a-half years to replace what was fired in just under two weeks. As for the critical Patriot interceptor, relied on by militaries around the world, the Pentagon used more than 1,200 against Iran in Epic Fury. While the Army hopes to order 2,798 PAC-3 missiles with the pending budget request, those funded in the annual base budget won’t begin delivery until May 2029. This shortfall is all over the warfighting spectrum. This generational habit created some incredible weapons, but they are designed for a world where no war lasts more than a portion of a deployment. I’m sorry, that is not the world we live in. The popular precision strike missile (or PrSM), also heavily used against Iran, has a construction timeline of 36 months. The Tomahawk’s build time averages 26 months. In all these cases, the long build cycles offset plans to order munitions in large quantities. That leaves the U.S. military to supplement what it does not have with what it does—a plethora of old, cheap, non-precision weapons that would fail to accomplish strategic goals in an environment such as the South China Sea, where long-range precision strike capabilities are critical. There is no training timeout in war. You keep going until one side loses the will or capacity to continue. Precision weapons are, more than anything else, life savers. They save the life of your people. When you run out of precision weapons, you can’t ‘touch base’ and stop the game, it keeps going. In order to bring the fight to the enemy—unless you want to quit—then you will have to use other, less precise weapons—weapons that will force you to close the enemy and lose a lot more of your people in the process: a much deadlier battlefield for you, and maybe or maybe not for your enemy. It does not have to be that way, but we have to make changes and find the funding to ensure it doesn’t happen. Change is not easy when so many people have their jobs, paychecks, and egos wrapped around … well … how things have always been done. Thankfully, this is a solvable problem—but not in the traditional Washington way. A wartime production surge to rebuild the industrial base and boost manufacturing capacity is part of the answer. But it’s just as important to rethink what America builds and how we build it—pursuing production with intention, putting more key assets underground, and modifying what we already possess. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to think about making what we already have better—and make new things with a different mindset. America’s military needs weapons it can print by the thousands and lose by the hundreds without breaking the budget. The Pentagon must ramp up its build-to-print model for munitions. America’s government research labs have tremendous innovative ideas primed for production. Outsourcing the key fabrication of parts while keeping design control in-house will help yield tangible results sooner. The military can also repurpose older weapons and reimagine uses for legacy systems with modest modifications. The Hellfire missile, originally designed in the 1970s, had by the 2010s become a victim of its own success: effective enough to keep ordering but too expensive to keep in surplus. By redesigning the Hellfire’s warhead and guidance section into a modular configuration, Lockheed Martin transformed the existing Hellfire airframes into a substantially more effective asset for its replacement system. Weapons that had been warehoused as second-tier munitions came back into inventory as first-tier ones. Scale. We need not just industrial scale, but intellectual scale. We need a growing mass of people with access to—or better yet control of—levers of power to force change. If we rely on the same people, institutions, and processes that got us here to force that change, we will fail. Towards the end of her article, Mackenzie coins a phrase—really a warning—that captures our legacy problem well. We have leaned back on our grandfather’s pride of our nation being the mid-20th century’s Arsenal of Democracy far past the point it was still valid. We’ve morphed into something else. Emphasis is mine. Until our arsenal is rebuilt and restocked, a commercial mindset to acquire technology rapidly and purchase off-the-shelf components must reign supreme in government. A majority of the munitions mentioned above are housed within the mandatory portion of the 2027 defense budget request. This side of the ledger is key to making one-time injections at scale into the munitions, shipbuilding, and drone industrial bases, accounting for surge capacity. If reconciliation does not become reality, the low quantities requested in discretionary funds for 2027 will ensure America remains the artisan of democracy and not the arsenal. Exquisite designed, Tiffany-jawed, and craft-built may look good at trade shows, but they don’t win wars that last more than 72-hours. The Artisan of Democracy is an invitation to disaster. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

The United States just used its most powerful conventional bombs against the deepest underground nuclear facility in the world. Those bombs worked — and they also revealed exactly where current physics ends and the next weapons problem begins. DARPA is now looking for solutions to that problem. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s […]View the full article

Three years after a Chinese balloon drifted across the continental United States and was shot down off the South Carolina coast, the U.S. Army is now buying the same technology for itself, and the shopping list it published tells a story about how American commanders plan to watch the Pacific in any future conflict. The […]View the full article

American Rheinmetall and electric vehicle startup Harbinger announced a partnership on May 27 to develop and field a family of robotic and uncrewed ground vehicles for the U.S. Department of War, pairing a combat vehicle integration specialist with a commercially derived hybrid-electric chassis designed from the ground up for autonomous operation. The teaming, announced from […]View the full article

A Texas-based startup has reached a milestone in its effort to fundamentally change how the United States manufactures rocket fuel, completing end-to-end propellant operations for two manufacturing systems at its facility in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory, X-Bow Systems announced. The milestone covers both the company’s Rocket Factory in a Box, a containerized […]View the full article

Elbit Systems has folded another autonomy company into its defense portfolio, acquiring Israel’s Blue White Robotics through its FUSE unit in a deal aimed at turning ordinary off-road vehicles into self-driving military and security machines. The Haifa-based defense company said FUSE completed the purchase of 100% of Bluewhite’s shares, adding an Israeli developer best known […]View the full article

North Korea tested three different weapons systems on May 26 under the personal supervision of leader Kim Jong Un, including a lightweight multipurpose missile launcher that analysts have compared to the American HIMARS rocket artillery system, a new 240mm guided rocket with expanded range, and a tactical cruise missile that Pyongyang claims can hit any […]View the full article

One of America’s most battle-tested rocket artillery systems just got a new round of engineering investment, with the U.S. Army awarding Lockheed Martin a $14 million contract modification to sustain and improve the Multiple Launch Rocket System across all its production variants. The award, issued by Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, brings the […]View the full article

Canadian armored vehicle manufacturer Roshel will debut three new military platforms at CANSEC 2026 in Ottawa, leading with a modular light utility vehicle that can convert from a standard unprotected configuration to a STANAG Level 2 armored vehicle in approximately two hours, offering NATO-aligned militaries a way to maintain battlefield-ready protected transport without sustaining large […]View the full article

Every cruise missile, every fighter jet, every missile defense interceptor, and every military helicopter flying today depends on a class of magnets so powerful and so small that the weapons systems built around them would be unrecognizable without them. For most of the past two decades, almost all of those magnets came from China. Two […]View the full article

Every time an F-35 lands, its brakes absorb an enormous amount of heat. The world’s most advanced stealth fighter weighs more than 29,000 pounds fully loaded, lands at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour, and stops using a braking system that has to dissipate that kinetic energy within the length of a runway. When the […]View the full article

The Javelin Joint Venture delivered the first Lightweight Command Launch Units to the U.S. Army, putting a next-generation launcher into soldiers’ hands that offers twice the target detection and recognition range of the unit it replaces while cutting weight by 25 percent and size by 30 percent. The delivery, announced from Tucson, Arizona where Raytheon […]View the full article

Thales completed the first successful test firings of its new X-Fire multiple rocket launcher, confirming that France is moving at serious pace toward a sovereign long-range strike capability that does not depend on foreign ammunition for its core operational function. The system, developed jointly with French vehicle manufacturer Soframe and mounted on an agile 8×8 […]View the full article

Beretta Defense Technologies will unveil a new remote-controlled weapon station for counter-drone operations at Eurosatory 2026 in Paris next month, bringing to the exhibition a platform that mounts eight Benelli Drone Guardian shotgun systems on a single automated turret capable of tracking and engaging drone targets without requiring an operator to physically aim the weapon. […]View the full article

Three American defense companies have been selected to compete in the Phase II qualifier of the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program in June 2026 at Camp Grayling, Michigan, putting them in contention for a share of a program that aims to deliver more than 300,000 drones to U.S. forces by 2027 under a total budget of […]View the full article

Teledyne FLIR Defense announced a major upgrade to its Rogue 1 loitering munition at SOF Week in Tampa, doubling the system’s operating range to more than 12 miles and adding an anti-armor warhead that uses shaped charge jet technology to defeat more heavily protected targets than the original platform could engage. The Rogue 1 Block […]View the full article

Teledyne FLIR Defense unveiled a new throwable reconnaissance robot at SOF Week in Tampa that shares a common controller with the company’s Black Hornet 4 nano-drone, allowing a single soldier to operate both a ground robot and an aerial drone without switching equipment or relearning workflows. The FirstLook 125, announced at the special operations conference […]View the full article

So, half a decade after we started the program to design our next oiler, all we have is this circa-1998 MS Paint graphic. We have what we have. Let’s look at where it started. The TAOL program (referred to in some documents as the NGLS or Next-Generation Medium Logistics Ship program) was initiated in the Navy’s FY2021 budget submission. The program envisages building a new class of CLF ships (or a family of CLF ship designs) that would be smaller and individually less expensive to procure than the Navy’s current CLF ships. Figure 1 shows a sketch of a Navy notional TAOL design concept. The Navy states that the TAOL is planned to be, “a new class of ships to augment the traditional Combat Logistics Force (CLF) to enable refueling, rearming, and resupply of Naval assets— afloat and ashore—near contested environments via ship-to-ship operations and ship-to port operations in support of Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE), and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO). Augmenting the traditional CLF, NGLS will provide a flexible, responsive platform to move fuel, personnel, equipment, and supplies between ships, advanced bases, ports, and dispersed nodes of the seabase; sustaining afloat (Surface Action Group) and ashore (Expeditionary Advanced Base) requirements.” The theory behind the T-AOL program is that future logistics requirements will shift toward a “smaller, more numerous” fleet to support dispersed operations, and sees it operating in littoral areas and contested environments, offering a smaller, more flexible, and more responsive logistical platform compared to existing large tankers. The “existing large tankers”—there’s the rub—we’ll get to that in a minute. That is the theory of the case for T-AOL. Sounds about right for the thinking of 2020/21. Place and time is important. Does it really reflect what recent combat operations tell us we need to “complement” existing tankers? The Maritime Gods of the Copybook Headings have had a field day since this concept became an official program—especially when it comes to the centrality of an effective auxiliary fleet to support a fighting fleet forward. The Red Hills fuel crisis in Hawaii makes getting the volume of fuel needed in the Pacific to support combat operations much more difficult. Real world, not theoretical, combat operations in the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf have proven that even third and fourth-rate naval powers can send the full-spectrum threat—from low-and-slow attack drones to anti-ship ballistic missiles—to any ship that gets inside its envelope. Poorly defended or inadequately escorted ships that wander close to shore are little more than floating monuments to arrogance. Access to safe and close logistics hubs and ready access for foreign ports cannot be assumed. Other nations may not share our national interests, nor have secure facilities outside the range of the enemy’s precision long-range fires. Our strike groups need to take their supplies with them, and in contested environments, the units will be many and the demands will outstrip the supply for everything from fuel to weapons. Putting all your goods in one basket is a risk, but you have to have baskets that can carry what you need. LOCE and EABO are not looking as good as they briefed half a decade ago. The case for molding the USMC and CLF around them at the expense of other missions is wearing very thin in the face of the reality of combat that we have all seen unfold since they were put forward. When will the T-AOL show up? Released earlier this month, the 2027 Shipbuilding Plan is our best datapoint as to the progress of the program, but besides having a “1” in the FY31 column, nothing more is mentioned. The program has shifted to the right, again. By the time they appear, will they still be the sole answer to our most pressing challenge when it comes to getting beans, bullets, and fuel to the fight? How many WorldWars lengths of time will it take for this program to serve the fleet? It’s looking like at least four at this point from when the program started. As the world’s largest navy continues to experiment and innovate with short development cycles, we continue to demonstrate why we are the world’s second largest navy. This is an auxiliary, a small one at that, not a nuclear submarine. Look what previous generations did with completely new systems in radically new platforms no one even thought of a decade earlier. They did it with slide rules. Back to the now. A lot has happened in the maritime world since 2021 that should inform how we structure the CLF. Do we need small capacity oilers? Sure, I can see that. It sure does distribute risk where you get close. Ships will be hit. They will be sunk. But you have to get across the planet first before you get close. Can we assume that the “Light” part means they will have a substantially smaller capacity and will carry it into the fight much slower? We do have one oiler in production, that has its own problems, but its in production. Generally known as the John Lewis class oiler, it is referred to as the T-AO 205 class oiler in the plan. The T-AO 205 class oiler is the replacement class for the current fleet of Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO 187) class oilers, which are reaching the end of service life. T-AO 205 class oilers will be the primary refuel asset to Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) and other afloat forces and will provide vital Navy intra-theater replenishment capabilities. These capabilities enable credible logistics support for global presence and wartime missions. These ships are produced by General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, CA. The first five T-AO 205s (hulls 205-209) have delivered with T-AO 210 planned to deliver in the summer of 2026. 31Navy plans to procure 20 of these ships. The 2024 block buy contract created opportunity to deliver remaining ships ahead of the planned delivery schedule with significant cost savings for Navy as well provide GD NASSCO’s industrial base with a stable workload through FY35. The 205’s carry 162,000 barrels of oil at 20 knots. How much will the “Light” carry? How fast? 100,000? 120,000? 80,000? 18 knots, 20 knots? Of course, we don’t know any of this a half-decade after the start of the program because we continue to use an ossified and accretion-encumbered system to design and build ships that has failed us over and over during the last three decades. We continue the failed policies and procedures of the past, and yet expect different results. Even worse, like LCS, we continue to shape our fleet by chasing the shadows of fleeting fashions and trends ungrounded in sound military experience, but instead by personality, exciting “pick me” theorists, and by some leaders’ desire to be seen as visionary people. Not solid stewards of maritime power, but “transformational visionaries”. Meanwhile in a parallel but very real universe, the world continues to demonstrate what is needed. We continue to ignore the clear requirement as we demand our carriers and surface combatants race from one hemisphere to another. The WWII and Cold War generations got it right: we need fast and big to feed the fleet on the high seas. It isn’t an “either/or” but an “and”. This year, from the Caribbean to the Arabian Sea, those who needed the US Navy to go wherever they needed to be appreciated the value that came from the Supply Class AOE/T-AOE. We only have two left. Fast combat support ships were envisioned the last time the US Navy faced a serious challenge on the high seas. That concept was reinforced by proper understanding of what would be required should we have to fight the Soviet Union. Too many have forgotten that in the Jesus Jones Era. Those same demands for global power projection, learned through experience in WWII and the Cold War, are back with the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China Though an atom-powered CVN can outrace a fast combat support ship, she is the only thing we have that can keep up with our conventionally powered escorts when they need to be the firstest with the mostest, all while carrying 177,000 barrels of oil at a top speed of 25 knots, along with ammo and dry stores. Are the T-AOLs really the only answer to what the 2030s Navy needs, or are they General Berger oilers running on bureaucratic inertia? Again, I can—if I squint—see a case for them, but only as part of the answer, not the future’s foundation, and unquestionably not what the big fight will demand. Regardless, it is something we won’t even see until over a decade after it was the glimmer in OPNAV’s eye. History is back, and she has unfinished business for all of us. Build the T-AOL, sure…but we need a new AOE class, sooner rather than later. And yes, I called it an AOE and not a T-AOE for a reason. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

The Netherlands sent more than 60 Toyota Hilux pickup trucks to Ukraine, dispatching them by rail for use by Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force Command, the branch of the Ukrainian military that operates the country’s drone forces and has become one of the most consequential fighting formations in the war against Russia. The Dutch Ministry of […]View the full article

A French startup’s experimental cargo drone lifted off the ground for the first time in Le Havre, confirming that a pressurized textile wing, an inflatable structure replacing the conventional rigid skin and internal ribs of a standard aircraft, generates enough aerodynamic lift to fly a real aircraft in real weather conditions. Celeste Ecoflyers announced the […]View the full article

An Israeli satellite company announced on May 26 that its RUNNER satellite can now detect and track moving objects from orbit around the clock, including at night, a capability the company describes as the first of its kind in persistent space-based surveillance. ImageSat International said the new capability uses onboard artificial intelligence to autonomously detect, […]View the full article

More than a thousand patients in war-torn Ukraine completed nearly nine thousand sessions of mixed reality therapy across 47 organizations over six months, a new study released May 26 shows, providing the most detailed real-world evidence yet that immersive headset-based mental health tools can function at scale inside an active conflict zone’s care infrastructure. The […]View the full article

Elbit Systems crossed a milestone it has never reached before, reporting a record order backlog exceeding $30 billion for the first time in the Israeli defense company’s history, as first-quarter 2026 revenues hit $2.19 billion and the company announced a separate $1.4 billion European modernization contract on the same day. The results, published May 26 […]View the full article

Israeli defense electronics giant Elbit Systems announced on May 26 that it has secured a $1.4 billion contract from an undisclosed European customer to modernize that country’s military across multiple capability domains over the next five years, one of the largest single defense contracts the company has publicly announced. The customer’s identity remains confidential, but […]View the full article

Russia’s state defense conglomerate Rostec unveiled a new short-range air defense system called the ZAK-30 Tsitadel at the First International Security Forum, presenting a 30mm autocannon platform designed to destroy drones using programmable proximity-fuzed shrapnel shells that detonate at a calculated point along the target’s flight path rather than requiring a direct hit. The system, […]View the full article