Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour One.

Greetings Conversation List. It's Eric Erickson here across the fruited plane. The phone number

should you wish to join me today, 877-97-973-7-425.

All is right with the world now.

Charlie is back behind the phones.

Everything just functions better when he's around.

Now, we've got to begin with the hero America needs right now.

There have been near daily stories across America about the military's inability to fix supply chain problems.

This is one of the actual upsides of the war in Ukraine. We would have been caught

with our pants down otherwise, it appears, based on all the reporting out there, that by sending

so many weapons to Ukraine, we have discovered our inability to manufacture weapons. We used to be

the arsenal of democracy. Now, we can't even be our own arsenal,

let alone Ukraine's arsenal, because we cannot fix the supply chain issues. Our military allowed

so much consolidation to happen within the military industrial complex. So a bunch of companies that used to make weapons merged together.

So now we have very few that make weapons and those that we do to reward their shareholders.

They outsource to get cheaper rates to where?

China.

So many of the parts and basic components we need for the military weaponry that we will one day have to use against China are manufactured in China.

The F-35 engines in that horrible plane are racking up $38 billion in extra maintenance costs.

The military geniuses decided instead of having a plane the Air Force

likes and a plane the Army likes and a plane the Marines like and a plane the Navy likes, let's just

build one plane and they can fit it together as they want so everybody can have one plane

...