WTH Happened to American Military Power? Seth Jones on Why the US Can’t Produce the Weapons We Need

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, History, Government, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The conflict in Ukraine has revealed what conventional war looks like in this day and age. It has also made clear just how extensively the US defense industrial base has atrophied in the post-Cold War era. We are struggling to keep pace with arming Ukraine, even when drawing from stockpiles that have not been replenished since Reagan’s buildup in the 1980s. We are failing to put in place today contracts that will produce critical munitions by 2026 and beyond, but the reality is that the entire system is so broken (from the supply chain, to research vs. procurement imbalances, to budget hurdles) that American leadership in future great power conflict is a question mark, not a given. What does this mean looking ahead? Our guest ran over a half dozen war games to simulate what a US conflict with China over Taiwan would look like; he discovered that we will run out of some of our most advanced precision weapons in less than a week. This should be a wake-up call – why are we seeing sobering lessons from Ukraine but failing to learn them?

Seth G. Jones is senior vice president, Harold Brown Chair, director of the International Security Program, and director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Prior to joining CSIS, Dr. Jones was the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation. He also served as representative for the commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Before that, he was a plans officer and adviser to the commanding general, U.S. Special Operations Forces, in Afghanistan (Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan).

Download the transcript here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.0	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on?
0:01.1	Who in God's name knows what it's all about.
0:35.0	Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
0:36.6	And I'm Mark Tyson.
0:37.6	Welcome to our podcast.
0:39.2	What the hell is going on?
0:41.6	Mark, what the hell is going on this week?
0:44.3	Well, what the hell is going on is there's been a report that the United States will take, it'll take us five years to replace the javelin missiles that we've
0:55.9	given to the Ukrainians. War in Ukraine is surfacing a major problem, which is that our defense
1:03.1	industrial base has atrophied in the post-Cold War era since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
1:08.5	And we are not capable of producing weapons, particularly advanced precision weapon, in a very
1:16.8	timely manner and weapons that we will need for a conflict with China.
1:21.4	And, you know, Seth Jones, who is our guest today from the Center for Strategic International
1:26.0	Studies, they did a bunch of war games over a U.S.-China War over Taiwan,
1:32.9	and they found that we run out of some of our most advanced precision weapons
1:38.4	in less than a week, and the time to replace some of those weapons will take years and years.
1:45.9	And, you know, a lot of Americans are thinking, we're the United States of America.
1:50.3	How on earth is it that we can't produce weapons that we need to protect this country and to deter war in the Pacific or to help the Ukrainians against the Russians.
2:01.3	It's just absolutely gobsmacked by our inability to produce weapons.
2:08.8	So I think that there are people listening to you who can draw the wrong conclusion.
2:14.0	They will say to themselves, oh, my God, we don't have enough to beat the Chinese.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from AEI Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of AEI Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.