Seriously, it is a crime it got to this point:
The Pentagon plans to invest more than $20 billion in munitions in its next budget. But whether the industrial base will be there to support such massive buys in the future is up in the air — at a time when America is expending munitions at increasingly intense rates.
This is all in support of the headline that says America is "running out of bombs."
Although this doesn't seem like supporting evidence:
All this is happening as the U.S. is expending munitions at a rapid rate. For instance, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that 1,186 munitions were dropped in that country during the first quarter of 2018 ― the highest number recorded for the first three months of the year since tracking began in 2013; that number is also more than two and a half times the amount dropped in the first quarter of 2017.
Thirteen bombs per day is a "rapid" rate of expenditure?
Honestly, although reading a trusted source tells me that these shortage reports are real, because of "supporting" information like 13 bombs per day being dropped as evidence for why we have a bomb shortage, I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that this is actually the real situation and not a bit of disinformation to lull potential enemies.
Of course, the real problem may be the ability to surge production in case we actually do use bombs at an intense rate for a significant amount of time and must replace them in our stockpiles.
I guess I'm still having a problem accepting that we really do have a bomb shortage that cuts into our use of bombs against ISIL or the Taliban.
I keep thinking that bombs are being stockpiled to deal with North Korea while having reserves in case China does something unexpectedly hostile; that bombs are being stored in Israel to replenish their stocks if they hammer Hezbollah in Lebanon; that bombs are being restored to Europe in case the Russians get overtly aggressive; and that bombs are being directed to Saudi Arabia to deter Iran from taking action in the Persian Gulf.
And that once you wall off those stocks, yes we have a "shortage." Although the shortage doesn't stop us from an "intense" rate of use in Afghanistan.
But this may just be my inability to simply accept that reports of shortages are accurate. Which is bad if that is what I'm doing.
That kind of failure to let information affect my preconceived notion is how enemies achieve surprise even when all the information points to them attacking you--you just don't believe your lying eyes.
Heck, maybe the reports are just an effort to get enemy analysts to believe their lying eyes and assume America can't possibly wage a big military campaign.
Okay, now my head is spinning.
