Victor Davis Hanson: The Problem with America’s Military Arsenal

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

Victor Davis Hanson (0:08)

There is an emphasis that while a Northrop, a General Dynamics, a Lockheed, a Raytheon with their huge budgets and their exquisite platforms are necessary, they have to be complemented by quantity. So we don't use $4 million missiles to shoot down a $5,000 Yemeni drone whose sole intention is to exhaust our inventories until they're down at 10 percent, and then they will really unload on us.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We're in the eighth month of a on and off war, as we all know, with Iran. And since 2022, we have been watching Ukraine and Russia fight, and we have been supplying Ukraine. And one of the problems with these multi-front wars, and we have been conducting operations against Iran, as well as helping Israel supply its forces against the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah. Part of the problem is that in Ukraine, in Iran, in the Middle East, we have now, because of the use, cut our inventories of Patriot missiles by about 25 or 30 percent. And remember, we export them all over the Western world. And our Hellfire and Tomahawk missile inventories are cut by 50 percent. And the problem is even greater than the erosion of our safety net, because if we would have a problem with Taiwan or elsewhere in the world, we would be in trouble. But the Patriot missile costs about 4 million and 4 million plus per missile. The Hellfire is shot by a plane, about 150, 200,000. The Tomahawk is about 3 to 4 million. So what I'm getting at is our enemies, whether in Iran or the enemies that are trying to squeeze Israel or the Russians that we supply Ukraine to fight, they are using cheaper drones. And some of them are only 5 or 6 thousand dollars. So in a cost-to-benefit analysis, we're spending 10, 20, 30 times more to knock them down. And I know that we're going to, we're in an evolutionary spiral where we can update electronic warfare, jamming, lasers, that's all coming. But right now, we have kind of a problem. And our Reaper are really premium Reaper drones and remnants of the Predator drones. We've lost about 25 percent of those. Those are several million dollars.

This year, Ukraine will produce, when 2026 is over, a million drones. We're really trying to ramp up production, and we will probably only do 50,000 at most. And we are galvanizing, but even next year, we don't think we could make more than 300,000.

Look at elsewhere what we have, though. We have 11 of the best, biggest carriers in the world, but they cost 13 billion dollars just to produce them, not even to maintain and run them. We have the wonderful B-2, the most stealthy bomber in the world with the biggest payload, but it's 2 billion dollars, and we only have about 20 of them. The B-1 dates from the Reagan era. It's a wonderful bomber, but it cost 315 million dollars each, and we only have about 45 And when you get the slightest threat, the Iranian agents may be sending drones into an RAF US base in the UK, and we can't defend it. We have to take all 11 and send them back home, or we might lose 3 billion dollars of inventory.

The F-35 is a wonderful plane, or 90 million dollars apiece.

We only have 400 of them. The best plane in some ways, the Interceptor F-22 is 140 million dollars each, and we only have 195 How could you have more at that cost? What I'm getting at, this is not how we won in Korea, but especially in World War II.

The idea was, we were not going to, when we re-armed and we started the war with number 19 in size of our army, and almost virtually no air force to speak of, except some B-17s and out-of-date fighters. We had a good Navy, but the idea was, we were not going to try to match the Germans or the Japanese, necessarily in the quality of each particular plane. We were not going to build a Panther or Tiger tank that was un-dominable as far as the power of its gun and the armor, but would be produced in very limited, at five or six thousand Panthers to a little over two thousand Tigers. We were going to do something different. We were going to produce 50,000 Sherman tanks. Pretty good tanks. Ten hours on the road, one hour maintenance. Not like the Tiger or Panther, one hour maintenance, one hour on the road. Easy to maintain, very crew adaptable. If they were hit, you could drop out on the bottom through a trap door. Three out of five of destroyed Sherman crewmen escaped with their lives.