There’s been a lot of hopium from many for months, a year or more now about how the west entirely exported its MOP and because of greed of the arms manufacturers who are privately held cannot hope to increase production because they demand guarantees of profits into the future and HERE WE ARE. They are being given those guarantees or the first steps of them.

(Archive link)

Western defense spending will remain high for years to come to counter Russia and China, a US official has told weapons makers

The US and its allies are planning to continue ramping up defense spending, which will ensure long-term demand for weapons, US Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told a gathering of arms manufacturers during a NATO event on Tuesday.

Speaking at the NATO Summit Defense Industry Forum, the official praised NATO members for boosting their military budgets since the initial flare-up of the Ukraine conflict in 2014, and particularly after the open hostilities between Ukraine and Russia erupted in 2022. Over the past decade, the average annual increase in spending was 72%, adjusted for inflation, she said.

That reversed a period when “defense industries across the Atlantic were affected by decades of inconsistent funding and blinkered demand signals,” she said. She said the current thinking is: “Production matters. Production is deterrence.”

Western arms manufacturers have the ability “not just to compete, but to out-compete and prevail” over Russia and other nations that the US considers its rivals, including China, North Korea and Iran.

“That includes ensuring we are prepared for the possibility of protracted war, which every ally must be prepared for – and not just in Europe, either,” Hicks warned.

Developing the manufacturing base on both sides of the Atlantic in a way that combines “information-age ingenuity and industrial-era capacity” will benefit US allies in the Pacific, such as Australia, Japan and South Korea, the official said.

She claimed that Western political systems are inherently beneficial for building “arsenals of democracy,” since they foster innovation and transnational cooperation. On the other hand, “autocracies,” according to her reasoning, can’t move beyond “just landing at each other’s airfields, or sailing ships alongside each other for a few days at a time.”

The Pentagon is looking for ways “to be a better customer,” Hicks said, by streamlining its internal processes, delivering targeted investments in the defense sector, and providing security services to weapons businesses.

I think it’s important to point out common misconceptions that many in the anti-imperialist left cling to, hope is nice, but the reality is better even if it’s not very inspiring and even depressing.

They have no other choice, no way out, war-mongering, domination-demanding Euro-American world empire has been a product in the works for centuries and they’re not about to let it go because of a few set-backs or give up in their deranged beliefs that they should dictate to the world how things should work or that they are in fact benevolent for imposing these things on the world.

So they are going to double down and much as we might hope for it I think they’ll be able to inflict some real pain on China in a few years when they go to war with it. A complete defeat on Chinese soil is not needed, merely to bruise them, humiliate them on the west’s preset terms of what that means and be able to throw up a deep ocean island chain blockade on China and thump their chests. I think the actual results will be rather limited but they just need the appearance of a win in their media. I just worry about that limited conditions not being met and things spiraling into nuclear war. I definitely think they’d rather blow up the planet than accept loss of hegemony, certainly the arms manufacturers, the industrial bourgeoisie who remain in the west have that kind of mindset.

Yes there are still headwinds against the west in many places, corrupt practices, bad airplanes but they had the high ground to begin with, a better starting position so can afford some of that with their built-in advantages.