US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians

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Radion_Godiva said:
Call me stupid, but doesn't the US wage war as an excuse to make more weapons? Why would they need the old weapons?
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As NATO recently complained about, the US military industrial complex can only make so many weapons and ammo at a time. In peacetime, it was sufficient. In wartime, that stockpile gets used up quick.

For example, Lockheed-Martin can make 2100 Javelin missiles and wants to expand to 4000 a year. Why can't they make 40K a year? Because products can be two of three values: fast, good, cheap, pick two. Javelins are pretty sophisticated pieces of equipment, so we know it's good. They also cost $15K per unit, so it's not cheap. So, Lockheed-Martin has to make Fast, Good products, so they can't be cheap. to meet quotas like they listed, they need more factories, but said factories need to be in America and Germany, nations that have lots of government regulation designed make it hard for businesses to function as businesses. Combined with standard graft that goes on in weapons procurement, and producing enough weapons at the price point Lockheed and Raytheon demand is financially impossible. Ukraine's military* ends up paying the price by being given a lot of fiat currency that has difficulty being converted in actual goods.

Also, @The Last Stand is correct. Angry goatherders with billions of dollars worth of equipment is a bad idea all around.

*For the sake of argument, I'm assuming they aren't corrupt and gear doesn't fall off the backs of trucks and sold on the Black Market.
 
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Random Internet Person said:
So what are you saying? That the Taliban will use these weapons to go after American interests? The only thing I can think of is to sell that shit to Russia in their fight against Ukraine, or onto the black market to restart the terror wave of the 2010s in Europe.

Hell, I’m willing to bet that there’s some nationalists that’d LOVE to go after work governments and migrants. 4Chan would be proud.
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And that's why leaving behind weapons in a nation you helped destabilize is a bad idea. Is there something I'm missing?
 
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Random Internet Person said:
No, I’m just trying to figure out what the next step is. The Taliban has a bunch of American weaponry. Advanced weaponry. What do they do with it?
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The next step is being much more comfortable in their control of Afghanistan, in regards to foreign threats. The Taliban now have equipment capable of destroying modern military assets, effectively, and they have a lot of it. Its not enough to prevent a whole US scale invasion or the like, but it is enough to ensure that invasion faces thousands or tens of thousands of casualties in the process. Against their immediate neighbors and rivals? They're in an exceedingly strong position.

So we have an Anti American interest who is more or less fortified in the middle east due to the mistakes of the US Withdraw, who have the military strength to bully and threaten the region for whatever their strategic goals might be. Historically, having a major destabilizing player in the sandbox suddenly unchecked and powered up like that is not good for the entire region. The Taliban won't attack the US, but they're well positioned and more than well equipped to act on ancient grudges at home.

There's no specific obvious target or option, but the Middle East as a whole now has to deal with a war hardened, experienced insurgency. These guys rolled out for nighttime mortar attacks in pajama's with a garbage pail and some sixty year old soviet ordinance, and managed to actually hit their targets. Now give them NVG's, GPS equipment, and a real mortar tube, to conduct strikes against the laughable forces of something like the Iraqi army. They don't even have to do it themselves, they can now train and equip new insurgencies to do it for them.
 
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The Last Stand said:
And that's why leaving behind weapons in a nation you helped destabilize is a bad idea. Is there something I'm missing?
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This isn't directed exclusively at you, but most of the equipment left in Afghanistan was never going to be removed, it was no longer "American." We built, trained, and funded an entire country's military with the idea that once we pulled out they could support themselves.
Anyone who saw the ANA in action would know they never had any intention of fighting and that Afghanistan would fall as soon as we pulled out. The ANA was inept and US leaders lied to themselves every day that one day it'd be a real fighting force.
 
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Aidan said:
This isn't directed exclusively at you, but most of the equipment left in Afghanistan was never going to be removed, it was no longer "American." We built, trained, and funded an entire country's military with the idea that once we pulled out they could support themselves.
Anyone who saw the ANA in action would know they never had any intention of fighting and that Afghanistan would fall as soon as we pulled out. The ANA was inept and US leaders lied to themselves every day that one day it'd be a real fighting force.
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Hence the idea that even in the face of a military withdrawal, the politicians, law enforcement and military of the former American puppet-regime were sufficiently reformed, funded and trained that they could hold key portions of Afghanistan for months, maybe more than a year, against Taliban forces, and Americans and their allies could peacefully exit. People said the system in place was functional and robust enough to withstand more than 6 months of Taliban offenses. In reality, thousands of people were stranded for months, hundreds might still be there, because the decades of "training" was a big slush fund and the politicians, cops and the military were basically Taliban and the entire country was taken over by the Taliban in a couple of days. Whoops!

That's one of their mistaken predictions that NEVER gets talked about anymore. Its gauche and verboten to snicker about Afghanistan falling in days.
 
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