Pentagon Presses Defense Firms to Build Weapons, as Iran War Depletes Stocks.

Well, foolish me.

I thought that was what the Pentagon was insisting upon, as those military-industrial guys were eating up such a large percentage of our national budget.

Apparently not.

But with some 800 Flag Officers stumbling around the Pentagon with their spit-shined shoes untied, who would know? Who salutes whom anymore, as they stumble down those corridors?

Hegseth insisted on high testosterone, which is why he fired all the top female officers. He never mentioned production rates at home, so I guess that accounts for empty warehouses.

But, if Heggy is going to insist upon defense firms building more weapons, the logical thing a business does, prior to the CEO thundering down from his perch on the umpteenth floor, is to look at the numbers.

Unfortunately, there are no numbers to look at. At least none that have ever passed the acid-test of a balance sheet.

The echo can still be heard from the depths Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, if one cups his ear and listens carefully.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice, when reality stopped behaving itself.

Reality has had a great deal of difficulty behaving itself in our complicated governmental arena lately. Hegseth, his face buried deep in the pillow of despair, continues to mumble, “it only requires more testosterone.”

In any case, who would expect a weekend talk-show host to run (or even supervise) the military Armaments Production machinery?

Have your secretary dial up Michael Duffey’s phone, Pete. He’s the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. That’s the Pentagon’s chief weapons-acquisition official, overseeing more than $300 billion in annual procurement, as well as keeping an eye on the defense industrial base and efforts to expand munitions production. He took office June 5, 2025.

Ever hear of him? Maybe not, but he’s there somewhere. Ask your secretary. The secretaries know everything, Pete.

You might want to set up a meeting with him, and invite Michael Cadenazzi to join the two of you. He’s Assistant Secretary for Industrial Base Policy. Mike’s responsible for developing and maintaining the actual defense industrial base.

No matter, one of them is bound to actually have control of what you’re short of. Take your testosterone tester along with you, to make sure they pass.

That could be the issue right there.

Maybe one of the two Michaels can tell a very fidgety Pete Hegseth exactly why the United States has difficulty rapidly increasing missile and drone production.

Certainly Trump’s small war with a weak little old nation like Iran, shouldn’t have emptied the warehouses. This is not Ukraine we’re fighting for god’s sake, it’s Trump’s slam-dunk instead of Putin’s, something for them to chat about in their weekly phone calls.

But apparently, the Pentagon has built itself an enormous, program-by-program acquisition apparatus.

It’s deeply intertwined with a highly concentrated group of suppliers.

Yet the question remains, ‘How could a Pentagon containing roughly 33,000 people in 1944, preside over an industrial system capable of producing tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks, ships and millions of weapons, while today’s Pentagon, with roughly 24,000 people (plus that enormous acquisition establishment outside the building), struggles to increase production of comparatively small numbers of missiles and drones?’

It’s complicated, Jim.

I understand that.

It was complicated then, and complicated now, but it worked back when I was watching the show. One possibility is, the WWII version was not run by a talk show host.

During that war, the last one we truly won by the way, the job was under the control of Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. Marshall’s personal (but unmeasured) testosterone was sufficient at the time to not only to gain the confidence of President Roosevelt (no small challenge), and equip a war on two fronts, but devise a rebuilding plan for after the war.

Another answer trotted out for public consumption is technological complexity. A modern missile may not be a Sherman tank, but building an American aircraft that could take on (and defeat) a German Messerschmitt was as technologically complex as the world got in the 1940s, forgiving another small detail like an atomic bomb..

The third and more compelling answer (in my opinion) is that we were under an existential war footing then,

All American industry turned to the task at hand. My memory of those times is Mom saving bacon grease for munitions, women turning their shoulders to a Rosie-the-riveter workforce, gas rationing, my father working at Douglas Aircraft, communal “Victory” gardens, and the auto industry shutting down to build tanks and bombers.

These days we are not on a war footing, except in Hegseth’s mind, and if we are to keep some reasonable degree of weaponry on hand, we’re pretty much in the hands of the military-industrial-congressional complex Eisenhower warned us of.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed“

-General/President Dwight Eisenhower

The CEOs of America’s five dominant defense contractors are compensated at roughly $25 million apiece per year. But the “not being on a war footing” is the reason the cupboard is bare in drone and missile stockpiles.

The Pentagon is now spending nearly a thousand-billion dollars annually on the Defense Department in peacetime.

That $trillion would house Eisenhower’s homeless, feed the hungry, and cloth those who are cold. But we wouldn’t have the luxury of sticking our finger in anybody’s eye, and can’t seem to break that habit.

Logically, Pentagon leadership is wrestling with why that enormously expensive permanent establishment cannot rapidly manufacture relatively inexpensive drones, missiles and munitions in wartime quantities, but they don’t read my essays.

Bottom line, we are not at war, at least in any realistic sense. After 1941, I watched an America that was at at war, totally mobilize. But what Heggy doesn’t seem to understand, is that Iran is under existential threat and totally mobilized.

We are not.

That’s why mugging is so traumatic.

I have been mugged. You don’t ever want it to happen. It’s not an even game.

My assailants hadn’t much to lose, poor, black, and on drugs at the time.

I had a wife, two dogs, a pretty fine lifestyle, a good business, a nice car in the garage… and all I wanted to do was live.

That fact, and that fact alone, is why the Iranian war is so badly misunderstood. Russia misunderstood Ukraine in the same way. That’s also the tie that binds every war we’ve lost since WWII.

Sub context: Hegseth’s frustration (and his boss’s as well) lies in the fact that the request, budgeting, contract delivery, agreement, scheduling, tooling, manufacture and delivery process is too long for the ‘small-wars-at-a-moment’s-notice’ mindset of our current president.

Maybe it’s worth it.

Maybe it’s not.

But it’s what we got…