美媒讨论美国导弹拦截器产能提升与供应链挑战

When we started this conflict, folks were explaining to me the geography of the Strait and how it's kind of hazy, and there's usually this, like, low lying fog that sits over it. And I feel like we're dealing with that and the fog of war, and the lack of communications from both of these governments makes it really hard to understand what's going on. But is this an escalation in the conflict, or is this just more business as usual as this kind of midrange conflict, not a war, not a battle, whatever the president wants to call it, to drag on?

Yeah. I would say it's more of the same. I think what you're seeing right now, though, is especially on the USNCOM side is being able to come back and say, you are if you try and shoot at my carrier and you try and shoot at my guided missile destroyers, there is going to be some type of ramification, and it's not going to be just hitting something, minuscule that's sitting alongside of the the straight. Right? I mean, I think right now you saw a lot of the coastal attacks against, small fast ship vessels and all of those things.

I think this is a continuation of some of the economic pressure campaign that's going on there. It also shows some of the economic, interdependencies that are tied in both with the military and the way that Iran is doing things. Right? We've talked about the hydro model before. Right? Because you have the IRGC. You have, the supreme leader as well as the presidency. You have to get all three of those, together if you're trying to make a deal with Iran.

And so by going after one of the tankers as a self, self defense back from them shooting at our tankers or at one of our carriers, this is what they're doing. Colonel, Christina sort of mentioned this in the intro. The president and the secretary of war or secretary of defense have made a big deal about how decimated the Iranian military is. Is it as decimated as The United States says? Yeah. From a conventional military perspective, I I absolutely agree.

When you look at the conventional forces of the Iranian army, the Iranian navy, they they absolutely are. The problem is is that the IRGC has a lot of asymmetric capabilities. Right? They are dealing with Houthis as proxies. You're dealing with a lot of IRGC fastboats throughout the strait. You talked about the geography. You don't need a, guided missile destroyer or an air cap aircraft carrier. Excuse me. Those are blue water navy problem or, forces, but you're dealing with a brown water navy problem.

You're dealing with something that's very narrow. You're not gonna wanna put an aircraft carrier directly into the straits to deal with that. So it's a sea denial strategy that's coming from Iran versus a sea control strategy for The United States, and both of those are a little bit, out of sync with one another. I also wanna ask you. You have, your latest analysis breaks down some of the missile systems that Iran is using.

I wanna ask you how important Chinese support is to the prolongment of this conflict because you talk about this indigenous weapon system that I think is called a Bavar, a Bavar. I've never I this is not I don't know this one. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Three seventy three and also s three hundreds, from Russia. And there these the missile systems that Iran makes and has been using have been hit or degraded or they're out of munitions.

So they're relying on other systems. Where are those coming from, and are they getting Chinese supplies of these h q nine b, h q, 16 air defense systems? Yeah. The HQ nine, HQ 16, those are some of those sophisticated air defense systems that do come out of China. And it's something that right now, right, The US is has touted for quite a while now that we've had air supremacy, air superiority in the region. So we can fly wherever we want because we have decimated the launcher capability, and so Iran has been looking for it.

So if you look at Russia's s 300, s 400 air defense systems as well, some of these components, they're they're separate pieces that make up an air defense system. So you have your launchers. You also have your radars. You have the interceptors themselves, and then the command and control system that has to make all these things communicate with one another. So as different pieces come in, these countries are able to say, oh, well, I didn't give a whole system.

I only gave part. But if they're able to put these systems together, then you have some level of capacity. And I know that's something that US CENTCOM as well as Fifth Fleet keep an eye on is to whether or not some of these components are being put together to reestablish some of the air defense capabilities for, for Iran. Did I say that even remotely correctly? B a v r? You did you did great. You did great. You're such a liar, but I appreciate it.

World, they do, say it separately. They say it in a lot of different ways. Alright. Thanks. Let's talk about munitions. The president has really bristled at reports that's saying that The United States is low on munitions, and he put out another true social, post about that just recently. Give us your take on what the supply is and what the risk is that The United States is depleted. Yeah. When you look at specific weapon systems, you are correct.

Right? If you're looking at our interceptor capabilities, some of them have been depleted quite a bit. And you look at PAC three interceptors for the Patriot system, you look at SM three and SM six that are some of our naval interceptor programs. These are some of the interceptors that we have had to use a lot because there is this separation between the capability to fire a bunch of drones at us at The United States, and then we are shooting them down with very high powered, high very highly expensive, munitions to be able to shoot these things down.

So during that time frame, we were actually using quite a bit of it. What you're seeing right now on those, the PAC three and all those, is that r RTX as well as, Lockheed Martin have tripling and quadrupling demand coming from the DOD to be able to to build these back up. But it is a longer process because you're dealing with a lot of different pieces of a supply chain. It's not as simple as you just put in an order and it comes out.

A PAC three interceptor has 400 suppliers that make up a portion of that with several of them being very, very large. Obviously, Lockheed does a bulk of it. But if you're looking at your propulsion side of the house, it's coming from l three Harris. If you're dealing with guidance and control, you're dealing with Honeywell. So they have to put all these pieces together to start making sure that we're ramping from 650 pack three interceptors per year right now to trying to reach 2,000 by 2030.

Now we have a lot of munitions that are gravity fed, gravity bombs, something like Boeing's JDAM, which is a joint direct attack munition. Those are ones that you just fly overhead and you drop these bombs and they're GPS guided to their targets. And for an Iranian scenario, they the the US military has a ton of these. They still have a lot of different options in the arsenal. It's some of the exquisite ones, both on long range precision munitions as well as on the interceptor house that we are more concerned about for an Indo Pacific theater engagement because that's where you need higher level of sophistication for a peer to peer adversary, and that's why you're seeing the urgency of demand right now.

The other part of Trump true social is the president alleges he says the Biden administration gave far more munitions to Ukraine, than we have used in Iran. I know you guys track this as much as we can. Do we know if that's true? Well so so what we know is that three Patriot batteries have been given to Ukraine during, the Biden administration. And what what we don't know is how many interceptors come with that. Now a normal standard package is somewhere between 72 pack three interceptors a