The U.S. has sent 20 HIMARS to Ukraine and has promised to send 18 more. However, those could take years to be built and delivered.
To be clear, HIMARS refers to the ground-based vehicle that actually launches the rockets. I couldn’t find info regarding how many of the actual rockets have been supplied to Ukraine, how many Ukraine has launched, how many are still pledged to be supplied by the US (other than that the aid package announced in October included “rounds for HIMARS”), or how fast they could be made.
Might be a minor hijack, but is there any international law or such to stop Russia from offering a thousand soldiers from, say, Iran and just shipping them in to fight for good pay and such? Getting another country fully involved?
They’re already employing mercenaries; the only thing stopping them from employing more mercs would be either lack of ability to pay or lack of interest from the mercs (i.e. the mercs see that Russia’s forces are poorly supported and thus don’t want to sign up for likely death or capture).
So it looks like Himars are the launch system and mounting gear to mount it into a vehicle. The vehicle isn’t part of it.
The article says it would take a couple years to build 18 more, but it also says that they cost a little over $5 million dollars each seven years ago. Those two numbers don’t go together at all in my head. If you said it would take years to produce 18 F-35 fighter jets, okay, that I could understand. They cost $80 million each. But a 5 million dollar self-contained launching platform plus whatever it takes to mount it to whatever vehicles they designed it for? That feels to me like something the US military industrial complex should be able to knock out in weeks without breaking a sweat.
The article does mention that they’re investing 200 million in infrastructure to speed production, so I guess they view this “it’ll take us years to make a couple dozen” situation as a problem.
I’m wondering if Himars hasn’t been a priority for the US because the US personally wouldn’t have much use for them in the field. If they are mostly for defending borders, we aren’t shooting missiles at our neighbors. If we only deploy them in local hotspots around the world, a couple dozen might be a reasonable full complement. Now that we see a real use for them, I still have to believe we can kick production into high gear.
It’s not like computer chips where we’re hopelessly behind in technology so even if we wanted to we couldn’t replace Taiwan’s semiconductors. This is our original technology built by us. So maybe we just haven’t needed any in numbers until now, and so now they’re getting that sorted.
I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in our trillion-dollar defense that such a crucial device needed in such small numbers is so difficult for us to produce.
There is a saying I have heard referenced a lot in relation to military acquisition and construction projects, but I am sure is also to be found elsewhere:
You can have it done fast, cheap, or right. Pick two (and even then you’ll probably only get one—maybe that’s the government contract caveat).
It was pointed out to me some years ago that modern fighter jets are much more complex and high-tech than the sort of planes we were flying in WW2, and so we will never be able to suddenly ramp up production rates like we did back then:
I suspect the same may be true for other high-tech weapons systems like the HIMARS.
No, M142 HIMARS is the whole vehicle with launch system. The vehicle is a standard US Army truck frame, used to be Lockheed Martin got them from Oshkosh and did the rest of the work. As for now LM produce the truck frames inhouse, according to Wikipedia.
According to this article, production was 48/year in early 2022, was raised to 60/year and there are plans to do 96/year soonish. So it must be a matter of priority that 5 HIMARS are not shipped to Ukraine every moonth.
If the chassis is a standard Army truck, then it stands to reason that the launcher and mounting hardware would be the bottleneck in making more, because HIMARS must represent a very small percentage of Army truck usage.
HIMARS is the truck MLRS launcher. A single pod of 6 rockets or a single ATACMS. The M270 is the tracked MLRS launcher which holds two pods of the same munitions. It’s based on the Bradley fighting Vehicle chassis. We (US) have hundreds of these available that could be shipped today. Other countries have shipped their M270s or equivalent (GE, UK, Italy,).
It boggles my mind why we haven’t sent them (Now, now Steve there must be a rational reason why the powers that be haven’t done so.) We have very competent people in high places and lots of dolts. I was is the loop for years and challenged stupidity in many instances - and it was stupidity/we don’t do it that way/can’t change/too much momentum/too hard. Won a few but lost some incredibly ridiculous fights.
Don’t get me started. One more. Ukraine needs more artillery. We have hundreds (300+) M109 155mm Self-propelled howitzers that could be shipped tomorrow without impacting US stocks needed for a Pacific war. Big suckers that would take up a RORO ship. Yes, 155mm ammo is being burnt through at high rate but we’re not close to running out. The stocks were meant for confronting the Soviets/Ruskies; do it.
But training Steve? Ukraine has the forces; training is available in Poland and GE on these exact vehicles (no rocket science required). It’s also a 16 hour day for the Ukrainians, they don’t need the soldering (marching) stuff. No off days. Simulators available. Hell, I learned and did an acceptance test on a rebuilt M270 at Red River Army Depot in less than an hour (the vehicle portion).
I’d love to stand in front of SecDef Austin and say WTF?
Remember how Poland ordered 500 HIMARS? Apparently when they realized there would only be a trickle for years, they switched part of their order to 288 South Korean K239 Chunmoo. Deliveries will start by 2023.
Reading up on them, the Chunmoos can fire both unguided and GPS/INS guided rockets of similar range to the M30/M31 available on HIMARS, and have a similar pod system for loading. It carries 2 pods rather than the 1 of the HIMARS and have a loading time of 10 minutes.
I can’t quite see how South Korea can spool up production so much faster than the USA. It might be that the manufacterer (Hanwa) has finished orders to the SK Army, and now has idle production capacity and only a few other customers.
IIRC, this is at least the third suspicious death of a Russian oligarch in France. And, quite frankly, even it they presently oppose the “special military operation” now, they were still there collaboratirg in Vlad’s rise to power, facilitating and abetting his quasi-despotic rule. In other words, the West has little inclination to protect any Russian billionaire who is not actively, aggressively working to bring the Putin era to an early end.
But you’d think the threat of this, combined with an offer to protect them, would be useful in getting them to abandon Putin. At this point, why would they do that? We’re not doing anything for them, and Putin can apparently still get to them, no matter where they are.
Like it or not, we need other people with power in Russia to step up and deal with Putin. This is not the way to convince those people to help us.
I would suspect that the calculus has already been done and it turns out that Russian billionaires who have fled Russia have no power left in Russia. Why defend someone who was against you, isn’t really for you now, and has no power to help you anyway? It’s cold-blooded realpolitik at its finest.
This point has been made on this board, and also various op-eds. The oligarchs are misnamed by the west - they don’t have power. They’re more like the victims of mob shakedowns than anyone with political power.
Putin has studied carefully how to keep anyone from having any collection of power. That’s why there’s the military, the Wagner group, and that Chechen leader, all with strength - so no-one person can threaten. He’s also divided up power sources within the Russian government (military intel, domestic intel, domestic security, military leadership) to make it difficult for a coup group to form.
He knows how strongmen can end. He was a young KGB agent when Ceaucescu went from being supreme leader to dead by firing squad in three days. Putin’s also said to have repeatedly watched the videos of Qadaffi being killed by a mob in a gruesome, personal way. Putin is doing everything he can to make sure that won’t happen to him.
ISW predicts Lukashenko will keep Belarus out of Russia’s world. Lukashenko is still claiming his troops are preparing for NATO aggression. That’s bs but whatever works.
I couldn’t say this any better myself. The video of Putin squirming and listening to Lukashenko is priceless.