How Can Our Own Military Be Running Out of Ammo?

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! And did Italy just beat the US in baseball this week???

As much as the ongoing deaths of civilians and soldiers horrify me as trump pushes the United States into more bombings and more war with more nations, another thing irking me is the revelation that our military is woefully unprepared for most of this, especially in terms of supplies. Susie Madrak over at Crooks & Liars has the details:

Inside the Pentagon, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation. “The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

Senior leaders are worried that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles.

“I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” one source added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

The president’s senior military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, warned the White House last week that munitions shortfalls and a lack of broad military support from other U.S. allies would raise the risk to any operation in Iran and to the U.S. personnel put in harm’s way.

Granted, the government under Biden has been shipping out a lot of reserve firepower to places like Ukraine, but our own military should have been stockpiling newer gear, ammo, defense systems, tanks, planes, helicopters, and other equipment to fill that void. 

I went digging for information about what's going on with our military manufacturing, and by the looks of it there's hundreds of billions of dollars getting pumped into all that (via Jake Kaufman at Defense and Munitions, a trade magazine):

The President’s FY ’26 National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, a 13% increase from 2025. However, at the moment, Congress has passed $831.5 billion for the Department of War’s Defense's discretionary budget. Outstanding budget considerations going through Congress could bring that final number up toward $893 billion...

You would think $893 billion would pay for a lot of bullets...

The budget includes an additional $1.3 billion for industrial-based supply chain improvements and an additional $2.5 billion for missiles and munitions production expansion. The budget also includes significant new investments of $200 million for automation and artificial intelligence (AI). It breaks down to shipbuilding, munitions and defense supply chains, and air and missile defense alone accounting for 50% of the total enhancements...

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Where's the fucking money, Lockheed Martin???