Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
I'm no expert on heavy industrial and tech production but I think that modern tanks, jets, missiles, etc. will not roll off of production lines anywhere near as fast as the much more low-tech armaments did in WWII. The U.S. armaments industry never geared up to its maximum production capacity during either of the Iraq wars but I seem to recall hearing of a couple of instances where USN ships literally ran out of Tomahawk and had to wait week for the trickle of new production missiles to find their way in to the fleet.
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There was that same problem in the Bonsia and Kosovo missions -- by the end of Kosovo, there were practically no ALCMs left in the US inventory, and they were converting a bunch of them by removing the nuclear warhead and replacing it with conventional explosives. The JDAM was new to the US at the time and almost all of them got used up.
Towards the end of Desert Storm, there were worries that if the conflict went on a couple of weeks longer, Coalition forces might run out of smart bombs altogether.