We cannot deliver 1000 tanks. We do not have that many for our own use that are free from assignment to units. We have 5,500 in active service. We are sending from storage, or we are sending from recently turned in to reserve status marine corp tanks. That’s part of that number. Fun fact, the marines no longer have tanks…which is in my view way stupid. We are no longer producing tanks either. The next Gen has yet to enter service.

Oh and blame Congress for USMC not having tanks. It was them who caused this.

Unless this goes hot for the US, we are stuck with existing stocks. The DPA has been used as far as it can in peacetime.

In my view we should be doing exactly what we managed to do with stingers, and use the DPA to bring those back to production. They were supposed to be retired. So they had to recall a lot of old retired workers, cause none knew how to run that line. We have a single tank factory that these days does a lot of restoration…they could go back to production without retraining any body.

Right now Europe surpassed us, and they have expanded their defense spending. This is good. Because that war could go hot soon. See Romania. When it does, all these limits of peace time will drop like a veil. But we need an actual declaration of war. Fun fact, all our auto plants are built for easy conversion to making tanks, Bradley’s, whatever we need. It will take about six months. Maybe less, depends on a lot of stuff. This is a lesson from the Second World War.

This brings me deeply to American politics. If I were you, I would be far more worried about Senator Tuberville right at the moment. The promotion holds and his crazy ideas that we have too many generals is actually hurting readiness when we could be heading to war. The man complained about poetry reads over the 1MC on carriers. He has never served, or understand that poetry is integral to the warrior ethos. Do you think we can get all we need to send with people like him and the “freedom” caucus in the house? So far we have, but some of these have been by very narrow margins.

Yeah, I like to rage against the WH. And yes, they are a tad on the slow side, because they fear Russian dissolution. It’s the nukes, and the lose nukes. Imo we are there, but that’s what they fear. They think (wrongly) that Russia is better than a series of small, warlord run, nations. This thinking is old thinking going back to 1991. One reason we flew food and pampers. If we, and others, had not. Russia would probably broken up even further.

Eastern Europe understands Russia far better than we do. We literally should listen, because we are miscalculating a lot of this because every time Russia is facing the music on the battlefield they go nuclear threats. Incidentally we are there again. It’s psy war, and they know this makes policy makers on both sides of the aisle quake. But the short of this, it’s not just Biden.

Few American politicians have understood this better than John McCain. But I suspect he was the last to do so. We have been in these try to control these events since Bush Senior, trying to reset with Russia every damn administration. It’s a cultural blind spot we have in the US. We really cannot see how dark Russia has become, because Americans always look forwards.

We also can’t because how our Russia specialists were trained. And since 9-11 we really have not paid that close attention to that part of the world. This is how Russia managed to convert the Chechnya war of independence into fighting Al Qaida. They played on our fears…to be specific George Bush Jr and his administration, who for the record had a specialist on Russia as his NatSec adviser (Condoleeza Rice) and should have known better.

But when all your training ignores Russian colonialism. To this day the textbook I used in Russian history class is central. Yes, out of curiosity I bought the latest edition. And that textbook is part of the problem. It was written by an emigre, Riasanovsky…that history of Russia ignores all the internal colonialism. Russian experts still train this way.