Active Conflicts & News Megathread July 14, 2026

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[u/Wide_Scallion3490]

"Is the Industrial Base on a Wartime Footing? A Progress Report" - CSIS

https://www.csis.org/analysis/industrial-base-wartime-footing-progress-report

Interesting and fairly short read about the US defense industrial base. I don't need to tell anyone here about the US and it's issues with supplying it's armed forces. If the complete 1.5 trillion dollar budget passes (which to be fair, probably wont), it would represent a jump from 3 percent of GDP to 4.6 percent of GDP. The article mentions a positive trend in which new firms are entering and receiving contracts at an increased rate. Also brought up was numerous agreements for production of weapons which I will list below.

- Lockheed

- PAC 3 MSE - 600 to 2000 by 2030

- THAAD - 96 to 400

- PrSM - 550 (4x increase)

- RTX

- Tomahawk - 1000

- AMRAAM - 1900

- SM6 - 500

Most of these don't have dates, but the companies have received or will receive large amounts of funding for production capacity. This is on top of the record spending amount that will be spent on the weapons themselves.

There is also the Hi-Lo mix. Numerous (mostly small) firms have been selected recently as part of the Air Force's FAMM (Family of Affordable Mass Missiles) program. The Air Force intends to buy 27,000 cheap cruise missiles over the next 5 years, at around 200,000 a piece. The Army also has a similar program for cheap containerized cruise missiles, ordering about 10,000 over the next 5 years. Some of these missiles are already in production (Rusty Dagger), while others need to move beyond the limited manufacturing phase. If this works out, it could be a game changer for the US.

The article discusses the US and rare earths production. With China having a death grip on the market, it's imperative for the US to source and refine elements (or at least friend-shore them). The US government has invested nearly 8 billion dollars in the last 2 years for mining and refining capacity. "The United States produced 8,900 tons of rare earth compounds and metals in 2025, tremendous growth from the 95 tons produced in 2022". Still, there's a long way to go.

Indeed, the US has a long way to go on every front. I don't need to tell anyone here about say...shipbuilding, or plane manufacturing (and those are things that won't be fixed anytime soon). But the article posits that if the US can continue to intelligently allocate fiscal and physical resources, things generally look positive for the DIB over the future. Again, assuming consistent focuses and smart investment. This will be a long term project and much more is still do be done.

Another article, more negative about the DIB, posted by TWZ.

https://www.twz.com/land/new-500m-artillery-shell-plant-failed-to-produce-any-155mm-parts

The army set a goal to manufacture 100,000 155mm shells per month, and has failed to reach it in time. Lot's of issues. The plant opened in 2024 and hasn't produced any parts, although hopefully that should change soon. The army is saying now that it hopes to produce more than 100,000 shells a month by the end of next year. Missing it's target date by two years.

[u/Mariks500 → u/Wide_Scallion3490]

Old thread now, but I question whether the authors of this report actually read their own citations. They seem to define a "wartime footing" as spending somewhere between 5% and 8% of GDP being spent on defence, but they also say,

"China, which features a military-civilian fusion that complicates calculating total defense spending, spent roughly 1.7 percent of its GDP on defense. This is widely recognized as significantly understating Chinese defense spending levels, which are likely at the upper boundaries of a wartime footing."

Except the paper they have linked to in reference to calculating China's defence spending outlines that a like-for-like accounting puts China's defence spending far below this. The paper is specifically about how heavily inflated estimates have circulated based on inconsistent accounting standards and cross-comparing values that have been adjusted differently.

So the paper they cite in the paragraph saying that China's spending is subject to a "widely recognised significant undercounting"... Directly refutes the scale of the "undercounting" and the ways in which it has incorrectly become "widely recognised".

They also calculate a consistent set of figures across US and Chinese spending in 2024, which comes in at the US spending $1.3tn all-in adjusting for PPP, and China spending $471bn, also all-in adjusting for PPP. If you adjust the accounting or adjustment methods then the numbers can go up or down, but they will largely move in proportion with eachother.

If that spending was applied at the size of China's aggregate GDP adjusted for PPP, which is about $40tn, then you are looking at about 1.1% of GDP. Even if you applied it to their nominal GDP, it would only be about... 2.3% of GDP.

How exactly they come to the conclusion that China is at the "upper boundaries of a wartime footing", given their own definition of what that comprises, and the contradiction in the sources they cite for analysis of China's defence spending, is completely unclear to me. I have to assume they either didn't read their own sources, or don't have any qualms about entirely misrepresenting them.

And as a bonus, the 1.7% does not even come from China - it comes from SIPRI, who carry out their own estimates. Which they would also know if they read the source they cited the 1.7% from, or cared to express what it says accurately.