US halts export of most civilian firearms and ammunition for 90 days

submitted by hfxB0oyA from (theguardian.com)

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[–]binaryblob 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The strategic reserves don't need to be so big anymore, because there is an actual domestic supply of oil. The name strategic reserves is out of date for that reason.

You would be right, if the strategic reserve still had that role. Perhaps their website would still claim it is, but I don't think it still has that role in reality. (when there is a war time shortage, they would just commandeer various wells)

[–]SoCo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I'm a bit on the fence about that, myself.

I have the understanding that we have a domestic supply of oil, of which we don't have a domestic refining capability of, to scale, and that we mostly sell our oil to other countries and import, more-or-less, Russian oil, which our refineries and infrastructure are optimized for. I'm sure we are scrambling to improve this balance, but it will take a long time, especially after the Biden admin shit on our domestic supply and suppliers when first entering office. I don't give our domestic supply much credit in the context, due to this. Yet, our military has made huge strides to remove its reliance on oil. I am doubtful that this major progress is quite enough for a large or sustained war, with fuel disruptions, though.

[–]binaryblob 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ultimately, all of the geopolitical tensions just show that, whatever your alliance is, you need to have your supply chains managed and secured up to the latest bolt for every atomic number of interest. That requires a level of control, which is antithetical to "free trade".

Similarly, the US can try to protect chips all they want, but three nukes targeted at the right location smuggled via a container and all the infrastructure and knowledge for sustaining our current technical level is gone. I think the list of people with knowledge for how to construct the best chips in the world is uncomfortably small. In fact, you could probably just send one hundred secret agents to take out all of them in a day.

The military industrial complex is really weird. The idea that the government is dependent on companies to create their munition is just insanity at work. What if it is more profitable for those companies to instead lower weapons output or to produce shells that will only explode when in a test environment like with the Diesel Gate with VW?