I'm guessing the US arsenal of ATACMS missiles is rather limited and they have their own reasons for not making it smaller, which they can't go into detail about. Frustrating, but understandable.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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The best theory I have seen is the Biden administration is trying to 'manage' the conflict. A belief they can dictate levels of aid to determine a geo politically satisfactory outcome.
Concerns around unmanaged escalation made sense but the UK has been pretty focussed on methodically moving up the escalation ladder to demonstrate Russia won't resort to nuclear strikes (Brimstone, Challenger 2 tanks, setting up the F16 coalition, Storm Shadow, etc..).
The USA expects China to be the next conflict zone, that is a naval/air situation where ATACM's can't be used. Suffering a shortage of ATACM's in the near term isn't really an issue especially if you've already put in place contracts to address the gap.
PrSM isn't ready yet.
I'm convinced this is the real reason they haven't been sent yet
IMO it's also about not looking like the boss of NATO -- a lot of tankies in Europe like to complain that they're just puppets.
It's a tragedy that these have not yet been sent. There should already be a production line set up to deliver hundreds per month.
They've been out of production since 2007
In sure someone still knows how to make them.
That's a complicated one. Military tech tends to all be 10+ years old at time of deployment and the ones stockpiled are probably late 90s designs that went into production in the early 2000s. Most of the parts for the control and guidance systems are likely no longer produced at all and haven't been for a decade+ (think the kinds of computer chips you'd find in a SNES, maaaaybe an N64) so it's not that they don't have the blueprint somewhere, they would have to re design large parts of it to work in a modern supply chain. Yes, they could do emulation/simulation shenanigans to get some stuff to be compatible on modem COTS hardware but they'd still need to re qualify everything because nobody wants a 500lb ballistic warhead going stupid and killing someone in the wrong country.
The inability to restart production lines must be a huge strategic problem though.
What if the USA was involved in a large scale war against a larger nation state?
We're screwed at the moment because we do not have the manufacturing base that we used to have. We can and do outproduce most of the world when it comes to munitions in a time of peace, but we have a massive scalability problem because we've offshored so much manufacturing.
We used to be able to ask companies that produced mundane consumer goods to retool for producing war materials, but they don't exist many places anymore. Much of our domestic manufacturing already produces for the defense industry and wouldn't have enough tools to increase production much to meet demand.
We've seen the government take some steps to mitigate this in the electronics space by encouraging Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel to build more foundries stateside, but there's a long way to go to solving the problem.
I don't think this is a very valuable weapon for use in such a conflict anymore. They're very expensive and, at this point, relatively easy to intercept. Really the whole thing is a holdover from when our idea of a large scale war was nuking the fuck out of central Europe to stop the soviets.
Generally speaking it seems us defense posture is to stockpile stuff and hope it's enough, maybe starting production on newer systems in mass if anything promising pops up in due course.
That sounds like it might be true, but is it? I've heard many things in relation to this weapon, but not anything about the inability to produce them.
Shrug? This is what the budgets have indicated. The military isn't interested in pursuing this weapon anymore. They're actively trying to replace it but also don't want to give up the capability until it is fully replaced.
I have inside knowledge on this because I support[ed] production for a part of this system. I can't divulge too much information obviously, but we can still manufacture ATACMS. The real issue is a lot of the components and manufacturing processes are terribly out-of-date so it's questionable whether it's worth it when the replacement is on the horizon.
They might not.
There’s been a couple cases where the US military has classified something so heavily that they needed to re-spend millions in R&D in order to learn how to make the material again.
The Washington Post reported that Lockheed Martin company produces 500 units of ATACMS annually, but they are intended for sale to other countries.
As per the article
FYI (source: ChatGPT 4)
ATACMS stands for Army Tactical Missile System. It is a surface-to-surface missile system designed and manufactured by Lockheed Martin for the United States Army. This system is designed to be extremely mobile and can be fired from the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) family of launchers, including the M270, M270A1, and the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
The ATACMS is a short-range ballistic missile with a range of about 165 km for early versions, and more than 300 km for later models. It carries a large payload, up to 500 lb, which can include unitary warheads or submunitions depending on the specific model of the missile. The missile is designed for precision strikes against a variety of target types, including enemy artillery, air defenses, and concentrations of troops or armored vehicles.
As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, the ATACMS was set to be replaced by the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), a next-generation surface-to-surface weapon system being developed for the U.S. Army.
Really weird how much ChatGPT knows. I wonder how much comes from Lockheed's public promotional material, and how much comes from sources that should not exist.
ChatGPT doesn't know anything. It just reproduced existing stuff and if the core points of a topic are hit is purely coincidental, just like there's no guarantee that the reproduced information is correct. It just needs to be found out there...
Case in point: No, ATACMS can't be fired by M270s... Only the very first production line was compatible and those don't exist anymore as they were modernized and upgraded with newer guidance systems. Which requires M270A1 and later. You could probably find that information even on wikipedia and yet ChatGPT missed it.
Sure. I think everything in that post and more can be found on Wikipedia, but does ChatGPT retain any information on a server after scraping data from sites or does it always just look it up upon being given a prompt?
I would think for the learning process they'd have to retain some data about prompts it has been given. I know there's been issues with ChatGPT finding classified info about certain topics. If those sources are located and removed does that then deprive ChatGPT of the information?
but does ChatGPT retain any information on a server after scraping data from sites or does it always just look it up
ChatGPT is not a data scrapper, it's a deep neural network training model.
Data Scrapping ≠ Neural Networks.
The Neural Networks USE the data that is scrapped to train themselves.
Which means, if you ask it about data that it has not been trained on ... it will probably tell you it has no fucking idea what you're talking about. (edit: e.g. ask it about today's news ... it will reply that "It has been trained with data that is till September 2021")
Exactly on point. Sht-in-sht-out. If you feed it garbage it will tell you garbage. The researches and developers just happened to gather the "right" amount,quality and source of data. But it definitely does some mistakes and you have to correct it sometimes.
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