Back in March, Joshua Steinman made a simple request of us all:
“If you pay attention to one tech twitter chart this week, I beg you, make it this one.”
As Balaji let us know last month:
“The report was issued by Arlington, VA-based Govini which was awarded a five-year $400 million contract from the Pentagon in 2019 to deliver data, analysis and insights into DoD spending, supply chain and acquisition”
I forgot about both the report and the amount of money we – yes kiddies, we – paid for it. Nice snag by their Board of Directors, and … I hope their graphics department was well paid, because this report, now five years old, has some good ones.
I hope we got a lot more than a 12-page document for $400 million. You paid for it, so go here and download your copy.
As I was mowing the yard – wonderful therapy that is in 95 degree heat at 6pm with 85% humidity – it popped in to my head this simple fact; all this talk here and elsewhere of a long awaited ‘Pacific Pivot’ to get ready for a ‘Great Pacific War’ sometime in the Davidson Window™ against the People’s Republic of China … is it all just delusional?
Has the talk about “72-hr Wars” not so much a grand idea – but a requirement? How do we go to war with the same nation who we cannot produce weapons without their factories?
As a Southerner, going to war against your own industrial center is a Lesson Learned, and yet here we are.
Here’s another ponderable chart;
Just look at it. The implications are so … well … shocking that they don’t seem to quite sink in.
This report was funded in 2019 and delivered in 2024, 150% of the time it took for the USA to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific.
As such, a lot of that data is reward looking. It begs the question, what progress has been made in the last 5 years to wean ourselves off of relying on our greatest opponent on the world stage?