US Running CRITICALLY Low On Interceptors, PULLS From Asia

The US is reaching the limits of its physical military capacity as it enters into what the Seventh week or something of this US is really conflict with Iran. We can put up this Bloomberg article US deploys bulk of stealthy long-range missiles For Iran war to put this into some context here

You know

We had two carrier groups that were in the region one of them Because of what they said as a result of a laundry fire, but I think more accurately as a result of just being deployed for too long. This is the jailed Ford was sent down to Venezuela to carry out the operation there against Maduro. And then they were told they're going home right after that. Instead, they steamed across across the ocean headed over close to Iran to take part in that along with the Lincoln aircraft carrier group. At the same time

the US has been using an extraordinary amount of its kind of its resources to defend against Iranian attacks, particularly against Israel, but also against the rest of the Gulf countries. The Gulf countries upset saying that Israel gets greater priority,

and also they have access to the THAAD and the Patriot, and all these other things. US pulling assets out of Asia to bring them over to the region. The US also getting the carrier groups and others and the bases are getting emptied out by Iranian attacks on the Gulf bases, which

means that you then have to fly further. Spain, followed by Italy, now followed by the U.K., have said forget it, you're not using our territory to fly over, you're not using our bases to launch attacks on civilian infrastructure, that stretches the US thinner. The recognition that the claim of 100% air superiority turned out to be false also changes the equation, because now you can't use your more conventional

bombing aircraft, you have to send in F-35s, an F-35 gets clipped. Now that means you have to take a lot more care around what you can do. Then you have to rely a lot more on tomahawks. Only have so many tomahawks. You know the number, like how many tomahawks

do we make a year? Dozens?

Oh, well, we ordered 57. As of last year, we've used 800 so far in the war. So, yeah, a little bit of a problem. Also, update on that, we don't even have this in the story. I know, only just happened yesterday. The Japanese press reported yesterday

that they had a huge order of Tomahawk missiles, which by the way, they did because we asked them to. Because we were like, hey, you need to buy some. They were like, okay. So they did, and we just went to them yesterday, and they're like, yeah, just so you know, that's not gonna be fulfilled, even though you've paid for it already, and we will be taking the Tomahawks,

the very same missiles which we wanted them to buy for some deterrence effect in China, and also against North Korea. just so we were on the same page. Oh yeah, and we're keeping the money. You'll eventually get your missiles, maybe, ish. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's kind of a disaster. Same thing with the UAE, by the way,

with many interceptors. South Korea is a similar problem. This is really bad.

And a bunch of weapons that were intended for Ukraine. The US said, actually, you know what, we're gonna go ahead and take those. And Europeans are like, wait, didn't we pay for those? We're like, yeah, you know what?

Right. You'll get it eventually.

What is property and money really when you're a hegemon? We're just going to go ahead and borrow these. And so one piece of evidence of how stretched in things are, you can put up D2 here, C17s just like a like a giant ant march you know up the eastern seaboard over over toward the theater there. Put up D3 as well. This looks at Tungsten in particular. The headline if you're just listening to this is from foreign policy America's war machine runs on tungsten

and it could run out. You could actually run that headline and put several other critical elements inside there and it would also be accurate. We hollowed out our productive capacity over the course of the last 50 years. We focused on this kind of shock and awe strategic approach. We enriched our military industrial complex

with this trillion dollar annual defense budget with basically no kind of checks and balance on it. Like no quality control. No, because it feeds itself. Things are going well in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland, then things are going well

for everybody who's gonna rock the boat. And so it was designed in a corrupt fashion, but also literally not designed for an extended war against a real country. It was designed for like 2003, three or four day bombing campaign of Baghdad,

followed by sending in a bunch of troops and paying Halliburton to supply it.

Let me, did you put D1 yet up on the screen? Yeah, you can put D1 back up if you want. I wanna expand a little bit on some of these missiles is that they're explicitly being taken away from the Indo-Pacific region. It's not just about a shortage,

it's that you're burning through the vast majority of the stockpile. There were over 2,400 before the war. If they take all of them out, there'll be about 400 left. So do the math about what that means. Almost 2,000 in a single one-month period.

Also, to connect this to my great fear of what we talked about in our A Block, when you start to run out of conventional weapons, what do you do, Ryan? You have to start thinking about unconventional weapons or ground troops, and that's exactly where things are going. If we take this whole civilization will die tonight truth,

and we combine that with what's left in the US military arsenal. Well, let's say you're in the same boat as Truman. I know, you put yourself in this boat, but what was his calculus? His calculus was, well, 250,000 dead Americans, atomic bomb. Now, it was a little bit more complicated than that,

but in his mind, that's what he was thinking at the time. And he goes, okay, I'm going with the bomb. Well, this is gonna be very simple. So, let's say that this power plant bombing and it doesn't work, almost certainly just leads to horizontal escalation with Iran. They wipe out all these power plants, desalination plants,

oil infrastructure all across the Gulf. We're in a full-blown global depression and now he has a choice of a tactical nuclear weapon, not that there is such a thing, or he can use ground forces. Well, the war is only gonna be even more unpopular.

When America wakes up tomorrow, we're living in a whole new world, not just in terms of what we've wrought, but people will actually, at least I hope, finally start to pay attention to what the hell is going on here.

And then you combine that with where the president is, he either has to order ground troops or he has to order some sort of unconventional weapon, especially when the military is gonna start coming to you and say, listen, we can't keep up the sustained bombing campaign or we're gonna rip everything dry,

like all of these munitions. This is just the way that wars are not meant to be fought. They either have to be fought on the ground, have a diplomatic solution, or you need to bring this to an end immediately. So the brittleness of the US defense industrial base is right around, right around now

is when we expected things to break. In the early days of the war, I quoted a expert named Seth Jones over at CSIS. As you know, CSIS is like this with the Pentagon. They're basically the arm of the Pentagon, which is why you should listen,

because they tell you the things that the Pentagon wants to say but can't. And he said, neither Israel nor the US has the munitions for a months-long war. Out loud, he said it on the very first day. When I put that out, I was ridiculed by the Zionists,

by the pro-war lobby. Here we are, we're a month in. We're stripping interceptors, oh, I mean, oh, God, we already stripped the interceptors out of South Korea. That took two weeks. Now we're stripping all these missiles out of the entire Indo-Pacific. We've got these large C-17 refueling tankers,

which we've had to bring back. The money have been struck. We had that US Navy, what was it, the E3 spy plane, that was taken out. There's only 14 in the whole world. It was bombed. Let's put D3 up there on the screen already. They're talking about a big tungsten shortage.

This is from foreign policy. It could run out. The US operations are draining limited US stocks that show how reliant the war machine is on tungsten. And exactly that material, which is very low in supply for a lot of the munitions and piercing rounds that we want to use,

very low, we don't have enough, a lot of it is in China, and they don't want to sell it to us, shocker, in order to fund this war, which is currently happening. And so what do you think is gonna happen? So as we start to dwindle, and this is the same playbook that we saw in the First World War.

As I've said, if you look back, the amount of munition, artillery shells, that they had budgeted for the whole war, they blew through in a month, in a month. So they were like, oh my God, what do we do? They were able to go total war,

nationalize the economy, put everything into production. Obviously, nobody really ran out of shells, but when you start to run low, you have to start thinking about how do we change the status quo? And right now, there's only two options, unconventional weapons or ground troops. Both are a horrific disaster for the world, for us,

I mean, for the economy. In the middle, so many millions of people are going to be affected. And this is the danger, not even to think about the bigger picture about the Asia Pacific, our real allies.

I mean, we talked earlier in the show, how crazy is it that Trump is like, yeah, our only real allies are the Gulf and Israel. You're like, what? Australia, South Korea, Japan? I mean, look, people know I hate Europe, but like, come on, like, I'll take London over Tel Aviv.

Like, what are we doing here? ASML, like all these companies that come out of there. Again, you know, sure, they're sclerotic, but it's not. What are we getting from Israel? Waze? All right, I'm good, all right?

You know, if I had to use Google Maps I could suffer through it. And at the same time that we're getting exhausted, Israel is getting exhausted too. You know as we're told the number of interceptors that that Israel has left that are capable of taking on ballistic missiles is at a critically low point. And that's obvious. Like, we don't have to be told that, though we are.

It is obvious just from the math, the numbers that they had, the numbers that they've been using. And at the same time, the Iranians haven't deployed many of their most sophisticated hypersonic missiles which are capable of

more precise targeting and of evading You know these very interceptors that they are running, you know, critically low on and so Israel is relying, you know, very heavily on the US Navy and its interception capacity as it is much more vulnerable to attack it. Also, and this is why I just like Israel's decision to want to continue going forward with this at this point is so maniacal and so suicidal because it is,

I've heard somebody describe it as an energy island, because it is, you know, this country that is isolated from all the other countries in the region, it's not connected in a lot of ways. It has its own kind of energy island grid. If a few different nodes of that are hit, it is plunged into darkness. Iran, you can plunge it into darkness. We still have enough munitions that we can do extraordinary kinetic damage to Iran. No doubt about it.

But Iran has hundreds and hundreds of power plants. Israel has, what, 10? Eight? Like, not many. So if they're hit, and if they can't protect them from getting hit, and if Iran decides to use

its hypersonic ballistic missiles against a much depleted ballistic missile defense, they're gonna get through and hit Israeli power plants. Which then kills, like, it kills people. I was just in Cuba, yeah.

I was gonna say, you should tell people about this because you were just in Cuba. Yeah. And tell them what you saw. What does it mean when you lose power?

The most immediate thing, and so we might, for a range of different people, but the most immediate and obvious thing is patients who are in hospitals on ventilators.

Die.

They die, or the nursing staff has to run to them with their iPhone camera on, or their smartphone light on, and hand pump, which is not what you want, because you also wanna be able to check their vitals constantly, and you wanna be able to give the right amount of oxygen.

So you can keep them alive for a while, but not forever. We also talked to a mom whose kid is on an oxygen tank, and she said in the hospital, the nurses are so good that they're not as worried when the power goes out. But at home, they have to rush to like get the oxygen tank, get the mobile one, the one that's battery

powered, make sure if the battery is not charged up, you're screwed. Also, the shutdown, the immediate shutdown of power damages all of this equipment. I talked to a researcher at Cuba's Neuroscience Center who was saying that they're losing a bunch of data to corruption because you can't just done, shut down, like you just lose stuff. MRI machines crash because the cooled helium, the cooled liquid helium that is

essential to an MRI machine, MRI machine loses power, that helium becomes a gas.

Ryan, do you wanna tell me where liquid helium comes from? Do you wanna tell me where 30 to 40% of the world's helium comes from?

Cutter makes that from the fields that, we even bombed one of the fields that makes that helium. So if you're a Cuba, you can't get it just because you're sanctioned and told that you're terrorists. But if you had money a month ago in the United States,

you can buy new helium.

If now, you might not be able to. If Trump goes through with what he threatens and the entire strait is mined, if Qatar's gas field is destroyed, there is a world where in a year,

Europeans are waking up and there's no helium in your MRI. And that's also, it's for AI. It's a perishable good. It's for AI. Yeah. It's very critical for semiconductor manufacturing. Right, so what I didn't know before I went to Qubic is like, no, this is not the kind of stuff I know.

You cool helium to an extraordinarily low temperature and that interacts with the magnets in the semiconductor and MRI technology

In ways that allows it to move

very frictionless and that lack of friction is essential to The the advanced sophisticated technology and an economy that we have today When that stuff warms up to anywhere Remotely approaching think about helium balloon. All right, like it becomes, it seeps out, it's gone. You can't chase it. You have to produce it in cutter and then ship it around. If those facilities are on fire, you can't. So if you need an MRI, like get it now. And I would suggest

you don't get cancer or anything else that's going to require an MRI in the near to medium term future.

And who knows all the other petrochemicals and all of these other things.

We're going to find out how physical our economy is. We think our economy is fantasy and imagination, and we just press these buttons and things work. We're going to find out that there are actually things underneath here

that matter. Yeah, in our last AMA, someone was like, how do I prepare for this? And I was like, honestly, just save your money. I was like, have cash. I was like, that's all I can really say.

Because we'll be okay, we're a rich country, as in we won probably starve to death, or may starve to death if things become the worst case scenario. For us, we won't, but things will become massively expensive and effectively unlivable. So yeah, that's the only advice that we can give.

By the way, that's an extremely privileged piece of advice because most people, if they could be saving, they would be, so there you go. they would be, so there you go. What a disaster.