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.

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.

Fogbank