The administration of US President Joe Biden refuses to transfer long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, despite requests from Kyiv and pressure from US lawmakers.
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.
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.
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.
Can you specify any such case?
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.
