On Monday’s broadcast of Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted to the Biden administration that the U.S. is low on weapons Ukraine needs by stating that the Biden administration has faced calls for months to ramp up weapons production and do things like having multi-year contracts but has failed to do so.
Cotton said, [relevant remarks begin around 1:16:20] “[I]t’s been increasingly the case in various kinds of munitions, not just in the United States, but our European partners as well, given the woeful state of our defense industrial base. That’s why I’ve been calling, for months now, for a much more aggressive effort by the Biden administration to ramp up production of these basic munitions. We’re not talking about large and complicated weapons systems. We’re talking about something as simple as a 155-millimeter artillery shell. These things should not take months, much less years to make. But there are certain steps that we need to take that we haven’t taken yet, like providing multi-year contracts so companies have the certainty they need to increase production rates or even add an entire new line of production, allowing other countries to buy these weapons on an accelerated basis to, again, create the demand that the companies need to invest in their factories that build these weapons. But it’s very worrisome for what is happening in Ukraine. It’s also very worrisome, Brian, for the prospects of deterring war over Taiwan in the western Pacific.”
He continued, “It’s a serious problem, the administration needs to move much faster on it. I understand that they’re excited that they’ve taken steps to get production down from several years to just 18 months on some weapons systems, but we can’t dislocate our shoulder patting ourselves on the back on that. We have to get that 18-month timeline on these weapons systems down to two, three, four months.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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