I thought you might find this observation by Sam Skove at Defense One interesting:

Lower-tier manufacturers are layered throughout the weapons production process, even if the branding on the end-product bears the name of a well-known, multi-billion dollar company. Boeing relies on 55,737 suppliers, Lockheed on 17,722 suppliers, and General Dynamics on 17,701 suppliers, according to an investigation by the Financial Times.

Many of these smaller suppliers are “tier five, six, and seven,” in the defense supply chain, said Jerry McGinn, a former senior career official in the Defense Department’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy. “We’re talking wiring, harnesses, fasteners, those kinds of things.”

The Defense Department also works directly with over 39,000 small businesses, not including subcontractors working for bigger firms, according to a 2020 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

So if Lockheed wants to boost production for its missiles, those small machine shops must also increase production. “You can’t just go to a hardware store and buy a nut and bolt, it has to meet certain specs,” said Berardino Baratta, the CEO of MxD.

Meanwhile, the number of those firms is shrinking. The number of small businesses working in the defense industry between 2010 and 2020 fell by 40 percent, and an estimated 15,000 firms will go out of business in the next decade if trends continue, according to a Defense Department study.

In the past I’ve known small defense contractors like this that consisted of a guy wiring cables on his kitchen table.

In other words increasing production of munitions is more than a matter of ordering more. A lot more. The capacity might not be there, the management of such a supply chain is daunting, and some of the suppliers are reluctant to modernize their operations without a dependable stream of orders.

This piece at Foreign Affairs by Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins has an interesting snippet:

rab Barometer’s survey of the West Bank and Gaza, conducted in partnership with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy, provides a snapshot of the views of ordinary citizens on the eve of the latest conflict. The longest-running and most comprehensive public opinion project in the region, Arab Barometer has run eight waves of surveys covering 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006. All surveys are designed to be nationally representative, most of them (including the latest survey in the West Bank and Gaza) are conducted in face-to-face interviews in the respondents’ places of residence, and the collected data is made publicly available. In each country, survey questions aim to measure respondents’ attitudes and values about a variety of economic, political, and international issues.

Our most recent interviews were carried out between September 28 and October 8, surveying 790 respondents in the West Bank and 399 in Gaza. (Interviews in Gaza were completed on October 6.) The survey’s findings reveal that Gazans had very little confidence in their Hamas-led government. Asked to identify the amount of trust they had in the Hamas authorities, a plurality of respondents (44 percent) said they had no trust at all; “not a lot of trust” was the second most common response, at 23 percent. Only 29 percent of Gazans expressed either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in their government. Furthermore, 72 percent said there was a large (34 percent) or medium (38 percent) amount of corruption in government institutions, and a minority thought the government was taking meaningful steps to address the problem.

and

In terms of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, support for the two-state solution in the West Bank was slightly lower than in Gaza (49 percent versus 54 percent), and opposition to Arab-Israeli normalization was slightly higher.

I don’t know how to reconcile those findings with the other poll I’ve cited here taken in May which found, well, pretty much the opposite. I also don’t know how to reconcile the reported findings with the finding in the Arab Barometer poll that more Gazans supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined than supported Fatah. I doubt that opinions have changed that much since May (but before Hamas’s attack on Israel). One or both of the polls could be flawed or erroneous. I simply don’t know but I wanted to report this polling result anyway.

At his blog Lawrence Siskind presents a point by point rebuttal of the charges made against Israel. Here’s an example:

Israel refuses to let the Palestinians have a state of their own.

The Palestinians were offered a separate state of their own by the British in 1937, by the United Nations in 1947, and by the Israelis in 2000 and 2008. In each instance, they turned down the offer, rather than live as neighbors with a Jewish state. No wonder the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban once said: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

The post is definitely one-sided. If I find a comparable pro-Palestinian post, I’ll link to it similarly.

My sole observation is completely tangential. I often hear it claimed that not all Palestinians support Hamas. I’m sure that’s true. However, what also seems to be true is that as of the most recent polling information from last spring a majority of Palestinians believe a two-state solution is unworkable. That would appear to differ from Hamas’s position only in detail.

In an op-ed in Newsweek Brad Palumbo points out something distressing. According to a recent Harvard-Harris poll although among Americans, generally, there is a consensus of support in favor of the Israelis following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the situation is quite different among Generation Z (Americans aged 18 to 24). 62% think that Hamas’s action was genocidal and 48% support Hamas. He remarks:

This is not normal. Such a moral perversion is not an organic belief that naturally emerges among decent people. On the contrary, it’s in large part the consequence of a corrosive and malevolent “social justice” ideology that’s being spoon-fed to young Americans on college campuses.

In this depraved worldview, which Elon Musk has dubbed the “woke mind virus,” the world is divided into two groups of people: oppressors and oppressed. Black people, for example, are oppressed in America. So, under this lens, Black Americans cannot be racist: They can only be victims of racism.

He attributes it to miseducation. While distressing I don’t think that’s quite right. I agree that it’s egoism if not narcissism but I suspect that much of it is due to an almost complete lack of anything resembling moral education. They only know what they see on TV (or maybe on Instagram) and that is largely amoral or immoral. I think that Mr. Polumbo is assuming that American young people are naturally moral and only through “miseducation” could they possibly hold such a view. I think contrariwise that human beings are naturally self-centered and that inculcating a moral sense in them is hard.

It sounds like a problem to me. Can it be remediated? Will it fix itself over time?

The editors of the Washington Post, donning their rose-colored glasses, urge Democrats to join with Republicans to break the impasse over the appointment of a Speaker of the House:

This is Republicans’ mess. But it hurts the whole country. If Republicans change course — for example, by nominating a better candidate — Democrats should be willing to help them clean it up.

The best — and, given the three weeks of paralysis, perhaps the only — ways to unfreeze the House involve Democrats doing more than watching Republicans fail. This would require at least some tacit understandings between the two parties, which neither side has seemed eager to develop. That has to change.

concluding:

The fact remains that, if just a handful of Democrats had voted “present” on Mr. Gaetz’s motion to dethrone Mr. McCarthy, the House would have been at work for the past three weeks and Mr. McCarthy would have felt freer to govern without constant worry that hard-right obstructionists would take him down for keeping the government open, as they eventually did. Something more like the national interest would have prevailed. At some point, it should.

The question that the editors fail to ask is should the Democrats bail out the Republicans without exacting a pound of flesh for their support and why? They imply that it should be done for the good of the country but, realistically, doing things for the good of the country is in pretty short supply these does. The Republicans should move forward for the same reason but see above.

Also omitted is that

1. It hasn’t always been like this. At first the Speaker of the House was a parliamentarian full stop. The power of the speaker has grown over the years until today we have an imperial speaker. The members of both caucuses seem to like it that way.
2. The present situation is in part an artifact of representatives selecting their constituencies rather than the other way around.
3. Wouldn’t reducing the power of the speaker be more in the national interest than electing yet another imperial speaker?

Imagine for a second that speakers were selected by lot. That wouldn’t violate the Constitution. IMO in that case the power of the speaker would be greatly curtailed. That should provide a hint.

Update

The Congressional Republicans have elected a new Speaker of the House, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana. The vote among Republicans was unanimous and without any help from Democrats.

There are some signs that the war between Israel and Hamas is expanding into a regional conflict. I’ve already mentioned the increased shelling of northern Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon. U. S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have come under fire lately. In the Wall Street Journal Michael R. Gordon, Nancy Youssef, and Gordon Lubold report:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Tuesday that Washington would react “swiftly and decisively” if Iran or its proxy forces attack U.S. personnel after Tehran raised the risk of a larger Middle East conflict in recent days by unleashing the regional militias it has spent years arming.

For more than six months, these Iranian-backed militia groups refrained from launching drones or rockets against American troops in Iraq and Syria, as part of what appeared to be an undeclared truce between Tehran and Washington.

That came to an abrupt end when U.S. officials said that Iran-backed groups launched 10 drone and rocket attacks against bases that U.S. troops use in Iraq and another three on a U.S. base in southeast Syria.

The attacks were carried out between Oct. 17 and Oct. 24. In one of the attacks at al-Asad air base in Iraq last week, U.S. troops shot a militia group’s drone out of the sky, where it fell atop of an American drone and destroyed it, U.S. military officials said.

In Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthis also fired five Iranian-provided cruise missiles and launched about 30 drones toward Israel in an attack that was larger than initially described by the Pentagon, U.S. officials said.

Last week, the USS Carney guided missile destroyer, which was operating in the northern Red Sea, shot down four of the cruise missiles while a fifth cruise missile was intercepted by Saudi Arabia as it protected its airspace, according to people familiar with the episode. Those cruise missiles have a range of more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles), the Pentagon said Tuesday, which would enable them to reach targets in Israel.

We may have the opportunity to see what the unit of measure of “swiftly and decisively” is soon. Other risks are also emerging. The active arms smuggling network from Iran to the West Bank also appears to have stepped up its activity. Also in the Wall Street Journal Sune Engel Rasmussen and Benoit Faucon report:

Iran is a patron of Hamas, which it over the years has supplied with money, weapons and training. But as Egypt has cracked down on smuggling routes through the Sinai Peninsula, which borders on the Gaza Strip, Hamas has become increasingly self-reliant on indigenously built weapons, especially rockets.

The bulk of Iranian weapons to Palestinians go into the West Bank, particularly to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group allied with Hamas, according to a senior Jordanian security official. The official said networks of smugglers, assisted by the Syrian government and Iranian-backed militias like Hezbollah, were growing.

“The weapons flow has really increased, specifically over the past year. This is because Iran has been much more focused on the West Bank recently, and trying to arm some of the groups there, especially the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is Iran’s more direct partner,” said Michael Horowitz, Israel-based head of intelligence at Le Beck International, a risk consulting firm.

The smuggling routes extend from Iran across Iraq, Jordan, and Syria.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk via RealClearPolitics expresses concern that we’re “sleepwalking into World War III”:

I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War Three, sleepwalking our way into World Wr Three with one foolish decision after another. Really, people should be deeply self-reflective. If they make their predictions have not come true. They should consider whether perhaps their predictions might not come true either.

The “bad decisions” didn’t just start recently. They’ve been made over the last 30 years at least. What I notice is that so many of the arguments being made in favor of the “bad decisions” are completely a priori and discussions devolve into name-calling if you dare contradict them. I have no doubt that the decisions are in sombody’s interest. I don’t see how they’re in the U. S. interest in any but the most indirect of ways.

David Kilcullen has a high level overview of the coming invasion of Gaza by Israel at Foreign Affairs. Here’s a sample:

Hamas is a technologically enabled, socially embedded force fighting on its home terrain. Its fighters operate in small networked teams that are armed with lethal weapon systems of the kind that, in recent memory, were largely only available to the armed forces of nation-states. Hamas’s tactics are likely to involve network defense: holding strongpoints to delay and disrupt IDF advances while keeping mobile forces in reserve, ready to counterattack or re-infiltrate cleared areas. They will make extensive use of military off-the-shelf weapons as well as booby traps and improvised explosive devices. Hamas has also already demonstrated its ability to fight a sophisticated information war to mobilize international support.

What started as a horrific attack on Israeli civilians, exploiting shock and surprise, is now likely to congeal into a grinding, slow, contentious, and costly battle in the air, on land, on the sea, and in cyberspace. In Gaza’s complex, cluttered, heavily populated and densely urbanized environment, it will be extraordinarily difficult to make sense of what is happening, even for those on the ground. The effect of emerging technologies, the enduring features of urban combat as identified by NATO—friction, density, complexity, and all-directional threats—along with the physical, human, informational, and infrastructure constraints that cities impose on military forces will all inform what is about to unfold.

Understanding the tactical difficulty of urban warfare adds context that Israel can use to evaluate the wisdom (or otherwise) of any full-scale ground assault in Gaza. IDF planners are likely concerned that once their forces are decisively committed to ground combat in Gaza, other regional players—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-backed militias in Syria, or Iranian forces themselves—might attack Israel, creating a multifront war. This possibility might prompt Israel to mount a preemptive strike on regional players before entering Gaza, but such a strike would be a high-stakes gamble.

I don’t really have a lot to add to that article which I recommend. The present conflict began with a multi-pronged surprise attack. I doubt that will be the last surprise in the conflict.

The piece that caught my eye this morning was this one by Annalisa Merelli at STAT:

Fixing the U.S. health care system can seem like a herculean task. But the solution is “actually very simple,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Amy Finkelstein.

In their recent book “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care,” Finkelstein and Stanford economist Liran Einav describe how years of research have led them to the conclusion that the best way forward is for the U.S. to offer universal basic health care coverage.

It isn’t until nearly the end of the piece that Ms. Merelli gets to the fine print:

Countries are divided, however, on what constitutes basic services. There are services that are clearly fundamental (say: vaccines, primary care, cancer care, maternity care) and others that are definitely not (for instance, purely cosmetic plastic surgery). But Finkelstein noted that a lot of services fall into a gray area, such as physiotherapy, new drugs that only extend life expectancy for a few months, Viagra, and in vitro fertilization.

Under certain circumstances I could support universal healthcare in the United States. I do have certain questions:

• What would be covered? I don’t believe it could work if elective procedures are covered, for example.
• If universal basic healthcare controls costs why are costs rising so fast in the United Kingdom?
• How will a country of 330 million however wealthy pay for the healthcare of 8 billion people?
• How will we persuade Medicare beneficiaries to accept a lower level of benefits than at present?
• What if they’re wrong?

I suppose we shouldn’t worry about the problems a system of universal basic healthcare might face in the U. S. Such a thing would not be possible politically for some of the reasons suggested above.

I will need to reread this article by Dante Chinni and Stephanie Stamm at the Wall Street Journal a couple of times. I think the interpretation of the data is almost the opposite of what the article claims to show.

As you can see from the graphic above, the American electorate’s voting has become very slightly more Republican (margin of error) over the last 50 year and considerably less Democratic. The article purports to demonstrate that the degree to which Baby Boomers have become more Republican is offset by the degree to which Millennials and Gen Z is Democratic. I think it actually shows that a) the Silent Generation has changed a lot; b) the Baby Boomers have changed a little; and c) Millennials and Gen Zers are quite a bit more Republican than the Baby Boomers were at their age.

More research needed.