Things that Go Boom

A detailed analysis by Sarah Constantin, published on the LessWrong forum under the title 'Things That Go Boom,' has gone viral for its stark assessment of US military readiness. The post examines the potential bottlenecks in a late-2020s US-China conflict over Taiwan, concluding that the most urgent constraint is the production of 'energetics'—the explosives and propellants inside munitions like missiles and torpedoes. Constantin cites the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland, as the sole US facility for torpedo fuel, representing a fragile single point of failure. The analysis is framed around the Pentagon's stated goal of being ready to 'fight and win' a Taiwan war by 2027 and the US strategy of 'deterrence by denial,' which relies on sinking an invasion fleet.

Constantin grounds her warning in recent CSIS wargames, which model a conflict where US and allied submarines, bombers, and aircraft launch a continuous barrage of precision-guided munitions to cripple a Chinese amphibious fleet. The central finding is that while US platforms (ships and planes) are relatively fixed, they would expend munitions at a staggering rate. The US's current, peacetime manufacturing capacity for these critical energetics is orders of magnitude too small to sustain such a high-intensity conflict. This creates a severe mismatch between projected wartime demand and the industrial base's ability to supply it, posing a fundamental risk to the credibility of US defense commitments in the Pacific.