China production, US production, and more on the F-35

Looking at American defense manufacturing today, and it ain’t pretty.

China has unveiled a new method of smelting iron which gives an incredibly fast yield – typical blast furnaces can take up to six hours per batch.

A new iron making technology developed in China is set to significantly impact the global steel industry. Developed after more than 10 years of research, this method injects finely ground iron ore powder into a very hot furnace, causing an “explosive chemical reaction”, according to the engineers. The result is a continuous flow of high-purity iron that forms as bright red, glowing liquid droplets that accumulate at the base of the furnace, ready for direct casting or one-step steel-making.

The flash iron making method, as detailed by Professor Zhang Wenhai and his team in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nonferrous Metals last month, can complete the iron making process in just three to six seconds, compared to the five to six hours required by traditional blast furnaces.  MSN

I believe the stat we had recently was that their shipbuilding capacity was 269 times that of the US? Wonder how much their capacity is constrained by traditional blast furnace operations – however much it is, sounds like they will no longer be.

 

Meanwhile, a new report on the Navy’s ability to put Marines where they need to be is scathing:

Half of the Navy’s 32-ship amphibious fleet is considered to be in “poor” condition by the Navy’s own standards, according to the Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday. “In some cases, ships in the amphibious fleet have not been available for years at a time,” which also means that “these ships are not on track to meet their expected service lives,” the agency said.

The new GAO report served as validation for the Marine Corps, which has been raising alarms about the state of the amphibious ship fleet for years as it hampers the service’s approach to deploying units from the East Coast, West Coast and Japan.

The GAO report said the impact of maintenance delays from 2010 to 2021 was 28.5 years of lost training and deployment time for those ships and their associated Marines.

The lack of ship availability has hampered responses to real-world events.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, officials said there was no MEU deployed. Marines were unable to evacuate American citizens out of Sudan during a civil war there in 2023, having to rely on other countries to pick up the slack, nor were they ready to respond to a devastating earthquake in Turkey in 2023.Military.com

A crisis response team that takes months to get there is not a crisis response team, now, is it?

Let’s go back to an old familiar favorite – the F-35. Turns out, there may even be a shred of good news: They CLAIM to have a fix for their guns (but have not tested it yet.)

“The F-35 lethality assessment suffered from the inability of the F-35’s gun to hit the targets because of design and installation issues,” according to an unredacted section of the February 2024 DOT&E report that POGO (Project on Government Oversight – ed.) obtained.

For context, each F-35A has a four-barrelled 25mm Gatling-type cannon, designated the GAU-22/A, mounted internally in a space above the aircraft’s left engine intake. The gun has a rate of fire of 3,300 rounds per minute and feeds from a 180-round magazine.

Yep, that works out to 3 seconds. 3 seconds of 25mm compared with an A-10’s 1172 rounds of 30mm rounds.  Oh, and the F-35 ammo costs $131…PER ROUND.

The design of the internal mount for the GAU-22/A on the A version of the F-35 was also found years ago to have been so badly misaligned that it not only negatively impacted accuracy, but also caused physical damage to the aircraft from firing the gun. The War Zone

Anyone else hearing Sean Connery saying “I’m afraid they got us” after shooting up his own tail?

 

 

Category: China, Marines, Navy