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Radio War Nerd EP #581 — Missile Warfare, feat. Jennifer Kavanagh (Patreon)

Published:
2026-02-13 22:09:04
Edited:
2026-02-13 22:10:17
Imported:
2026-02
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Guest: Jennifer Kavanagh, Defense PrioritiesRecorded: February 11, 2026

We talk to defense analyst Jennifer Kavanagh about the asymmetry between missiles and anti-missile systems in modern warfare, defense procurement, Ukraine, and the Munich Security Conference.

Read Jennifer's article "What happens when we give Europe first dibs on US missiles for war" in Responsible Statecraft. Follow Jennifer on Twitter.

Total time: 53:24Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Buy & review John Dolan's new book, They Should Have Been Hanged: War Nerd Essays on the U.S. Civil War

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Files

Comments

T

First.

Chaise Combs

I don’t think many people who listen to this podcast are particularly interested in the strategic interests of the United States.’

Swamp Music Players

Giving WW2 as an example of how production can be ramped up when they really need it? Production capacity , skilled labour, supply chains , critical minerals , a capable political class , a willing population? Just an opinion, but does anyone think that just because of necessity the current USA could morph into WW2 USA in short notice? It would have to be a concerted effort by society to get into that kind of shape. Otherwise it sounds like magical thinking.

SB

Thank you for limiting it to 40 minutes. Such a waste of time. Bachelor & PhD in Political Science and Government. Has very little idea of the substance of what she is talking about -- physics, manufacturing, mass production, technical characteristics of the weapon systems. Claimed that THAAD is the best of the best (face palm), that U.S. could ramp up military production a'la WWII (not possible no matter the money), that Ukrainians've been successful in intercepting Russian missiles (!) and drones, that U.S. just didn't give its better systems (name one that actually exists) because of the concerns of the U.S. deeper involvement in targeting (can it get any deeper?), "because Russia is a dictatorship" (double facepalm). Bollocks from start to finish. A typical D.C. think tank parasite. Worse than Sam Bendett because I felt Sam was aware of his grift while she came across as a true believer in her own B.S.

aqueous_steve

Understanding how people inside and adjacent to the US government see the situation is interesting though, even if I don’t agree with them.

Joe S.

Her comment about how Europe could be stronger than Russia if they just organized themselves better was particularly revealing. Europeans won't do that because they see it as a threat to their national sovreignty. Does she not know that or is it just one of those facts that's too inconvenient to factor that into the analysis?

Candido Gonzalez

20:40-20:50 Its interesting that this view still dominates the defense discussion. People think that industrial capacity is something that you can just turn on with the press of a button. Did people collectively forget that the elites sold off our domestic industrial base decades ago?

JoR

May need an Ukraine update soon. I know we’ve been sticking to general negotiations/strategic updates, but as far as I can tell Ukraine is having a legitimate counter offensive in Donbas. For February they may have even equaled or outgained russia in terms of square kilometers. But even if that’s inaccurate we’d all appreciate an update lol

.

Not a waste of time. Insight into how these types of people think even from a more “moderate” imperialist position. Why I love RWN and what journalism/interviews should be about.

SB

Nothing is legitimate about Ukraine except PR

Karl Childers

i can't say i learned much from this one

CR

Every midwit who talks about how the U.S. ramped up industrial production for WW2 is oblivious to the status of American manufacturing, power generation, and the literal nuts and bolts of what would be constructed now vs. what was being constructed in 1942 as a matter of complexity and as a matter of what raw and processed materials we have in the U.S. for what was being built in 1942 vs. what we need to build our toys now. Sure, if you need to construct 200 million new AR-15s in a month you can reprogram every CNC in the country. If you need to build one F-35, you need raw and processed materials from China that in a war we are not going to have and if we're lucky we can figure out how to build a single F-35 100% domestically in 16 months. The reality is that if the U.S. ever needs to ramp up wartime production, it's already over. Manufacturing has remained stagnant for 25 years. The shift to a wartime command economy requires political, economic, legal, and social leadership and investment that does not exist and will never exist again in this country absent this level of shock, which will not bring anyone together. It will have everyone tearing each other throats out. Whatever is left will have to pick up that burden/responsibility, but at that point you will have a much bigger problem just in terms of who is going to keep the lights on and who is going to deal with the debt collectors now that the dollar is dead.

CR

Thank you for your contribution.

GC

Well said. I'm not always inclined to look towards someone's academic background first, but shrugging and saying "it happened then so it can happen now" without worrying about the difference between the two "it"s or the gulf between then and now is a familiar flavor from academics who went through American political science and government studies. They have a way of making American economics PhDs look thoughtful, which is awfully hard to do. I tend to agree that RWN should interview people with Kavanagh's background from time to time but I wonder if Mark and John could push back a little more on claims like the WWII thing. I think they both have enough of a historical sense (and intuition for material conditions) to have clocked this as silly. Ah, anyway, doing interviews is hard and I'm glad I listened to this one, but yeesh

Joe S.

And that, in order to ramp up production during WWII, massive state intervention in the economy was required. Our current class of oligarchs would never allow that.

CR

Just a reminder: it took eight months just to clear the debris from that bridge in Baltimore that serves as a key artery of the I-95 corridor. They are still “designing” a bridge that was already built once at a rate that won’t have it usable for traffic until next century.

Jon

Jennifer is wrong to take European leaders at their word that they genuinely doubt Europe's ability to defend itself against Russia. These are not (generally speaking) stupid people, and they fully understand that Russia is no threat to any NATO country. They're just paid well to pretend otherwise.

Jon

You seem to forget that WW2 saw the introduction of cost-plus contracts with an average fixed profit margin of 30-something percent. Big business did very well out of war production

Jon

Europe is already much stronger than Russia

Karl Childers

thank you for being a pissy bitch

William

The “imbalance between the unit cost of offensive and defensive weapons” is a puzzle piece I’ve been looking for, for a while. I think it fits in with the pendulum swing from “highly and expensively trained professional soldiers” (ie French knights/heavy cavalry) to cheaply trained & armored conscripts/levee on masse soldiers (idk, crossbow men). Spitballing, I guess one way you can look at the changing dynamics of the battlefield is by calculating the disparity between the number of man hours put into a soldier on one side and the number of man hours put into the counter for that soldier, or piece of equipment

William

I disagree mostly because in these sorts of situations there’s a lot of pressure for “getting results” and ineffective leaders are often weeded out pretty quickly. Also, this assumes that they’d still be focusing on loser projects like the f35 and not switching to something that is more mission ready. A lot of things get thrown to the wayside when conflicts are considered existential and a lot of the gridlock you see is based on a variety of factors that would change given the perceived level of severity of the conflict

William

They are, but there the Russians are still making advances all across the rest of the line. The Donbas has been heavily fortified in the 8 years preceding the confict, so it makes sense it would be slow to take ground. But, if the Russians break through the third defensive line anywhere on the front, I don’t see how the Ukrainians can stop them from splitting or flanking large portions. Donbass offense feels very much like the last offense into Russian territory (can’t remember the name right now)

William

Some of yall really continue to surprise me “Why does this person, whose entire education and career has been inside an ecosystem that takes its first principles from established foreign policy blob precepts, not understand these obvious contradictions??” Yeah. I wonder

Joe S.

They get plenty of money from gov contracts currently. Switching to war production would be expensive and likely entail higher taxes.

JoR

Generally I agee SB , but the movements on the map, for whatever it’s worth, rival what the UAF was doing in late 2022. PR or not, it’s not like their extremely short lived counter offensives in recent years . And hell by the time they make an episode, maybe it’ll all collapse again lol

JoR

From the elite POV I don’t know if I agree. Rationally they should know this. But the engrained hate and fear the EU elite has for Russia is pretty real. If it was simply a matter of the elites and their interests, would they have cut off the cheap, consistent flow of Russian gas ?

JoR

Probably thinking of Kursk, William. But yeah we will see what happens. I truly don’t see Ukraine even sniffing a full counter offensive that they dream of. But I also didn’t see them putting up the relative fight they’re putting up currently.

Karl Childers

its more a question of why bother interviewing someone whose analysis is so blinkered in such a predictable way

a clash of purple

Her whole point was that the U.S. *could* increase manufacturing capacity, if we faced more severe pressures. Those pressures would be what overcomes the institutional inertia and political gridlock that you point out. I think RWN listeners are very smart (I am one myself, after all), but most of us are terminally on-line and have a skewed perspective on American politics. There's still plenty of Americans who would be happy to fight, work, and die for the nationalist project, if they thought it was under threat. We still have the base for ramping up manufacturing, in terms of the raw materials, the technical expertise, and the untapped manpower. Would it maybe take a year or two to (re)build factories, rework supply chains, and such? Maybe. Could we do it, given the right political pressure and incentives? Yeah. The idea that the country will operate the same way in a real crisis situation as it does during a period of kleptocratic imperial "peace" is silly - it's the same mistake that the Russia-watchers often make. Just because the U.S. drags its feet when it comes to providing logistics for fighting unpopular wars that the population doesn't want and the government doesn't view as existential threats doesn't mean that its behavior wouldn't change in a theoretical "real" war.

a clash of purple

Did anyone chiming in to hate on the guest even bother reading her article? Or listening to the episode? The point of interviewing her was to get an idea of the current reality of U.S. logistics, the political mechanisms through which aid is being delivered to Ukraine, etc.. This is the first time on the show that someone has been able to talk in detail about these things. I'm willing to believe she's wrong about certain things, like the quality of this interceptor vs. that interceptor, or how great the THAAD is. But that's not the main point of the interview, or her article. It's a snapshot of the American empire's ability to manufacture missile defense systems, the leadership's political priorities and commitments (and how they changed from Biden to Trump 2.0), and some of the ramifications. It's genuinely enlightening to know just how few Patriots are manufactured a month, and how fast our stockpiles of certain materiel gets cleared out when they're actually needed. The stuff about Europe being potentially stronger than Russia if they just worked together and the U.S. needing to be more careful in shepherding its resources so it still has gas in the tank for other potential crises is whatever. A matter of opinion.

Cathode Ray Dude

One of the better episodes in a while. Thanks War Boys!

a clash of purple

If recent events have demonstrated anything to me, it's that European leaders (including Putin) are in fact *very* stupid people. No one should ever forget that the only reason the Ukraine invasion wasn't a possibly existential disaster for Putin's regime is that the Europeans are even dumber than him, and the genocide in Gaza distracted the U.S.. At the moment it seems like Russia will come out ahead in the Ukraine war, but that is only because of sheer dumb luck.

William

With the ever widening gap in perceived reality between the ossified political elite and literally every else, it is useful to hear what plays in that other world. What would you have preferred to hear? Shit you already know and believe?

John

I think aswell it’ll boil down to how many troops you’re willing to lose. Which won’t be many for the US. Its different for a country defending its borders of course. Would b interesting if the US actually broke out a hot war with iran. My guess is that israel would be levelled but i’m no authority.

Karl Childers

there's a lot i don't know about the capabilities of modern missile systems; i would have preferred an interview with a hardware expert. the episode title is "missile warfare"

John

I agree with jor. I think especially the smaller countries are quite scared right now.

John

I think your making good points a clash of purple. Problem is - there’s no actual situation where the USA is in an existential war. None of those exceptions will apply if the US and israel decide to bomb iran or china. There’d be a lot of domestic resistance. Plus how many patriots would actually go to the middle east or asia to die for a piece of land that isn’t home ?? As soon as the body bags start flying home you’d see a huge pushback to any war. Thats ny guess anyways. I don’t see china russia or anyone else actually threatening the US borders.

Owen

RWN should get Ted Postol on some time to talk Patriots etc

SB

I believe these people aren't very bright to begin with. The worst part is that the bankers like Macron and Merz never had a REAL job in their life that would produce real tangible value. They truly believe that money creates value and not the other way around. This makes them stupid in all practice sense despite their raw IQ test results.

SB

That's a dangerous delusion. Even the current beat up Ukrainian military would destroy any of the European militaries. And this is without the Russian manufacturing capacity ISR, air power, layered AD, and missiles.

CR

I need you, Mark and JD. To understand that the West is right and they know they are right and they are winning and know they are winning. They are right for the wrong reasons, but for now their delusions are cushioned by trillions of dollars and the most effective and massive hard and soft power machinery of control that has ever existed in history. The Carney speech wasn’t a concession speech like Arnaud Bertrand said. It was a warning: the gloves are off. The Trump Administration was given power because he’s the man those in power need and want to take the gloves off and take the heat for it. They get to look principled while “reluctantly” and “slowly” reverting all their actions and all their power moves to the ways that worked before 1945. And this time they are going to take everything or destroy it. That means the western hemisphere, Africa, near east, south and Southeast Asia, Eurasia, and the final bosses are Russia and China. As it was and as it always will be. But they are going to do everything to destroy both and they’re not going to fuck up like the Nazis did before NATO took the reich’s place or the way Japan fucked up in China.

CR

I understand that. I think some people do. But that doesn’t make the Blob’s position not-idiotic on matters like reindustrialization

CR

Directed Energy Weapons and superhumanly competent AI are just around the corner, bro. Trust me.

a clash of purple

What is the blob's position on reindustrialization? Don't they pretty much not want to do it? I know they've taken some steps to expand domestic military manufacturing, or at least Biden wanted to go in that direction.

a clash of purple

You're right. Really that whole discussion in the episode was kind of a non-sequitur. I don't think there's any realistic prospect of the U.S. massively increasing its military manufacturing capacity any time soon. Why would they?

SB

Her article does describe that to supply Ukraine the U.S. has to steal from Peter to pay Paul. She does mentione the limited production capacity, though I'm not sure she stated correct numbers for PAC-3 and THAAD in the interview. She also, correctly, stated in the article that the U.S. is pretending to be a mediator while actually being a party to the conflict. These points are news only to people that weren't paying attention. Russians knew from the beginning that they are fighting not Ukrainians, but NATO/U.S. and had no illusions about it. The December 2021 "ultimatum" made it very clear. It's only people in the West that are still under this notion that evil Russians want to "steal Ukrainian land" or "destroy their vibrant democracy." However, while she is describing the trees, she is completely failing to see the forest. The U.S. never, even in the top days of Cold War, had a serious AD system, let alone anti-missile one. Because it never needed to seriously prepare to defend itself from an air attack. USSR due to it's geography was always under such threat, and had to build generations of very formidable integrated AD systems that gradually added an anti-missile component. That's the reason why Patriot and THAAD are not serious systems, while ATACAMS were routingly getting shot at a 90%+ rate. Likewise, surge capacity has always been doctrinal in USSR/Russia, but never in the West. The NATFA-triggered deindustrialization destroyed capacity for even basic manufacturing in the U.S. that is pretty much impossible to restore due to elimination of the whole blue collar population. Car dealers, mortgage brokers, and wellness instructors cannot be converted into industrial working class. Worse than that, the gradual destruction of STEM education starting from late 80s if not earlier led to the current state where the majority of tech workers are foreign born and foreign educated. Unsustainable for any surge manufacturing dreams. Kavanugh cannot grasp it because she herself is a product of the "soft science" (no science) word thinker degree mills (looking at you, Harvard). She can't understand something she has no idea about. Martyanov may be crude, but his observations are very valid -- on top of the lack of STEM education, the mythologized history of WWII written by the defeated Nazi generals played a nasty trick with the U.S. military and civillian establishment. They make their assessments on the incorrect historical picture of the Russians and a very distorted "Top Gun" idea of the U.S. capabilities. She is just an example of such a creature that knows nothing about anything but has zero self-awareness. Yet she is very confident in her proclamations. And most people in the last several administrations are like that, which makes them look very dangerous to the rest of the world. Nixon was probably the last president who was generally aware of what was going on in the world and the U.S.'s real capabilities within it.

Cameron Young

Very informative I just found the comment about the USA going full ww2 production mode to be kind of odd. To steal someone’s phrase “we aren’t those people anymore”

a clash of purple

It'd definitely take a couple years, a lot of money, and a concerted political effort, but we could do it. It would take some serious pressure, though, and it's difficult to imagine how that situation would come about. So in that sense it's extremely unlikely, even if not theoretically impossible. The ruling class would be wary of reindustrialization because it would make unions stronger and give workers some power over the economy again. It wouldn't be easy to make them allow it to happen, just like it wasn't easy to mobilize the country in WWII. That was a massive undertaking that was only possible because, very broadly speaking, people hated and feared the Nazis and were outraged after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and because the New Deal had already mobilized millions of people into working on big state projects.

Cameron Young

Improbable , not impossible. The median age of the us in 1940 was 29. Today it is 39. The factories are old the infrastructure is old and we are old. Bad analogy incoming - I watched LeBron inthe All Star game at 40. But the guy who won mvp is 24. It’s just easier if you are young

CR

Deindustrialization began in the late 1970s. It just accelerated exponentially with NAFTA.

CR

RWN fans are already well-aware of the elite’s bullshit. That’s why we’re here.

CR

Europe can only rearm and wage war against Russia outside its walled garden by recolonization of the barbarous global south, and that is exactly what they are working towards. Russia isn’t a genuine threat, nor is China, but it is a genuine concern for lack of hegemony. As far as Europe is concerned, it’s better to be a pet of the Americans than cattle for a world that will eventually overtake them in manufacturing and commerce by following China’s lead. So they have mocked up this existential threat just like the mocked up Red Scare/anticommunist, anti-Bolshevik, anti-Third Worldist agendas. And it is using the same playbooks and the same foot soldiers of neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, anticommunist, religious fanatics, and ethnonarcisist scum like Azov and al Qaeda and all the groups that are gaining experience from in cross-training in Ukraine or politically in Eastern Europe and Central Asia or in just throat-slitting adventures in Africa and Syria.

CR

Exactly. There is no practicable scenario where the U.S. faces an existential threat that would create the conditions necessary for a political economy of reindustrialization that doesn’t already leap frog that state to the one where the U.S. devolves into oligarchic factions fighting it out, which even then would be limited to islands of industrial capacity and lots of the country being abandoned to a fate worse than east of Urals Russia in the 1990s.

Dec

Her comment about Israel’s “need” to defend itself from Hamas’ “poor” rockets truly stopped me in my tracks

William

Thanks for the completely unrelated and worthless comment

William

Dude, just shut up already. You’re not even right about “deindustrialization”. Manufacturing output, measured by real value added, has doubled in the US since 1970. Capital investment has declined and manufacturing’s share of the economy has dropped, but that’s true for every major world economy over the last 50 years

Tariq

I may not agree with her or care about the US’s strategic positions but it’s still helpful to hear what represents the dominant view in these circles

Boobs123

"Bachelor & PhD in Political Science and Government" like it's a bad thing, are you not aware that the namesake of the show is a poetry professor who drifted between education jobs for a couple of decades?

Boobs123

Me too, she really should have added an addendum to every comment she made about the perspectives of bad people where she suggests that they're evil, stupid, or lying, I know it really improves the show when John does it every few minutes.

SB

It is a bad thing. It's essentially a degree in religious studies. To his credit, John is always very open that he doesn't understand money and RWN's been avoiding discussing hardware the whole time. This lady claims to understand hardware, manufacturing, surge capacity, and all. She clearly does not. Her lack of a basic STEM education is likely a major contributing factor to her delusional incompetence.

Dec

You have misunderstood me Boobs123 :((

Vincent

Exact reason I looked at the comments. Like, you know 80 years of stuff has happened, right?

GoyBulletStopper

I feel like ive heard this interview a hundred times in the past year or so. But ive never heard this one specifically.

CR

Fuck value added. How much actual stuff in tonnage do we make? You're acting like all those finishing factories in the middle of the L.A. Basin are anything more than where the final screws are added to make a product appear to be manufactured in the U.S. instead of literally anywhere else.

Sex With Ted Cruz

Still blows my mind, yet does not surprise me in the least that they just straight up changed the rules to make the other side winning anything not allowed lmao. The epitomy of "I'm taking my ball home with me"