The Market Will Tell You What You're Short of

For navalists, the very short answer to the question of, "How many carriers do we really need?" is "More." 

Why is that the answer? Simple ... look at the length of deployments and the foolish "double pumping" of the CVN we have.

"High demand - low density" is just a PPT way of saying we didn't buy enough of what we actually need.

Let's take that simple economics concept over to the Army.

What are they short of? Remember when we were naked to attack from the Iranians? We don't want to have that happen again.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot missile batteries remain among the most frequently deployed units in the service, Army senior leaders have said previously. They’ve also acknowledged a need to ease the burden on soldiers manning those systems.

...

“Every Patriot unit assigned to the 32nd AAMDC was forward deployed during this period of time," Stewart said Wednesday at the conference. "More importantly, every weapon system in our arsenal, to include C-RAM, Stinger, Avenger, Sentinel Radar, Patriot, THAAD, all those were deployed forward during this time.”

Here is a question; our allies have a lot of air defense forces. How many of them have deployed to help us during this surge? 

In NATO alone, the Germans, Dutch, Spanish and Greeks have Patriot. The Romanians just got their last month, so we'll give them a pass.

The Army has been funding something ... but too much of that and not enough of this.

Imagine the requirements we would face in a war with even a half-peer.