美军弹药库告急与滚珠丝杠瓶颈、英军基地未遂恐袭及亚马逊无人机配送争议

Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, September 28th. Here's what we're covering. President Trump's war against Iran has depleted US weapon stockpiles to troubling levels, according to senior officials, and the timeline for stocking back up on air defense missiles and other critical weaponry is long. A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office said it could take quote "at least 5 years." With those warnings in mind, the Times has been looking at some of the factors that make rebuilding the US arsenal so difficult. One of them is a little piece of metal that honestly wouldn't look that out of place in a junk drawer.

Farah Stockman: Ball screws are highly engineered components. They might not look that special, but they are incredibly precise. If it goes in a missile, they can easily be thousand dollar screws. And so it just changed my whole concept of what a screw is.

Tracy Mumford: Farah Stockman covers manufacturing for the Times. She says precision ball screws, which contain tiny metal balls to reduce friction, are essential, not just in missiles, but also planes and other modern technology. And they require incredible attention to detail at the factory level. The ones used in missiles, for example, must meet specs measured in units roughly 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. And Farah says only a handful of companies are capable of making the ball screws the US military needs.

Farah Stockman: I traveled to like the epicenter of US ball screw manufacturing, which is Saginaw, Michigan. It's where General Motors had a division that made ball screws for steering wheels in the 1930s. And some of these guys still use World War II era machines to make them. And a lot of them have gone bankrupt in recent years or they've been bought up by bigger companies. And that's happening exactly at the same time that demand is increasing because all of a sudden we need them for humanoid robots. We need them for submarines. We need them for missiles. You come across these bottlenecks in American manufacturing. There might be a component that no one's even heard of and all of a sudden it's the thing that's preventing us from making what we really need to make.

Tracy Mumford: Farah says precision ball screws are far from the only weapons component that can be hard to source. But the long lead time for these ball screws right now can add months or even years to how long it takes to make a missile. One executive of a logistics company that tracks supply chains for the US military called it quote "an immediate single point failure for our national defense."

Donald Trump: I reject their proposal. They they made a proposal, but I've rejected it.

Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, over the weekend, President Trump told reporters that he's rejecting the proposal Iran put forward to end the war. It had laid out a 7-day timeline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart talks about Iran's nuclear program.

Abbas Araghchi: There is a very reasonable plan on the table. If they reject it with no reason, this is their fault.

Tracy Mumford: Despite Trump's comments, Iran's foreign minister said yesterday that given a history of contradictory messaging from the US, Iran was waiting to hear an official rejection from mediators. Also this weekend in the UK.

UK Police Spokesperson: So at around 12:45 a.m. today, police received a call relating to three suspicious vehicles traveling towards RAF Fairford.

Tracy Mumford: Authorities said they thwarted a possible terror attack at an air base that the US military has been using for its strikes on Iran.

UK Police Spokesperson: A 400 meter cordon has been put in place around the vehicles while the army's explosive ordinance disposal unit examined them.

Tracy Mumford: Footage from the scene yesterday appeared to show a bomb disposal robot operating near three white vans. And officials said they'd evacuated dozens of surrounding homes as a precaution. They said they'd arrested five men on suspicion of terrorism. And investigators are looking into whether there's any link to Iran. Earlier this year, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps delivered a warning to the British government that quote, "Any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory is a legitimate target for our forces." The runway at the base in southern England is one of the few in Europe that's long enough to be used by heavy American bombers. And while the UK initially declined to let the US use it for the Iran conflict, the government later signed off on it. In the wake of the arrests, Britain's prime minister said an investigation into what happened is still ongoing, and he urged people not to speculate about any motive. Investigators are also looking into whether there's any link to Russia, which has been accused of orchestrating previous attacks on British soil.

Tracy Mumford: Now, two quick updates on the Trump administration. First, the White House says it plans to cancel more than $800 million in federal funding for education and health related programs that Congress had approved. This is the second time the administration has tried to take advantage of a quirk in the fiscal calendar to cut money without input from lawmakers. The legally untested maneuver would pull back funding for, among other things, programs for health research and the support of migrant students. Last year, the administration used the same method to cut billions in foreign aid, putting in the request so close to September 30th, the end of the fiscal year, that Congress did not have time to reject it. The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Republican Susan Collins, called the latest proposed cuts illegal. And the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray, described it as quote, "Theft from the American people, plain and simple."

Donald Trump: This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.

Tracy Mumford: Americans watching TV this weekend, Saturday Night Live, or some big college football or NFL games, were shown an ad featuring President Trump vowing to take on communists, Marxists, and fascists. The TV spot looked like a campaign ad featuring dramatic shots of Trump, but at the end, the screen flashed, paid for by the US government. It's one of a series of pro-Trump ads the administration has put out recently. And while it's not clear how much they cost, one estimate puts the price of the airtime at more than a million dollars. The administration has said the ads are public service announcements, quote, reminding Americans to love their country. But some ethics experts say the ads have crossed a line and violate federal rules against using taxpayer dollars for propaganda.

Juliet Macur: And finally, in the town of Richardson, Texas, you could just be walking down the street. You know, birds are flying on a Saturday morning. You know, some cars are going by. It's pretty peaceful. And then you see this drone appear above you, buzzing like billions of bees at once in a hive, and go over you really quickly. It's 5ft tall by 5ft wide and it weighs 83 lb. So this isn't like the little drones that people might have to, you know, take pictures or videos. And when you see it coming in for a delivery, you know, it's sort of like the moon landing, right? It sort of goes down really slowly and hovers about 12 ft above the ground and its cargo door opens and it just spits out this box.

Tracy Mumford: My colleague Juliet Macur has been reporting on how a Dallas suburb has become a testing ground for delivery by drone. Richardson is one of the first cities in the country where Amazon has gotten permission to test what it's calling Prime Air. And every day, dozens of drones lift off from a nearby distribution center and buzz across the surrounding neighborhoods to drop off packages on people's property. That's the goal anyway. There is footage of Amazon drones accidentally dropping a package into a pool and crashing into an apartment building. For Amazon, Richardson is just the beginning. A spokeswoman said customer feedback had been quote "overwhelmingly positive" and the company's got plans to expand Prime Air to hundreds more towns and cities across the US in the next few months. But some residents who live under the drones flight path told Juliet that their experience should be a cautionary tale.

Juliet Macur: I ended up walking around several neighborhoods that were under what now residents are calling a drone highway.

Resident A: Like sitting at my kitchen table where I do my work from home. I can hear them flying buzzing by.

Juliet Macur: And overall the the general feeling was that everyone hated the drones.

Resident B: It's not like somebody came in 20 minutes to mow the grass and leave. It's all day long. They hated the sound. They hated the sight of it. And they hated the intrusion of something with cameras flying over their house every few minutes.

Resident C: Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. I said, "It's a Sunday. Can we not have one day a peace?"

Tracy Mumford: Juliet says some residents have gone to city council meetings, complained to Amazon, and tried to escalate their concerns to the FAA, which controls the airspace, but they haven't gotten much traction and are now turning to writing letters warning officials in other cities where Amazon is about to expand, that the Prime Air program has been a quote disaster. Still, the appeal of faster and faster delivery can be hard to resist. And Amazon's not the only one in the game. Walmart's trying it, too. And one of the residents, who has complained about the drones flying over her backyard, acknowledged that her own daughter had been in a rush to make a sandwich at one point and ordered a package of ham from Walmart via drone. Those are the headlines today on the daily.

Deported Migrant: One of the officer, he came out and he goes, "Well, you in Africa." I said, "What the hell am I doing in Africa, bro? I don't want to go to Africa."

Tracy Mumford: A first person account of the Trump administration's third country deportation policy, where migrants are being sent to countries they have no connections to. You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a Time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to all of the journalism we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.