Here's an underappreciated fact of history: in WW1 the US was so ill prepared that it had to borrow rifles from France.
People now take for granted that "the sleeping giant" was going to awake after being attacked. But in WW1 the US was also the largest economy in the world, and it did not transform overnight in a weapons manufacturing behemoth, like it did in WW2.
If a conflict with China ever comes to pass, it is not at all predestined that the US will repeat its WW2 feat rather than its WW1 experience.
China is heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States. China is also the world’s largest shipbuilder and has a shipbuilding capacity that is roughly 230 times larger than the United States. One of China’s large shipyards, such as Jiangnan Shipyard, has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.
"U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China"
I don’t understand why the US voluntarily gave up its significant advantage in manufacturing. Is it just because it would be impossible to have an industrial base in a world where Asia exists and can produce everything that could be built in the US for 1/5 the cost? In every universe where the US dollar is significantly stronger than the next greatest probable superpower, will that next greatest probable superpower always be in a perfect position to exploit this disparity and become the de facto world leader in heavy industry?
They’d need to switch to aircraft carriers and fast. The US has 11. China has 2. They are expensive, require specifically trained crews, and air superiority counters all of that shipyard capacity.
China has a lot of shipbuilding capacity, but I think it'd be pretty vulnerable to attack. The USA couldn't ramp up shipbuilding capacity overnight, but it could certainly degrade China's ability to build ships overnight. I'm assuming that most of China's ship producing capacity is on the coast, which may be an incorrect assumption.
If a conflict with China comes to pass, it won't be on US or China soil. It'll be a proxy conflict somewhere else.
All the major conflicts since ww2 have been in proxy locations. Korea (US/China), Vietnam (US/Soviet Union), and so on.
"Occupying" a country is fruitless (see pretty much everyone in Afghanistan) and unpopular.
So I don't see Chinese bombers over Seattle or US bombers over Shanghai. In that sort if conflict both sides lose.
Taiwan is the obvious proxy in play. The South China Sea is the other. Both would give China significant geographical advantage. Taiwan is just important enough (making PCs) that the US may intervene. But will the US land troops in Taiwan to fight street battles? Probably not (imo).
Will Chinese troops parachute into LA or US troops parachute into Tibet? Not a chance.
With all this in mind, statistics and behaviors from ww1 and ww2 are somewhat irrelevant.
If there is a US China conflict though, it's more likely to be economic. Supply chains disrupted. Chips in short supply. In that sense domestic production of non-military items becomes paramount (to keep the population appeased.)
If you want to have strategic deterrence capability, all scenarios are kept in mind, even if they are little low probability, in warfare sometimes enemy tries to find low probability scenarios and exploits that. (Remember german blitzkrieg in ww2)
U.S. simply participated in WWI for too short a time, only 1.5 years. It didn't produce much stuff in WWII by spring 1943 either - everything was in desperately short supply then. If it wasn't, why didn't Normandy invasion happen a year earlier?
And lack of preparedness in the previous years before WWI was deliberate, because public was too much against the idea of interfering into European affairs and politicians made every efforts to make it as physically difficult as possible. Zimmermann Telegram changed that.
I think the expectation is that China is the one that would massively outproduce the US. And that our technological "advantage" is roughly that of Germany over the US in WWII (i.e. noticable, but not meaningful). We likely would be barely capable of a WWI performance as far as output..
> If a conflict with China ever comes to pass, it is not at all predestined that the US will repeat its WW2 feat rather than its WW1 experience.
Exactly, I see it pretty hard to pull the same feat again unless there is a very big alignment with the companies that have installed capacity in the country.
That's weird that they would have a rifle shortage as the US manufactured millions of rifles for the UK (P14) and Russia (Winchester 1895 and Mosin-Nagant) and France (Berthier) during WWI.
I don't remember where I read that. But I just checked on wikipedia and it looks like the US had rifles to provide to its white soldiers, but not to its African-American soldiers, which formed 13% of the force. There was a whole combat division (the 93rd) that was equipped with the French Berthier rifle [1].
What this article misses is that the US "private planes" were being sold directly to Japan and then being converted into military aircraft. What we didn't sell we licensed the designs directly to them.
This went on well into the late 1930s. It was recognized as a potential problem by some but the profits were large enough that these were ignored.
I encourage everyone to read the book "Human Smoke." It is a collection of headlines and newspaper excerpts from the period surrounding WW2. It's a fascinating read and wonderfully exposes all the propaganda driven half truths and complete fabrications we've sold ourselves about the conflict ever since it ended.
In "Critical Path", Buckminster Fuller said that US scrap metal companies were furiously selling scrap to Germany & Japan in 1939 to capitalize on all-time high prices...
> US scrap metal companies were furiously selling scrap to Germany & Japan in 1939
In Herman Wouk's novel The Winds of War, an admiral, aboard an aircraft carrier near Pearl Harbor in 1940 or -41, groused to his officers that (paraphrasing from memory) "sooner or later the [Japanese] are going to come steaming over the horizon, burning Texaco oil and shooting pieces of old Buicks at us."
Thanks for the rec. I'm going to check out "Human Smoke". Now I want to recommend "Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son"[1] which is a collection of letters that a man, who made his wealth through the Chicago meat industry, to his son who went to college. It gave a warming perspective of a parent who would express his love in one letter, and frustration towards his son for showing up to work late in another. It beautifully illustrates a "modern" parent-child relationship in a time period I often imagine as cold and distant.
Meanwhile America is now struggling to produce something as simple as artillery shells, while Russia is producing 2-5 times the number produced by the entire US + EU combined.
There is good reason for that: the US/NATO war plans are not to get into an artillery war in the first place. If there is artillery in the way the US/NATO plan is send an airplane with a few bombs to take it out. There is still some room for artillery in the army and so we produce some, but that isn't the major way to fight wars.
The Soviet plan - which both Russia and Ukraine are well trained in - was to use lots of artillery. In backing Ukraine NATO suddenly sees a need for some shells that they wouldn't use if it was them. But the Ukrainian generals know them and so that is what they want. (Note too the nobody has provided Ukraine anywhere near the number of airplanes needed to fight a NATO style war - even if all promised F16s arrive today with full training it isn't enough for a NATO war)
Right, I think the idea that America plans to go into an artillery slugsfest misunderstands American military doctrine. One could argue that the reason we weren't prepared to do "artillery war" in Ukraine is because, politically, we're restrained from conducting an air superiority campaign (which would be used to eliminate enemy artillery).
The Soviet/Russian land doctrine is totally based on artillery. It makes sense that that is their priority.
Now, that doesn't mean that American doctrine would work well in a hypothetical war with China. I personally don't think the current doctrine would work well. But those that watch the military sphere know that brass have taken note of that and are implementing changes. That all you can really ask for.
The point is not whether US/NATO would fight an artillery war. The point is about proving your industrial base's manufacturing capacity. Artillery shells should be relatively cheap and easy to produce. It's a really bad sign if America is such a bureaucratic mess right now that production can't be ramped quickly. Doesn't bode well for future war, doesn't demonstrate capability.
It’s disingenuous to claim without citation that the US does not anticipate using artillery as one (of many) primary weapons in a land conflict against a near-peer adversary. The fact that thr US hasn’t had such a conflict since at least Vietnam (and arguably Korea) not withstanding.
Artillery has proved decisive in every conflict with static lines in the last 100 years. Sure, hopefully air supremacy would overwhelm your opponent and prevent a static conflict, but no air force has ever established supremacy in a conflict with saturated strategic air defenses. Perhaps the US air forces could, but this capability is untested. Sadam and Yugoslavia were limited to tactical air defenses in relatively small numbers compared with modern day Russia or China.
In short, artillery remains important, which is why US artillery shell production is up an order of magnitude over the last 3 years, and will continue to rise.
Russia also spends something like 7% of its gdp in the military, while for most European countries defence budget is around 2% of their gdp.
I'm not a war analyst also, but nato doctrine is kinda different from Russia'S. During both Bosnia and Serbia bombing campaigns nato inflicted most damage through bombs, not shells. In Ukraine both Ukrainians and Russians had to resort to artillery shells because none of them could fly uncontested
Your linked articles don’t back up the first part of your claim: the US doubled production, and exceeded production targets, but that progress is being hindered due to Congressional funding. So we have the ability to make shells, but don’t need them in mass numbers (because we’re not in an active war).
The OP article is about creating the manufacturing capability, which is different from having the capability and not needing it.
Sure, if you have the mistaken belief that making modern artillery shells at scale is simple, the US looks bad compared to a country whose government has always prioritized having lots of supplies for its army because unlike the US, it is not separated by vast oceans from any army that could possibly pose a threat to it.
Did you read these? The first article clearly states the US is actually ramping up production better than expected and it can do even better with more support/funding. It's Europe/NATO being behind where they want to be and limitations on funding/support in the US that is causing the difference in supply, not US production struggles.
Slavoj Žižek talks about "wartime communism", the tendency towards centralized control during extreme situations like a war or pandemic, because it is absolutely necessary for effective results at scale, when the problem is narrow and well-defined. Capitalism tends to do better at peace when there is no single fixed objective.
>It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
The author ignores the USSR completely in their article, except for a brief mention in the graphs (where it's #2). 157k planes is impressive, too, considering that many of the factories had to evacuate to Siberia. 22k planes were also additionally leased by the US and the UK.
It definitely is, but the US' industrial output wasn't limited to just planes, and the USSR received a ton of supplies and equipment from the US to bolster its war machine.
That's true, the ussr did some impressive things, and the millions of deaths they suffered fighting the germans in ww2 can't be forgotten, along with the impact of their weakening of the german forces over time.
Conveniently forgetting that without the fuel sent by the US, those tanks would have been pretty paperweights.
Y'all, it's true historically that the US has oversold its personnel contributions to the European theater, but overcorrecting with this weird nonsense about the USSR single-handedly winning WWII is just beyond bizarre.
The vast majority of the USSR factories were funded by american cash. Without the US, Germany wins WW2 handily. Without the USSR, the united states drops nukes on berlin in 1946 and handily wins ww2 by 1947.
Those factories were paid with Soviet money, but many were built by Western companies in the 20s and 30s. Because apparently communism was not such a big deal after all, as long as you could benefit from it.
Germany had already lost the war before Lend-Lease had a significant impact. The offensives of 1941 and 1942 failed before Western aid started arriving in significant quantities. The aid had much more impact on the Soviet offensive, particularly on the logistics side. It can be argued that Lend-Lease won Eastern Europe for the USSR.
As far as I understand, there are two schools of thought on what would have happened without Lend-Lease. In one, the USSR would have won anyway, but the war would have lasted until 1946 or 1947 and it would have been even bloodier and more destructive. In another, the USSR would also have lost, and there would have been an uneasy peace between them and Germany. In both cases, I'd assume the US would not see the Continental Europe worth fighting for.
Any two of the big 3 (US, SU, UK+commonwealth), plus all the partisans and smaller allies could have done it. It was a dumb hopeless war that the Nazis picked because their ideology was incompatible with accurately evaluating their opponents.
But, it is good that all of the allies decided to band together and get it down a little bit faster. Every moment that Europe spent occupied was just another mountain of human suffering. Plus, getting that theater done before nukes really became available probably saved some historical German cities.
And regarding the Ukraine war. Russia's industrial might is underestimated. And while it can not match that of the West, as a word of caution: China has more industrial capacity than the EU and US combined.
Wars have the nasty habit of taking unexpected turns...
Sort of interesting to compare the US experience in WWI, where a program to deliver 20k planes by the summer of July 1918 managed to get a whopping 196 planes into service before the war ended that November.
This will happen again with drones. No doubt China is watching Russia closely and ramping up their production. What we're seeing now with FPV and bomber quadcopters is literally the equivalent of WWI biplanes tossing grenades and mortar shells, which only took a decade to become long range strategic bombers dropping thousands of pounds. Once the production is in place, autonomous swarms are an inevitability. And we will be forced to match.
Great observation. I have this idea (apparently semi-obvious based on this discussion) that if there is a future war with China (sure hope we can avoid it), in terms of production and technology, the US is in Germany's position and China is in the place of the US in WW2 parlance.
There are the obvious parallels where the US has great advanced technology, China can sure make things in mass quantities; also they have plenty of brilliant engineers and scientists and can figure out anything. Some obvous differences are the US has been where people from the world flee to, to get freedom and liberty; now we are in a serious period of retrenchment though, with certain (ahem) groups wanting to restrict the books in the library if they are idealogically unacceptable and also anti-science and anti-education etc going along with that. China is not the place you want to go to if you are going to introduce heterodoxical ideas.
There are also all the echos of the '20s and '30s in our current times in the US and the world, groups of countries pushing different ideas and coming together in blocks. We have instant communication, nukes make everything even more serious than that time. The new ascendant anti-democratic countries want their shot at power and riches too.
One other factor that may help the U.S. is that America will have an easier time getting access to some resources as production ramps up than China given our excellent geographic position and China's lack of a blue water navy that can cut off American supply lines. However, while America's navy may get pushed back from the first island chain, there are several other chokepoints it can use to stop materials from coming in to China by sea (which is one of the only cost-effective ways to ship the amount of mass needed to produce war materiel at scale), and many of China's neighbors are not friendly to the CCP and not liable to support shipments of material to support a war through their territory even if it is economical to do so.
I'm terrified that America won't be able to match Chinese industrial capacity for killbot type drones.
Does anyone know if anyone has stared the infrastructure to produce these things en masse in the US? If so, how can someone with heavy construction experience, CAD skills, and embedded experience become a part of that?
The USA wouldn't fight an 'in the trenches war' where drones will come into play. We would fight a stand off siege type war. Hence why we are developing Rapid Dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system), which would convert our entire logistics feel (something we excel at) into stand off bombers that would overwhelm Chinese defenses. We would effectively have an addition 1500 bombers in the form of C-130s, and 200+ C-17s.
I'm guessing the system is named after an old Chinese siege weapon system to give China a message.
There is the "replicator initiative" within the DOD but I have no idea if it's moving quickly or not. The U.S. defense establishment still seems stuck in a pattern of buying big extravagant and expensive systems (e.g. aircraft carriers, million dollar missiles) which are vulnerable to asymmetric attacks from low cost drones or land to sea based missiles.
I am not worried. History likes to rhyme and I think China will do a switcheroo on Russia and align itself with the West for the purpose of dismantling Russia's military and industry, just like the Soviet Union switched sides from being an ally of Germany in 1939 to working with the Western Allies on breaking Germany's neck. The West will make some concessions, but they will be seen as worth the price of breaking Russia up.
Without using Chinese parts the US found that making their own small drones would cost $2,100. And those were just the observation drones for use by the Department of Interior.
They were also only 20% as capable as Chinese drones.
It's a bit more complicated than just production capacity of shitty quadcopters. The limiting factor with them isn't the airframe, you can make that out of literal tree branches and duct tape. The part that's important is the chips and US leadership seems very intent on fixing that, the question is if they're capable of doing so.
We also don't know what form drones will take as the technology matures. Quadcopters are common right now because they require exactly zero aerodynamic knowledge to build or fly. Any tween with an AliExpress+YouTube account could design, build, and fly all of the systems we've seen to date. As the systems become more automated in the face of EWAR, lasers, shotguns, whatever, expect a reversion to high speed fixed wing systems that trade a little bit of CDF knowledge for order-of-magnitude performance improvement in basically all realms (payload, range, endurance, speed, survivability etc).
> Between 1939 and 1944, the value of aircraft produced annually in the U.S. increased by a factor of 70, and the total weight of aircraft produced (a common measure of aircraft industry output) increased by a factor of 64
Something about evaluating production quantity by weight always puts a smile on my face
It seems reasonable if you're thinking about the amount of material that must be sourced, transported, processed, etc. also serves as a check that the newly produced planes weren't simply 70x smaller than before.
Someone who successfully ran an organization that successfully delivered 70 4,000-tonne ships is probably more qualified to be put in charge of building an aircraft carrier, than someone who delivered 70 4,000-lb boats.
When it comes to material goods that dramatically vary in size (ships, planes, bombs), tonnage is usually a good first metric.
I haven’t finished the article yet, so I’m not sure if this is brought up. But I’m always amazed by how much government control there was in mobilizing the US economy for WW2. Factories were converted to producing war goods overnight. From Pearl Harbor to Japans surrender, the US produced less than 200 commercial cars! The amount of centralized government control during this period was astounding. It makes you wonder if that would be possible in the US today. Not just would the American people tolerate this kind of drastic change, but whether the modern economy and supply chains could support these kinds of sudden, drastic re-directs
One thing about these sorts of gov run industry things is that when it works it almost always coincides with great national urgency where you get total civilian/private industry buy in.
Everyone points to NASA in the 60s as a perfect example of gov production but like all newly formed bureaucracies they are largely the sum of the people they recently absorbed into it. NASA mined all the universities and nerds from private industry who brought their work patterns, leadership, and attitudes to the organization.
But as these orgs age it’s the classic Iron Rule story of managers taking over and accountants ruining things etc etc.
Maybe we need to move away from monolithic mega gov orgs and create new ones to solve new problems each generation instead of being catch alls that do nothing well and never face any risk of being replaced. There needs to be ways to breed new life and kill off the natural development of bad management and crippling rulemaking.
Yes, they would tolerate it. Both because of the Government's monopoly on violence, and because citizens always rally to support a war when under direct attack. The latter effect was popularized by Randolph Bourne in an essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne
> the phrase "war is the health of the state" that laments the success of governments in arrogating authority and resources during conflicts.
The problem the US might have in full war mobilization today would be due to cronyism. Remember all of the exceptions to Covid lockdowns for "essential" employees? Some of that is of course necessary but I suspect it would be very widespread if it happened today. This would stoke resentment from people/companies not so privileged.
I worked in an automotive plant opened in 1954. (I worked there from 200x to 201x). I was specifically told that the support columns were set a certain distance apart from each other in case it needed to be re-tooled for wing production, and that was a condition of the financing or deal or something with the govt.
Any of that could be a misunderstanding or an urban legend though.
It wasn't so much centralized control as just spending gobs and gobs of money. If the federal government just started handing out money to produce consumable goods and machinery today, you can bet every company in the world would be all over that.
Readit News
People now take for granted that "the sleeping giant" was going to awake after being attacked. But in WW1 the US was also the largest economy in the world, and it did not transform overnight in a weapons manufacturing behemoth, like it did in WW2.
If a conflict with China ever comes to pass, it is not at all predestined that the US will repeat its WW2 feat rather than its WW1 experience.
China is heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States. China is also the world’s largest shipbuilder and has a shipbuilding capacity that is roughly 230 times larger than the United States. One of China’s large shipyards, such as Jiangnan Shipyard, has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.
"U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China"
https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-t...
America loves fighting so much it's had a civil war and fought a few of it's closest allies at various times.
China is a novice at fighting. Whilst they may have lots of ships, having really good people to fight in a complex battlespace is different.
More seriously, why are we not prepared? Didn't we spend enough to keep our defense industry competitive?
If a conflict with China comes to pass, it won't be on US or China soil. It'll be a proxy conflict somewhere else.
All the major conflicts since ww2 have been in proxy locations. Korea (US/China), Vietnam (US/Soviet Union), and so on.
"Occupying" a country is fruitless (see pretty much everyone in Afghanistan) and unpopular.
So I don't see Chinese bombers over Seattle or US bombers over Shanghai. In that sort if conflict both sides lose.
Taiwan is the obvious proxy in play. The South China Sea is the other. Both would give China significant geographical advantage. Taiwan is just important enough (making PCs) that the US may intervene. But will the US land troops in Taiwan to fight street battles? Probably not (imo).
Will Chinese troops parachute into LA or US troops parachute into Tibet? Not a chance.
With all this in mind, statistics and behaviors from ww1 and ww2 are somewhat irrelevant.
If there is a US China conflict though, it's more likely to be economic. Supply chains disrupted. Chips in short supply. In that sense domestic production of non-military items becomes paramount (to keep the population appeased.)
That would be more than enough to allow Chinese full control over that region of the world and give America a shamefully large black eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_chain_strategy
And lack of preparedness in the previous years before WWI was deliberate, because public was too much against the idea of interfering into European affairs and politicians made every efforts to make it as physically difficult as possible. Zimmermann Telegram changed that.
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Exactly, I see it pretty hard to pull the same feat again unless there is a very big alignment with the companies that have installed capacity in the country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Forces#...
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This went on well into the late 1930s. It was recognized as a potential problem by some but the profits were large enough that these were ignored.
I encourage everyone to read the book "Human Smoke." It is a collection of headlines and newspaper excerpts from the period surrounding WW2. It's a fascinating read and wonderfully exposes all the propaganda driven half truths and complete fabrications we've sold ourselves about the conflict ever since it ended.
In Herman Wouk's novel The Winds of War, an admiral, aboard an aircraft carrier near Pearl Harbor in 1940 or -41, groused to his officers that (paraphrasing from memory) "sooner or later the [Japanese] are going to come steaming over the horizon, burning Texaco oil and shooting pieces of old Buicks at us."
[1]https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21959
Sources:
[1] https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artill...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery...
The Soviet plan - which both Russia and Ukraine are well trained in - was to use lots of artillery. In backing Ukraine NATO suddenly sees a need for some shells that they wouldn't use if it was them. But the Ukrainian generals know them and so that is what they want. (Note too the nobody has provided Ukraine anywhere near the number of airplanes needed to fight a NATO style war - even if all promised F16s arrive today with full training it isn't enough for a NATO war)
The Soviet/Russian land doctrine is totally based on artillery. It makes sense that that is their priority.
Now, that doesn't mean that American doctrine would work well in a hypothetical war with China. I personally don't think the current doctrine would work well. But those that watch the military sphere know that brass have taken note of that and are implementing changes. That all you can really ask for.
Artillery has proved decisive in every conflict with static lines in the last 100 years. Sure, hopefully air supremacy would overwhelm your opponent and prevent a static conflict, but no air force has ever established supremacy in a conflict with saturated strategic air defenses. Perhaps the US air forces could, but this capability is untested. Sadam and Yugoslavia were limited to tactical air defenses in relatively small numbers compared with modern day Russia or China.
In short, artillery remains important, which is why US artillery shell production is up an order of magnitude over the last 3 years, and will continue to rise.
But maybe I'm not a military genius like those in charge of for profit defense contractors.
I'm not a war analyst also, but nato doctrine is kinda different from Russia'S. During both Bosnia and Serbia bombing campaigns nato inflicted most damage through bombs, not shells. In Ukraine both Ukrainians and Russians had to resort to artillery shells because none of them could fly uncontested
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The OP article is about creating the manufacturing capability, which is different from having the capability and not needing it.
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Russian has been in a war for the past 2-years.
The US & EU have not.
If NATO could supply the materiel for Ukraine to "singlehandedly" defeat Russia, they would do it in a heartbeat. But they don't have it!
The author ignores the USSR completely in their article, except for a brief mention in the graphs (where it's #2). 157k planes is impressive, too, considering that many of the factories had to evacuate to Siberia. 22k planes were also additionally leased by the US and the UK.
Y'all, it's true historically that the US has oversold its personnel contributions to the European theater, but overcorrecting with this weird nonsense about the USSR single-handedly winning WWII is just beyond bizarre.
Tousands of planes and tanks were sent as well as raw materials to keep their factories pumping.
This after they were initially on Hitler’s side.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Germany had already lost the war before Lend-Lease had a significant impact. The offensives of 1941 and 1942 failed before Western aid started arriving in significant quantities. The aid had much more impact on the Soviet offensive, particularly on the logistics side. It can be argued that Lend-Lease won Eastern Europe for the USSR.
As far as I understand, there are two schools of thought on what would have happened without Lend-Lease. In one, the USSR would have won anyway, but the war would have lasted until 1946 or 1947 and it would have been even bloodier and more destructive. In another, the USSR would also have lost, and there would have been an uneasy peace between them and Germany. In both cases, I'd assume the US would not see the Continental Europe worth fighting for.
But, it is good that all of the allies decided to band together and get it down a little bit faster. Every moment that Europe spent occupied was just another mountain of human suffering. Plus, getting that theater done before nukes really became available probably saved some historical German cities.
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Is this still true in light of the recent Ukraine events? Russia certainly isn't losing if no one's going to stand up to it.
It was Russia that won the war. https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU?t=205
And regarding the Ukraine war. Russia's industrial might is underestimated. And while it can not match that of the West, as a word of caution: China has more industrial capacity than the EU and US combined.
Wars have the nasty habit of taking unexpected turns...
http://www.worldwar1.com/tgws/relairprod.htm
There are the obvious parallels where the US has great advanced technology, China can sure make things in mass quantities; also they have plenty of brilliant engineers and scientists and can figure out anything. Some obvous differences are the US has been where people from the world flee to, to get freedom and liberty; now we are in a serious period of retrenchment though, with certain (ahem) groups wanting to restrict the books in the library if they are idealogically unacceptable and also anti-science and anti-education etc going along with that. China is not the place you want to go to if you are going to introduce heterodoxical ideas.
There are also all the echos of the '20s and '30s in our current times in the US and the world, groups of countries pushing different ideas and coming together in blocks. We have instant communication, nukes make everything even more serious than that time. The new ascendant anti-democratic countries want their shot at power and riches too.
This has always been much more important than dead capital.
Does anyone know if anyone has stared the infrastructure to produce these things en masse in the US? If so, how can someone with heavy construction experience, CAD skills, and embedded experience become a part of that?
I'm guessing the system is named after an old Chinese siege weapon system to give China a message.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12611
They were also only 20% as capable as Chinese drones.
Read this and get terrified
https://www.ft.com/content/dd2e936e-5934-49f1-8aa6-29dea9a41...
We also don't know what form drones will take as the technology matures. Quadcopters are common right now because they require exactly zero aerodynamic knowledge to build or fly. Any tween with an AliExpress+YouTube account could design, build, and fly all of the systems we've seen to date. As the systems become more automated in the face of EWAR, lasers, shotguns, whatever, expect a reversion to high speed fixed wing systems that trade a little bit of CDF knowledge for order-of-magnitude performance improvement in basically all realms (payload, range, endurance, speed, survivability etc).
Something about evaluating production quantity by weight always puts a smile on my face
Imagine measuring computer hardware output by weight.
Dead Comment
... As long as you don't do something stupid with it, like using it to evaluate people.
When it comes to material goods that dramatically vary in size (ships, planes, bombs), tonnage is usually a good first metric.
Everyone points to NASA in the 60s as a perfect example of gov production but like all newly formed bureaucracies they are largely the sum of the people they recently absorbed into it. NASA mined all the universities and nerds from private industry who brought their work patterns, leadership, and attitudes to the organization.
But as these orgs age it’s the classic Iron Rule story of managers taking over and accountants ruining things etc etc.
Maybe we need to move away from monolithic mega gov orgs and create new ones to solve new problems each generation instead of being catch alls that do nothing well and never face any risk of being replaced. There needs to be ways to breed new life and kill off the natural development of bad management and crippling rulemaking.
corpos are functionally immortal and it's the cancerous mass, not the germ line that survives.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gdbjVMxdnpQ
> the phrase "war is the health of the state" that laments the success of governments in arrogating authority and resources during conflicts.
The problem the US might have in full war mobilization today would be due to cronyism. Remember all of the exceptions to Covid lockdowns for "essential" employees? Some of that is of course necessary but I suspect it would be very widespread if it happened today. This would stoke resentment from people/companies not so privileged.
Any of that could be a misunderstanding or an urban legend though.