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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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These are problems which could, in principle, be solved by spending US taxpayer money.

Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.

This presumption is based on the fact that it is common knowledge that in modern warfare, whoever can field more weapon systems will have an advantage. So a state (e.g. the US) which is working under a strong presumption of not having to switch to wartime economy might never the less invest to shorten the critical path to start mass-producing weapon systems in earnest.

Arguably, developing new weapon systems is part of this. For peacetime capabilities, developing a new weapon system and then building a few of them is likely worse than just using that budget for building the previous generation of weapons. But when you enter a big war and your defense budget increases by a factor of 20, R&D will be obviously a critical path, and not having done it beforehand will greatly diminish your capabilities.

Likewise for production. Keeping enough machines around so that half your working population can manufacture munitions is not effective when in all likelihood, these machines will just gather dust. But hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly. Perhaps this means keeping a lot of machines which build machines which build missiles around, or subsidizing certain key dual-use industries to keep them on-shore.

Of course, the US would face certain hurdles when trying to spend more money on manufacturing without being themselves in a shooting war, all the rules about having bidding processes, NIMBY/environmental lawsuits et cetera might still delay things. But compared to civilian manufacturing (i.e. the US on a whim deciding to invest 10% of the GDP into manufacturing hard disks onshore), I would still expect that military manufacturing -- especially of single-use items like missiles -- could be scaled up very quickly.

Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.

Modern weapons are complex. Building a factory to make something simple today might happen under a year, but for high-tech production of stuff with proprietary components that can't be bought from several vendors it just gets vastly more complicated. This simply isn't the 1940s when the most complex weapons may have had some electronics. Something like radar seeker heads is extremely specialised tech. Solid rocket fuel either, zero civilian use. Missiles are absolutely unused in civilian world, so are probably missile parts like those specialised servos etc. Expanding production in wartime requires having the entire specialised supply chain ready and waiting, so you existing workforce can train new people. This rarely or never happens.

but hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly.

No. Not happening. We aren't in WW2 era where you could convert an auto plant to an airplane plant with relative ease. Scaling production quickly is now really hard. You need whole mothballed plants with crews keeping the production going at low volume to maintain the ability. This is something only governments with money to spare such as Russia or China can manage. It'd never fly in any pensioner-heavy democracy, nor in the US.

If you look into this more closely, 'streamlining' and lowering cost was popular. US ended up with having problems of this type:

https://theweek.com/us-military/1023025/us-production-of-bullets-shells-and-missiles-sidelined-by-explosion-at-1

There's no reason to worry. US is going to abandon Europe and nothing really bad could result there, worst case Turkey or Russia conquers some unimportant part. The war with China in the Pacific is almost certainly lost on a numerical basis alone, so there won't be a big war. Maybe something silly like US Navy letting Taiwan hang but blockading Malacca strait etc. US itself is pretty safe.