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Last week there was a conversation on here about a potential peace deal in Ukraine. I claimed that the peace deal seemed fake since if you knew the background on peace efforts, you'd know that both Putin and Zelenskyy were playing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as the one who "doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump to try to direct Trump's ire in the other direction.
We now have pretty good confirmation that no peace deal will be forthcoming in the near term. JD Vance has said that the war won't end anytime soon. This backs up further reporting following the mineral deal that Trump's team was looking for ways to compel Russia to come to the table, and didn't really find any options that they liked.
The bull case for a Trump-brokered peace deal was the idea that the US could use its power to demand that both sides come to the table, and if either side tried to walk away then the US could force them back. This worked halfway, as the US has a lot of leverage over Ukraine for things like intelligence gathering, air defense, and to some extent other military deliveries. Much of MAGA hates Zelenskyy personally, and Trump was more than willing to exercise that leverage when Zelenskyy snubbed him at the WH meeting. The problem was that the other half of the puzzle was missing. Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms. However, Trump has been unable or unwilling to do this, so we had the situation where Trump could compel one side quite effectively, but when the other side did something Trump didn't like all he could do was tweet "Vladimir, STOP".
Peace is good as a general rule, and it would have been good if Trump could have gotten a peace deal along the lines of "ceasefire at current lines of control, Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe" so it was worth a shot. But alas, it seems like the war will continue.
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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.
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