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Trucks are really important for logistics. Soldiers need offroader vehicles - a humvee or something like it.
Furthermore, the broader learning in how to make factories, production chains, engines, working steel all helps military industry. If you've got a big car industry, you'll have a big robotics and machine tools industry too. You'll have lots of experienced engineers who can help make weapons. If you have a big electric car industry, you'll have a big battery industry and batteries have all kinds of military applications in lasers, drones and so on. Everything connects to everything else.
Converting factories to war production, that will be much harder these days. But the pools of knowledge, capital goods and experienced workers are still quite important.
I'm not an expert so I don't want to argue this too much. But what I heard was that, basically, modern military stuff is more like a custom bespoke piece, where each individual tank/ship/airplane/whatever requires tons of individual workers to pore over it and custom assemble it. They all need security clearance and experience with this very specific military technology that has no other application. Factories are more about scale, building up as big and cheap as possible, so they use totally different tools and ways of thinking.
I'm sure that\ you could take automative factory workers and engineers and re-train them as military workers, but you also do that with, say, software engineers.
Aerospace engineers are easier to retrain as a different kind of aerospace engineer than software engineers are as aerospace engineers. I think that’s just a truism.
I also think a lot of that is just the inefficiency of the modern west- in an emergency you could just use f-150’s instead of humvees.
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"Bespoke crafting" sounds true, that is how the hardware has been ordered for past few decades, but at the same time, it looks like such mode of production is not working very well when put into a test of a large-scale war (Ukraine). What seems to count is the ability to mass-produce hundred to thousands of missiles, thousands of cheap drones, and millions of artillery shells. Nobody seems to able to produce hundreds or thousands of tanks and airplanes, but if either side possessed such ability, it might decide the war.
That isn’t because America is fundamentally incapable of making more weapons. It’s because US strategy for decades has been that the only conflicts America will fight will either be against vastly inferior conventional forces in places like the Middle East or in a great power conflict against Russia or China which would either go nuclear or be over Taiwan and therefore resolved pretty quickly (the Chinese landing would fail or succeed in likely fewer than 72 hours).
The Ukraine situation is an extreme anomaly.
In great power politics, the wars are sufficiently rare that anomalies also count. (The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were anomalous in their scale. WW1 was, again, anomalous.)
Predicting the outcomes of wars is unpredictable business. Before the 1st Gulf War, very few people knew for certain it was going to be a quick, decisive victory against inferior conventional force. If American strategy calls for small wars in the Middle East or quick decisive naval wars in Asia, what Washington is going to do when faced with an adversary who is perfectly aware of the American strategy and thus presents something that is neither?
And anyway, the current nuclear stockpiles are a fraction of what it was in the 1980s. During the Cold War, the end-of-the-world thought stopping does-not-compute aspect was heavily colored by fiction and propaganda. After the nuclear exchange, a world will end, but the world will not.
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