That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.
If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.
We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...
Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.
There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).
That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.
More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.
If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.
Our scaling is human oriented - add more shifts. Maybe we can adapt new manufacturing methods like screw extrusion mentioned in the article
As a big part of Europe is learning at great cost.
How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Congress vs. running those factories in peacetime as a jobs program?
Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.
Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.
Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.
Side note, if you're ever in central Mass, the Springfield Armory is a great tour.
Agile, vertically-integrated weapons manufacturing... in 1820.
They've got an original wooden copying lathe: traces a finished master rifle stock with a contacting friction wheel, then carves the same shape onto a blank. https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/thomas-blancha...
It was finally closed in 1968.
Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
I was working on one when we got shut down due to a political squabble resulting in sequestrations. Reminds me of our recent shutdown in many ways.
This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.
Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.
But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.
Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.
And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.
It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.
Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.
1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages.
2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.
If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.
Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.
The flippant commentaries about drones help no one: they're a significant change in the intel environment, but nobody carefully inspects assumptions about cost efficiency or on the ground conditions.
Expensive drones are being used to fulfill roles which artillery fires could fulfill far more effectively, except both sides of the conflict don't have enough artillery but for vastly different reasons (whereas significant amounts of supplies are coming from a party which is more or less arming both of them: China's factories).
It should be noted that Ukraine has invested significant effort attempting to acquire US spec long range weapons like ATACMS and Tomahawk, and F-16 and HIMARS were both a big deal which took significant effort to get. Drones have created a new warfare dimension, but I find the way they're often discussed lacks of a lot of rigor or bearing on how they're actually being used.
