• SkibidiToiletFanAcct [none/use name]
    ·
    4 months ago

    They build cruise missiles and submarines today, but it's impossible for them to build more with their vastly greater capital and technology advantage? they seem to have excess capacity for atrociously complicated projects like the Zumwalt. There are also plenty of articles where someone takes a metric of the Chinese economy and says it means China is doomed also.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      4 months ago

      US isn't even able to build enough weapons to keep a proxy war with Russia going right now. It's absurd to think that US could develop industrial base to take on China. Also, nobody with a functioning brain says anything of the sort about China's economy. If you're still listening to the same hucksters who've been peddling China's collapse for decades and still can't see that it's nonsense don't know what else to say.

      • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        The US has like 10,000 tanks, fields of aircraft, fleets of rotting ships, all in storage.

        In the event of a war with China (just as Iraq and Afghanistan), most heavy US equipment would be refurbished stuff, it's cheaper and quicker to upgrade a 40 year old Abrams M1 than build a new M1A2.

        I don't think the US even tries to prepare for a scenario where it actually goes through its reserve.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
          hexagon
          ·
          4 months ago

          That's not how these things work in practice. US can't just pull out 10k tanks out of storage and put them into combat. There are logistics, personnel, maintenance, fuel, and so on, that's needed to operate each one of these tanks. In the event of the war with China, US would be trying to ship its decrepit tanks all the way across the ocean. Even US military isn't dumb enough to think this is feasible.

          US whole game plan was to have sea and air dominance and to surround China with bases in Japan, Korea, Philippines, and Guam. This whole hare brained scheme is now falling apart because China has reached parity with US both in terms of its naval and air forces. In addition to that, China enjoys massive missile superiority.

    • Tunnelvision [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      They are able to build what they have been contractually obligated to build, but they do not plan for surge capacity which means new facilities would need to be either built or converted to accommodate it. Going to large scale near peer conflicts like China or Russia necessitate huge surges in war materials that the US hasn’t had to plan for in almost 80 years. It’s just not going to happen without a huge nationalization effort of damn near the entire supply chain AND a huge investment into new facilities.