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Comment by traject_ | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is a point a lot of people simply don't understand. Having billions of dollars in GDP generated by the service industry (like financial services or informational technologies) does not map one to one to generating a functioning arms industry to produce artillery ammunition for example. You need manufacturing facilities, a large pool of candidates with potential expertise in technical hardware skills to run these factories and logistical lines to keep them running. These prerequisites existed in the West during the earlier part of the 20th century which was why the transition to the war economy was relatively painless but no longer exists now. It is simply irrelevant to talk about multibillion dollar GDP economies specialized in unrelated industries if you don't have the actual physical resource and staffing requirements.

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Let this be a lesson to all: you need to ensure your industrial base can actually step up and produce what you need for war. Thankfully you don't normally need it, but you are not in control of when someone will decide to attack. You are not in control of if NATO or other alliances fall apart. You have some input on both (please work for peace!), but there are factors outside your control involved.

That nobody is producing enough artillery shells almost 2 years later is criminal. I give Ukraine a small pass here only because evidence is post 2014 they were doing their best to build capacity, and that takes time. The rest of us didn't have the corruption and other problems that Ukraine has done internally, and so we should already have that in place. (or in place the ability to give Ukraine air supremacy so they don't need artillery - there are lots of options)

The idea of "If you want peace, prepare for war" is as true today as it was back then. Only risk being, that some people in power might tempted to use a strong military for all kinds of reasons.

Yes, like now for instance.

True, maintaining an industrial base in the defence sector is hard. Demand is usually, luckily, rather low. Technology is pretty advanced, making ot impossible to just repurpose existing industrial sites as was done during WW2.

Civilian industry could build a metric shit-ton every day of the equivalent of the Iranian shaheed drones. If the political will was there to repurpose civilian industry.

Yes, they can easily be shot down, but if several hundreds keep coming every day, the defences will be overwhelmed. It's already a war of attrition and Europe could easily win it, but it's mostly sitting on its ass.

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