Hacker News Reader

That 13mil also covers r&d costs as well as the actual manufacturing costs. If we needed 10000+ the cost would go down

Theoretically, assuming you get the supply chain optimized - this would be the biggest challenge, as US manufacturing has taken a nosedive after decades of being out-competed by lower-wage countries (and free capitalism being more than happy to save costs by moving production to said countries)

US manufacturing is bigger than ever. However it is concentrated in highly automated areas, and high value add. The share of labor in manufacturing has taken a nosedive. The manufacturing is still here though.

Eh, maybe. But even if you’re right, would anything short of an existential threat to US soil result in that capacity being re-tooled to make armaments?

I think the spectrum between where we are now and “existentially threatened wartime economy” is nonlinear: if there’s not an existential threat, but there is instead a popular foreign war (e.g. post 9/11), the fraction of defense economic capacity that gets unlocked is very small—still pretty close to what we have now. Which is a lot, but it’s far from efficient.

Hopefully it never happens. We should have the ability, but war time economies are not good for anybody.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com