I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production, so that you don't need to maintain as much military spending 24/7
Tanks are relatively easy to spin on production of. No nation ever started building a battleship in the time of war that then saw service in that war. Battleships commissioned during war had been started during peacetime or they were scrapped during the war because they didn't fit into the time or they were started under high holds, but they couldn't be finished in time. aircraft carriers are likely to be the same place going forward - you have to make them beforehand.
Things like artillery shells, which need to have the ability to quickly spin up production, but that's relatively easy to do. Which is why we're so low on production. The one thing that's lacking is the willpower to actually spin up production because as we quickly discover you could do it but that means all the things that your people are doing instead can't be done.
It's basically how Ukraine is doing it, with the EU and the US providing high-end systems while they have hundreds of small companies building drones. Russia also repurposed existing warehouses and factories to pump out hundreds of cheap drones per week relatively quickly.
But the elephant in the room is that they both rely heavily on China for batteries and electronic components, which the US obviously won't choose to do.
The first Iowa-class battleships were laid down in 1940 (so after WW2 started but before the US entered the war), and did see active service in the war. The British had two classes of battlecruisers that were laid down in WW1 that saw service in WW1, although they commissioned after the Battle of Jutland, which was essentially the only major naval action of WW1. It's debatable if you want to lump battlecruisers in with battleships, but considering that the main long-lead item of battleships are their guns and battlecruisers are essentially battleship guns on a cruiser, I think it's fair to do that here.
Aircraft carriers are not battleships, but I do think it is worth noting that except for Essex herself, all of the Essex carriers were laid down after the US entry in WW2 and these were the ships that formed the US assault in the Pacific in WW2.
The U.S. had a vested interest in keeping the Philippines safe, as that was a major source of rubber and several citrus fruits used for everything from hygiene systems to car tires. More importantly the Philippines were a place for the U.S. to exert influence over southeast Asia, as previously they had been a U.S. territory between 1898 and 1934.
On the U.S. side the Great Depression was still completely in motion (it's one of the reasons why the U.S. agreed to grant the Philippines independence), and manufacturing had taken a major slump after 1937. The 1933 halt of reparations payments from the Weimar Republic once Hitler was pronounced Chancellor, 1935 automotive industry contraction, 1934 and 1936 dustbowl famine, and contraction of ship building and oceanliner travel in 1936 following changes to immigration policy meant that many factories were laying unused. American companies were actually trying to make manufacturing sales pitches to Nazi Germany starting in 1936 because they were fooled into believing Nazi Germany's economy was actually going to escape the Great Depression first. With over half the country out of work and every one out of three factories sitting unused, it was easy enough to hire enough people and fill enough factories to have the workforce and workspace required.
And more importantly, the tools back then were more universal and the parts were designed to be worked by those tools. A hydraulic press, bandsaw, and lathe were already within the factory most likely, and they were all that was needed to machine many parts. There weren't complex specialized dies or 8dof placement arms that could only make one specific thing. The SBD Dauntlesses were so quickly produced because you just needed an engine shipped in from Wright, a roller press, lathe, and a rivet gun for the most part. Meanwhile you look at what is necessary to create an F-35B, and there's such a complexity creep that it requires several different manufactories that are in different corners of the country and cannot be placed near eachother for logistical and environmental safety reasons.
I think the issue is that you need different types of weapons for defence during peacetime and wartime (or when attacking).
For example, Stinger missiles are great for defending against the first wave of a drone attack or occasional rocket - they're effective and quick to use, but its immensely costly to maintain an arsenal of them that would last a year of sustained attack or even the production capability to replace used missiles. When you're under sustained attack it might be better to deploy more troops with lots of (previously warehoused) anti-aircraft cannon that can fill the sky with bullets for a few dollars to bring down drones and rockets and use your Stingers for those that get through.
They have a miniature Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and a rotary coded aperture, and a singular or just handful of gas-cooled IR detector devices. Either the aperture, or more commonly the entire telescope, is on a spindle and rotates at high RPM. So imagine one of those palm sized super long focal length camera lens is put onto a disassembled hard drive and the entire thing spinning at the disk drive speed. On models after AIM-9B, either the front group, or again the entire thing, is on a quick responding 2-axis gimbal.
A dot of heat source within view of the seeker, interfering with spinning coded aperture, will create a characteristic pulses and/or beats. The pattern can be half-open half-close disc, an asterisk/sunburst pattern, or a half covered asterisk. And the spindle can be strategically angled, or it can be perfectly straight. Anyhow, the way IR source is interrupted gives the seeker theta and alpha angles by the intervals of the blocker part of aperture passing over it, or the delay between the start of new rotation to the IR spike getting through and whatnot.
(I think this mechanism is where the hallmark Sidewinder grrrrr -> wheeeEeEeEEEEE growl comes from but I don't know...)
A separate flare sensor with filters to mask engine exhaust and focusing on flare spectrum is added, and it is wired to activate a mechanical aperture to limit the view as well as tracking disable signal to the seeker so that the missile flies towards last known direction as long as a flare is in the field of view of the seeker; the field of view is limited to a very narrow cone in the first place, and that is why seekers are built on the Schmidt-Cassegrain system, and extremely rapid tracking allows the seeker to work despite tiny FOV.
And, you know, in this day and age, it could be just a camera. And they in fact use cameras since AIM-9X and on(9X3? 9X4?).
And my point is, the US already uses the GP's suggested strategy of maintaining bare minimum military spending at uneconomical price to be spent on maintaining emergency ramp-up capability, combined with regularly repeated and easily won wars in Central Asia, as well as strict controls of advanced military technologies such as what I described above to slow catch-ups by other players than the US, except it is all out of control, now crippling the US and the Western world itself.
Slap an ESP32CAM on the head of a rocket with a pair of SG90 servos and it'll serve perfectly as a $49 superior substitute to a Stinger guidance block(exaggerating but shouldn't be more than 1.5 digits off). Military technologies and controls on technological proliferation completely missed that, and Stingers are still dumping current on Peltier coolers and spinning those mirror drive systems, genuinely costing thousands to make before bonuses and capped to peacetime rates.
I'm not from the US and I don't identify as an American so maybe I really shouldn't be saying this and I might recall this later in the way some retired American military officials pointing out basic corrective actions to be taken in after the Putin's massive blunder in the Ukrainian invasion - but I think that is the problem that the US military industrial complex is facing, what tech billionaire right wingers were making clumpy half-baked A for effort attempts to fix, and partly why they support what is effectively the destruction of the USA. I think.
That's probably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolleron
We in the public don't have a complete list of missiles from various nations and their tones, but it's well known that American Sidewinder systems use an iconic growling dog[1] tone. Stinger is more sine like[2], and many others appear to be sine like too, and newer systems like 9X and later are clearly just digital and software based even by public descriptions of it.
What I'm suspecting is that, the early gen Sidewinder growl might have been just the raw sensor output piped into the headset, because the operating principle of those seeker units somewhat corresponds to the sounds, down to the high boresight angle warning tone which isn't hard to imagine a kid playing with a benchtop example and accidentally implementing it by damaging some cable.
Sure. How?
The problem is continuously maintaining, and upgrading that sort of capacity when you don't have an active war that requires it.
It's a very different model to traditional exquisite weapons. It makes no sense to actually buy and store the drones as they quickly become obsolete. But someone needs to pay for the capacity to be maintained/upgraded. Dual-use can help, but only partially