In response to:
I trust Prof McCranie pointed out that Article I, Sect. 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to raise an Army and to MAINTAIN a Navy. You can train up a soldier in 3 months, but to build and equip a warship takes years.
Last month (June 18) marked the 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812. In this "second round" of the Revolutionary War, a weak, aggrieved yet ornery United States confronted its former colonial master, the eminently powerful but also riled Great Britain.
The diplomatic vocabularies of several current international conflicts echo, albeit distantly, 1812's route to war. Economic sanctions and (backfiring) embargoes aggravated U.S.-British relations. Britain's apparent lack of respect for U.S. sovereignty angered Americans. The forced "impressment" of U.S. sailors into Royal Navy service, usually backed by the threatened broadside of a RN warship, was a Yankee cause...
The response to your comment is rather complicated. The US mfg base isn't what we had in WWII, but we didn't have that base at the beginning of WWII, either.
The big push for "efficiency" and maximizing use of available resources has reduced the amount of "spare" capacity- I think that is what you were getting at.
"Modern" warfare may or may not consume large numbers of fighting aircraft, armor, and ships- our military leaders have placed their bets on superior quality making up the difference- I guess we'll find out if that's the right call, eventually...
Stopping production of the F-22 greatly increases the per-unit cost of the plane, giving its critics another shot at the program (just like anti-nuclear nuts filing
The F-35 does not have the same mission as the F-22. It would properly be called the F/A-35.
Well, it depends... Did we know that the B-52's were going to be in use 60 years later? Had we any idea what enemies and weapons they might encounter, 60 years later? Were they "overbuilt" for their current missions?
We can't know what enemies we will face, from Jihadis with suicide bombs to Aliens with miles-wide flying saucers. I'd rather have more-capable, than less-capable, weapons systems - just so we won't have to turn around and replace them in 10 years, when The Next Big Thing comes along.
So what we have NOW is all we're going to have for the duration of a war.
Sherman tanks were relatively poor tanks compared to German tanks,but we made FAR more of them; we lost many in battle,but we had made so many more that we still had superiority on the battlefield.
New START requires we dispose of some of those delivery systems,BTW,since they are "dual-use" and can be used to deliver nuclear weapons.
BTW, I also caught the "Footfall" reference above. It's been a pleasure corresponding with you...
Mare Island constructed the destroyer USS Ward in less than 2 months.
If we needed to, we could build the facilties from scratch to construct and launch a nuclear-powered spaceship between destroyer to battleship in size within 6 months - provided we didn't mind the radioactivity from the launch fallout.
But the US today doesn't HAVE the heavy manufacturing that we had in WW2.
Commercial yards in Californial, Mass, R.I, Charleston all started closing down in the 60s, as commercial shipbuilding shifted to other countries. Our repair work for Navy ships are done by a combination of private and government yards that no longer build ships (Puget Sound, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard,
Yes- once American industrial might was FULLY brought to bear on the problem, we were knocking out ships as though from a printing press. But that re-tooling took years to accomplish.
The other problem (especially with the Liberty ships) was that the vessels were considered "disposable" and were both incomplete and barely habitable. It took a lot of time and manpower underway to correct the basic deficiencies the crews inherited with their new ships.
By way of reference, the Navy had to discard over half of the WWI four-piper destroyers rushed into service because they were so poorly constructed and were falling apart.