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Big factories can be retrofitted in times of world war to build tanks/guns/etc. It's seen as a national security thing.

by chubs 10y ago

philipkglass 10y ago
This seems out of date. World War II is not going to be repeated. WW II could drag on as long as it did -- giving civilian-to-war conversions enough time to matter -- because there were no nuclear or precision guided weapons. If a no-holds-barred Total War breaks out between major world powers again, it's really hard to see how it would last long enough for factory conversions to be meaningful. And if it's just another big war of choice we're imagining in the future, like Americans fighting in Iraq or Vietnam, those haven't been bottlenecked by industrial capacity either.
burfog 10y ago
Two more national security reasons: 1. There is the problem of depending on potential enemies (all others have potential to be enemies) for goods that are critical to the military and/or general economy. Suppliers can threaten to cut supplies. Note that this can happen even if actual shooting war is unlikely; the threat to cut supplies is a brutal negotiating tactic that can block us diplomatically. For example, if we depended on Russia, they could demand that we support the Syrian government. 2. Lots of physical things contain computer chips. He who builds them is in control. Remember when France gave the UK some secret codes to make Argentina's missiles (purchased from France) fail. It's not just military equipment. Consider your Ethernet card and/or motherboard chipset. It could include a hardware debugger with full memory access, controlled by magic packets. What happens when we can only get those from government-owned Chinese companies? What about modern computerized farm equipment that phones home for licensing? If that were foreign, could a foreign power disable our farm equipment at a key time, causing us to face food shortages?
- rjsw 10y ago
  I don't think the example in your second point is true. France did help the UK a lot but the Exocet missiles worked fine, one was even launched from the back of a truck.

Big factories can be retrofitted in times of world war to build tanks/guns/etc. It's seen as a national security thing.

by chubs 10y ago

Big factories can be retrofitted in times of world war to build tanks/guns/etc. It's seen as a national security thing.

This seems out of date. World War II is not going to be repeated. WW II could drag on as long as it did -- giving civilian-to-war conversions enough time to matter -- because there were no nuclear or precision guided weapons. If a no-holds-barred Total War breaks out between major world powers again, it's really hard to see how it would last long enough for factory conversions to be meaningful. And if it's just another big war of choice we're imagining in the future, like Americans fighting in Iraq or Vietnam, those haven't been bottlenecked by industrial capacity either.

burfog 10y ago

Two more national security reasons: 1. There is the problem of depending on potential enemies (all others have potential to be enemies) for goods that are critical to the military and/or general economy. Suppliers can threaten to cut supplies. Note that this can happen even if actual shooting war is unlikely; the threat to cut supplies is a brutal negotiating tactic that can block us diplomatically. For example, if we depended on Russia, they could demand that we support the Syrian government. 2. Lots of physical things contain computer chips. He who builds them is in control. Remember when France gave the UK some secret codes to make Argentina's missiles (purchased from France) fail. It's not just military equipment. Consider your Ethernet card and/or motherboard chipset. It could include a hardware debugger with full memory access, controlled by magic packets. What happens when we can only get those from government-owned Chinese companies? What about modern computerized farm equipment that phones home for licensing? If that were foreign, could a foreign power disable our farm equipment at a key time, causing us to face food shortages?

rjsw 10y ago
I don't think the example in your second point is true. France did help the UK a lot but the Exocet missiles worked fine, one was even launched from the back of a truck.