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Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and c

Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?

throwup238 2y ago
The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
- cpursley 2y ago
  Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
  - Sakos 2y ago
    US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be. Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped. What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
    - hintymad 2y ago
      > Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list. I think Yamamoto Isoroku gave the answer to this challenge: just keep a booming manufacturing industry. When he was trying to convince the Japanese government not to have a war with the US, he said that he saw so many chimneys when flying over Philadelphia. All those factories would turn into a giant war machine if a war ever broke out. That is, the economy of scale matters. When the US had its entire supply chain domestically, replacing a special screw could cost a few cents. When we were in good terms with China, it would cost a few dollars as we had to order the replacement overseas, but well, it was still cheap. Now that we are trying to cut China off, then what will do if we'd need to get a replacement? Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        > Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed. You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here. Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
        klooney 2y ago
        We have a high dollar value of manufactured products, but volume is way down, and the supply chain is ragged or totally broken. If your factories are warehouses where you assemble Chinese feedstock with German tools, how much local expertise do you have, or is it just LEGO kit stuff for tariff evasion?
        hintymad 2y ago
        > You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
- hintymad 2y ago
  > We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery. Thanks for the specifics. I don't know about guided munitions, but I'd imagine a million dollar a rocket will be quite expensive for a prolonged war. Also, the US debuted a killer zone, Rogue 1, a few months ago, and it cost about $94K. $94K! I'm sure the drone is more advanced than DJI Mavic 3 Pro, but is it really 50 times more advanced even if we take the cost of military-grade into consideration? It looks to me the only explanation is that without a healthy manufacturing sector in the US, the cost of anything would go through the roof because we have lost the economy of scale.
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. the biggest reason is the need to deal with adversarial input. dealing with GPS spoofing, properly encrypted and jamming resistant spoofing, not leaking the location of the operator, etc all are really complicated requirements that need expensive mitigation (and worse, prevent you from using commercial components)
    - skinkestek 2y ago
      > drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. After following the development of drones in Ukraine since 2022 and also listening to people familiar with the US army, I also think there are some not so good ones, one particular nasty one being scope creep. Recently heard about a US effort to create home built expendable drones for use at the squad level like the ones Ukrainians use and the result was too heavy and a lot more expensive (some of it thanks to the demand that everything be produced in a US controlled supply chain) but also as a result of good old fashioned scope creep. And this is nothing new: AFAIK there is an old British military saying something like "an elephant is what a mouse would be if specified by a military procurement committee".
      - dgroshev 2y ago
wakawaka28 2y ago
>There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import many components due to them being made much cheaper elsewhere. >We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders? You're totally right. This war is coming very fast as well, and by some accounts has already started. I worry we will all soon find out just how bad of a position we are in, the hard way.
- fifteen1506 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure costs have gone up not due to workers' salaries...
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    I wasn't talking about a change in costs. Costs have been high in the US for a very long time. What matters in terms of industry is that the rest of the world is coming online and their products are much cheaper than ours, mostly due to cheap labor and the currency exchange rates. Cost increases of domestically sprouted goods in terms of dollars are overwhelmingly driven by inflation.
- hintymad 2y ago
  > We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that's just $3 a shell, or 0.3% of the cost of a Russian shell, or 0.075% of the cost of a US shell. What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale. By the way, this is also what Tim Cook said. He said that Chinese labor not cheap anymore, but China has so much scale and expertise so that the output from China is still cheap. Again, economy of scale.
Spooky23 2y ago
You adapt. Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale. You get smarter/more accurate with the constrained supply of shells, adopt drones etc. In the 80s, expensive Maverick missiles were the primary airborne tank killer. Now the Ukrainians are dropping mortars into tank hatches from cheap drones.
- closewith 2y ago
  That just moves the issue onto the production of drones.
- bluGill 2y ago
  > Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale. Not really. Most of what Ukraine is getting is things that were on the list to destroy because they are end of life anyway. Of course the important lesson to take here is that the US doesn't have enough missile defense systems in storage.
brazzy 2y ago
> I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. Read TFA. Faster, yes. Cheaper, no. Even after fully ramping up, Liberty ships cost considerably more to produce in the US than an equivalent ship elsewhere. In wartime that is acceptable. When you're producing for a global market, it's not.
lostlogin 2y ago
> Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Maybe. Or a it’s a sign that workers, the environment, or some other factor is being exploited for gain.
M95D 2y ago
80 years ago the priority was beating the nazis and japanese. The priority now is making money. Can't make money with ice breakers, so use the steel to make SUVs instead.
kragen 2y ago
right, the usa 80 years ago is china today

throwup238 2y ago

The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.

cpursley 2y ago
Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
- Sakos 2y ago
  US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be. Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped. What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
  - hintymad 2y ago
    > Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list. I think Yamamoto Isoroku gave the answer to this challenge: just keep a booming manufacturing industry. When he was trying to convince the Japanese government not to have a war with the US, he said that he saw so many chimneys when flying over Philadelphia. All those factories would turn into a giant war machine if a war ever broke out. That is, the economy of scale matters. When the US had its entire supply chain domestically, replacing a special screw could cost a few cents. When we were in good terms with China, it would cost a few dollars as we had to order the replacement overseas, but well, it was still cheap. Now that we are trying to cut China off, then what will do if we'd need to get a replacement? Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      > Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed. You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here. Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
      - klooney 2y ago
        We have a high dollar value of manufactured products, but volume is way down, and the supply chain is ragged or totally broken. If your factories are warehouses where you assemble Chinese feedstock with German tools, how much local expertise do you have, or is it just LEGO kit stuff for tariff evasion?
      - hintymad 2y ago
        > You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
hintymad 2y ago
> We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery. Thanks for the specifics. I don't know about guided munitions, but I'd imagine a million dollar a rocket will be quite expensive for a prolonged war. Also, the US debuted a killer zone, Rogue 1, a few months ago, and it cost about $94K. $94K! I'm sure the drone is more advanced than DJI Mavic 3 Pro, but is it really 50 times more advanced even if we take the cost of military-grade into consideration? It looks to me the only explanation is that without a healthy manufacturing sector in the US, the cost of anything would go through the roof because we have lost the economy of scale.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. the biggest reason is the need to deal with adversarial input. dealing with GPS spoofing, properly encrypted and jamming resistant spoofing, not leaking the location of the operator, etc all are really complicated requirements that need expensive mitigation (and worse, prevent you from using commercial components)
  - skinkestek 2y ago
    > drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. After following the development of drones in Ukraine since 2022 and also listening to people familiar with the US army, I also think there are some not so good ones, one particular nasty one being scope creep. Recently heard about a US effort to create home built expendable drones for use at the squad level like the ones Ukrainians use and the result was too heavy and a lot more expensive (some of it thanks to the demand that everything be produced in a US controlled supply chain) but also as a result of good old fashioned scope creep. And this is nothing new: AFAIK there is an old British military saying something like "an elephant is what a mouse would be if specified by a military procurement committee".
    - dgroshev 2y ago

wakawaka28 2y ago

>There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import many components due to them being made much cheaper elsewhere. >We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders? You're totally right. This war is coming very fast as well, and by some accounts has already started. I worry we will all soon find out just how bad of a position we are in, the hard way.

fifteen1506 2y ago
I'm pretty sure costs have gone up not due to workers' salaries...
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  I wasn't talking about a change in costs. Costs have been high in the US for a very long time. What matters in terms of industry is that the rest of the world is coming online and their products are much cheaper than ours, mostly due to cheap labor and the currency exchange rates. Cost increases of domestically sprouted goods in terms of dollars are overwhelmingly driven by inflation.
hintymad 2y ago
> We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that's just $3 a shell, or 0.3% of the cost of a Russian shell, or 0.075% of the cost of a US shell. What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale. By the way, this is also what Tim Cook said. He said that Chinese labor not cheap anymore, but China has so much scale and expertise so that the output from China is still cheap. Again, economy of scale.

Spooky23 2y ago

You adapt. Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale. You get smarter/more accurate with the constrained supply of shells, adopt drones etc. In the 80s, expensive Maverick missiles were the primary airborne tank killer. Now the Ukrainians are dropping mortars into tank hatches from cheap drones.

closewith 2y ago
That just moves the issue onto the production of drones.
bluGill 2y ago
> Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale. Not really. Most of what Ukraine is getting is things that were on the list to destroy because they are end of life anyway. Of course the important lesson to take here is that the US doesn't have enough missile defense systems in storage.

brazzy 2y ago

> I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. Read TFA. Faster, yes. Cheaper, no. Even after fully ramping up, Liberty ships cost considerably more to produce in the US than an equivalent ship elsewhere. In wartime that is acceptable. When you're producing for a global market, it's not.

lostlogin 2y ago

> Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Maybe. Or a it’s a sign that workers, the environment, or some other factor is being exploited for gain.

M95D 2y ago

80 years ago the priority was beating the nazis and japanese. The priority now is making money. Can't make money with ice breakers, so use the steel to make SUVs instead.

kragen 2y ago

right, the usa 80 years ago is china today