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Troop transports are kind of a red herring here. The issue isn’t moving troops, it’s moving their equipment. You can pretty easily move a division’s worth of tr

Troop transports are kind of a red herring here. The issue isn’t moving troops, it’s moving their equipment. You can pretty easily move a division’s worth of troops by air (activate CRAF and requisition a few dozen 777s, boom, done), but it’s a lot harder to move their equipment (tanks, helicopters, artillery, air defense, ammo, etc.) that way. If the troops don’t have pre-positioned equipment in the battle area, then it really needs to get there aboard ships. I’m of two minds about re-creating the logical and industrial capabilities of World War II (or, at least the subset of them needed to fight a major conflict with a near peer). On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it. On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter.

tatersolid 1y ago
> On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter. Hasn’t Ukraine shown us the opposite? Drones of all typees covering the battlefield have reset military doctrine once again. That war has been anything but quick.
Teever 1y ago
> On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it. I'm skeptical that this is the case. Supply chains for goods have become much more intricate than they were a hundred years ago and America has completely ceded them to China. At the same time by ceding these supply chains America has let manufacturing skill sets completely atrophy and with it has seen the evaporation of institutional knowledge necessary to train new generations of blue collar workers necessary to scale up manufacturing. This isn't even a 'nine people can't make a baby in one month' type scenario, this is more like 'we just plum forgot how to make babies' scenario which is disconcerting to say the least.

tatersolid 1y ago

> On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter. Hasn’t Ukraine shown us the opposite? Drones of all typees covering the battlefield have reset military doctrine once again. That war has been anything but quick.

Teever 1y ago

> On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it. I'm skeptical that this is the case. Supply chains for goods have become much more intricate than they were a hundred years ago and America has completely ceded them to China. At the same time by ceding these supply chains America has let manufacturing skill sets completely atrophy and with it has seen the evaporation of institutional knowledge necessary to train new generations of blue collar workers necessary to scale up manufacturing. This isn't even a 'nine people can't make a baby in one month' type scenario, this is more like 'we just plum forgot how to make babies' scenario which is disconcerting to say the least.