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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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they have the old soviet stockpiles that means even as the average equipment regresses decades, they can feed the war machine, whereas the European and even American stockpiles are getting hazardously low.

Russia will never outproduce the West.

China, or at least some Chinese analysts see Russia as defending their western border. Seeing as it's the most industrial country in the world, with some serious long-term planning, it's quite possible they have large conventional weapons in reserve and some production capacity.

Were Russia to fall and be decolonised, the sparsely populated Siberian Republics would end up just being bought by the West. What would prevent US army in Germany from being relocated to northern China border ? That's where the security threat is now, it'd make perfect sense.

So they don't want to let that happen.

The West has not even started to massively expand its production capacity, and our peace time production capacity is order of magnitude too low to keep up. By the time we get on that, it might be all over.

The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.

I think many westerners look at the achievements of their grandparents and great grandparents, and believe that we could do the same. We can’t. We would need to change our entire culture, and we won’t do that in a matter of months. My hope is that the current predicament at least causes our society to get on that path and start to grow serious. Might be the only way to recover from current degeneracy.

The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.

It appears the US has about 400,000 civilian machinists; 1.8 million assemblers and fabricators; 428,000 welders, cutters, solderers, or brazers, and 1 million metal and plastic machine workers. This isn't "tens of millions" but it's not nothing either.

Do you really think the US would be as nimble organisation-wise as back in the 1940s, and be able to transition to arms manufacturing in a couple of years ?

The US is already making tons of weapons. The US is the world's largest arms exporter, responsible for 37% of the world arms trade and delivering weapons to 96 different countries since 2016. The civilian sector makes almost 10 million firearms per year. Military production is also quite high, since equipment does wear out, and the military is constantly replacing old equipment with upgraded versions. Sending 20 MLRS systems to Ukraine was seen as a big deal, but the US makes 9,000 rockets for those launchers every year, and those rockets are soon to be obsoleted by the ER GMLRS.

Counterpoint.

In the U.S. weapons industry, the normal production level for artillery rounds for the 155 millimeter howitzer — a long-range heavy artillery weapon currently used on the battlefields of Ukraine — is about 30,000 rounds per year in peacetime.

The Ukrainian soldiers fighting invading Russian forces go through that amount in roughly two weeks.

That’s according to Dave Des Roches, an associate professor and senior military fellow at the U.S. National Defense University. And he’s worried.

Even Russia is probably getting low on ammunition and they were making far, far more per year and stockpiling in anticipation of a conflict.

US never planned for something like this:

Just to state it another way and make sure it sinks in - the US has already provided as many 155mm shells to Ukraine as it produces in SIX YEARS.

Russia - according to western defense officials - have fired as many shells over 1-2 day periods as the US produces all year.

It doesn't have to be as nimble as the 1940s, it just has to be better at doing so than Russia, with vastly more resources than Russia.

You are forgetting who is the pre-eminent industrial power in the world.

Hint: it's not the US.

China produces more, measured in terms of manufacturing output in dollar terms, but there's not a huge gap:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scorecard-how-the-us-compares-to-18-other-nations/

Russia is similar to countries like Turkey and Spain.

When you look around at everything with a weld on it, 428,000 seems like such a tiny number, doesn't it?

Was just thinking that about the 200k HVAC techs who would collapse civilization if they all went on summer holiday at once.

It's probably not enough to churn out millions of AR-15s, sure, but it's enough to build something. Perhaps at least build tools to make other things with.

Production is irrelevant when the time to produce the stocks is measured in years, and the rate of consumption is measured in months.

The US cannot keep the supply of Javelins or any other matteriel flowing to Ukraine at anywhere near the rate this war is consuming them. Russia's crappy soviet stockpiles are decades behind the times and half have been plundered... but 50ish% of them are there.

To take just Javellins, the US had given 1/3rd of its total stock of Javelins to Ukraine by April and most of that's been consumed or been sold off to the highest bidder by now.

The US has almost certainly crossed the 50% mark by this point.... that's it. The supply is not going to reach that peak again during this war and the US is almost certainly hoarding most of the remain stock for themselves given they just witnessed how fast that supply is consumed in any real conflict.

Production is irrelevant when the time to produce the stocks is measured in years,

The history of WWII stands in direct rebuke to this thesis

Any reason you left off the second part of that clause:

"when the rate of production is measured in years, and the rate of consumption measured in months"

WW2 no one was consuming materiel at rates vastly in excess of what even US production kicked out. The allies had to bomb german factories to get them falling into shortages, they weren't consuming 30% of global stock in the first 5 months of Barbarossa.

It's not your grandmother's country these days.

Irrelevant, the claim being made is still demonstrably false

Manufacturing was close to 25% of the US economy in that era, it's 10% today (and far more narrowly focused on a smaller number of high margin industries rather than low value businesses like assembly that are pretty important if a nation wants to convert to building weapon systems). GM could quickly make diesel engines and jeeps or tanks, Intel can't convert to missiles or something similar nearly as quickly.

Dunno if that's a good analogy. Intel probably can't switch to building whole missiles, sure, but they probably can build the electronics for guiding said missile.

10% of US manufacturing capacity is still an order of magnitude more than what the Russians got.

Sure, but they already have a gigantic stockpile of old weapons, they don't have to match manufacturing.

Most likely most of that "gigantic stockpile" is fictional or doesn't work.

As evidenced infamously by the ripped tires in the first week or two of the invasion. Sure, you can store a tank for 50 years. Good luck keeping the rubber parts still up to spec without regular maintenance, and we all know how good Russia is at such maintenance.

Not saying the US wouldn't beat Russia in raw steel output, but the number isn't "% of manufacturing capacity", it "% of GDP that goes to manufacturing", which, if this whole affair has taught me anything, is a silly number.

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