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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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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.

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