Has the US ever been engaged in ongoing cold war against multiple adversaries? We are now ramping up rhetoric and readiness against A) Islamism, B) Communism, and C) whatever amorphous and ism-neutral threat we currently imagine Russia to be just because they’re there. Which makes it hard to visualize the kind of war we are thinking about, and speculate on the weaponry.
I love the smell of Samsung in the morning.
Aren’t major weapons contracts made with an eye to keeping production lines viable, even if, to some, the bid from a different developer produces a better, and even cheaper, product?
I’m remembering something with Lockheed, I think.
Any war on a scale the OP imagines is going to go nuclear rendering the point moot, but he is right to worry; it is not possible to ramp up production of modern conventional weapons to a rate that would come remotely close to the rate at which they would be consumed in such a conflict. There’s a link on youtube to Part 5: Keeping the Old Game Alive-Conventional War of Gwynn Dyer’s 1983 documentary series War here that touches on this issue. From ~32:50 in he notes that it takes about 18 months to build an F-15, and that about the same amount of factory space is given over to the production of military aircraft in the US ‘now’ (in 1983) as was devoted to it by Germany in WW2. The difference is in 1944 the Germans were producing about 3,000 aircraft a month (and losing them at the same rate) while current (again, in 1983, at the height of the Cold War) US production was about 40 per month.
No, the difference is that WWII aircraft were designed to be disposable and modern weapons are designed not to be.
Nobody asks whether we would be capable of producing huge stocks of walkie-talkies should we get into a conventional war. They’re been so thoroughly superseded that nobody would think of assigning them to soldiers. But, you might complain, modern cell phones are so fragile and the old sets were rugged! What if a soldier dropped one in battle!?
We will never refight WWII. It doesn’t matter what the U.S. did then. Nobody is doing it today. Every conceivable enemy is doing what we’re doing now, except less so.
:dubious: Do you have any idea what the expected attrition rate of conventional weapons systems was projected to be in the event the Cold War went hot? I hate to inform you, but modern weapons and lives are still disposable assets in war. Apart from the near certainty that it would go nuclear, an outbreak of war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO was going to be come as you are - if it hadn’t already been built on day one of the war, it wasn’t going to be built in time to matter. There would be no ramping up of industrial production ala WW2. The notion that WW2 aircraft were designed to be disposable while modern aircraft are not is absurd. The US lost nearly 10,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters during the Vietnam War. The losses of conventional weapons systems during the 1973 Arab-Israeli was astonishingly high. In a war that didn’t even last three weeks Israel had 400 tanks destroyed and 600 disabled out of a pool of 1,700 tanks - almost 60%. Of 440 Israeli aircraft, 102 were destroyed, nearly 25%. Arab losses were even worse. Ammunition expenditure was so great that the only reason drastic measures weren’t taken to limit their consumption was the knowledge that the US and the USSR were airlifting in tens of thousands of tons of ammunition.
– Donald Rumsfeld
Love him or hate him, but you can’t argue with what he said.
I think it’s lack of imagination to just consider cases
- US (or other protagonist) easily defeats the enemy before running out of planes, tanks etc
- nuclear armed adversaries use those weapons when they run out of conventional ones.
Those are possible cases. No 1 has been the case with US efforts against non-peer foes in all wars since WWII, also including cases where wiping out or holding a consistent advantage against enemy conventional warfare assets didn’t win the war and the US eventually gave up in a stalemate or loss. Anyway US running out of conventional platforms hasn’t happened. Fairly serious munitions shortages have (bombs in the campaign v North Vietnam for example, near the beginning before production could ramp up).
But both sides could run low on conventional platforms they can’t replace at anything like WWII rates, and still not feel that justified the risks of nuclear war. Even one side could run down the other’s (including the US’s) capabilities and the US just pull back. Say the Chinese could inflict losses on US warships like the Japanese could ca. 1942, but in 1942 the US had a huge new fleet under construction from the 1940 program, reaching fruition (along with later expansions) by 1944. If it turned out Chinese antiship missiles could serious attrite a similar portion of the US carrier fleet to what the Japanese did in 1942, those losses would take far longer to make good. But would that really make it rational to launch ICBM’s (or even start with tactical nukes)? Just pulling back with tail between legs seems the more likely outcome, at least for a period of years. It wouldn’t mean the PLA marching in San Francisco.
Yes and thank you. I rather like it.
As for plans to have WWII quantities with modern quality, there doesn’t need to be any such plans.
The question operates under the presumption that the conflict would have WWII levels of attrition with a WWII level of duration. Are there reasons to believe both of those things would happen at the same time?
US cruise missiles are expended at a higher rate than they can be replaced. At some point, the US runs out of the more than 3000 Tomahawks it has. By that point, the enemy doesn’t have much in the way of HQ, intelligence/radar/EW, anti-air, artillery or logistics assets above battalion level while the US still does. How does this prevent the US from winning the war?
US planes get taken out at a higher rate than they can be replaced in the early phase. Enemy air and anti-air assets even more so thus decreasing the threat to US planes. The US then has air superiority and starts using dumb bombs with the planes’ ballistics computers. How does this prevent the US from winning the war?
US tanks get taken out at a rate higher than they can be replaced in the early phase. Enemy tanks and anti-tank assets much more so thus decreasing the threat to US tanks. That leaves the US with an overwhelming tank advantage. How does this prevent the US from winning the war?
Running out of advanced weapons isn’t anymore of a problem to the US military than running out of javelins was to Roman legionaries or running out of flashbangs is to SWAT members.
Vietnam was 50 years ago. The Yom Kippur War was over 40. Both were much closer to WWII than to today. I’m comparing modern $100,000,000 feature-dripping aircraft to the basic bombers and fighters of WWII. There will never be a several year long conventional war between major powers. Small, short wars galore, with all the waste and carnage that implies. But WWII has no logistic relevance to our world.
How close did Truman come to use nuclear weapons during the Korean war?
Even if F-35s could be assembled in short order, could pilots be trained that quickly? The USAF already has a fighter pilot shortage and, presumably if enough fighter jets were lost to combat action that new jets were needed, some pilots would have been lost as well. Is it possible to train an F-35 pilot in anything less than 3-6 months?
Let’s leave aside the nuclear issue, since that means total destruction for both sides. Are you saying that WW3, even if entirely conventional, would move so quickly that the issue would be decided in months if not weeks?
That sounds plausible given what modern weapons can do, but I don’t think it can be counted on, since most wars are predicted to be fast but often aren’t. One factor that could lengthen a war is reluctance to go all-out. We saw that in WW2 in the beginning. If both sides are reluctant to hit the manufacturing base or make civilians feel any pain from their country’s decision to go to war, it’s hard to see what incentive there is to end it barring one side or the other occupying huge swathes of territory. Which itself poses a problem, since our likely adversaries have a LOT of land. If WW3 just consists of both conventional militaries blowing each other way, but the civilian workforce and manufacturing base is intact and territory not occupied, I’m not sure how such a war ends. It could just follow an endless offensive/restock/offensive/restock cycle. And since wars tend to see major advancements in practical technologies, if we run out of men we’ll just see better drones and automated weapons systems.
The Japanese had that problem. I do not know about the Germans.
I wonder how far we are from actually deploying drones as fighters? In case of war, wouldn’t that program be sped up dramatically so that we probably wouldn’t even need pilots?
Do those work with on board programs approaching AI, or are they remotely controlled by people?
I would assume remote control would come long before AI, since we already have it for drones. But I’m not sure we have air superiority drones yet or drones that can do strategic bombing. But we can’t be far away from doing that, can we?
That’s why I’m not accepting the hypothetical. I can visualize no plausible scenario in which neither of these alternatives could happen and a long conventional war could.
Well yeah, if a long conventional war occurs, over time it will escalate into total war, but that does not necessarily mean all weapons will be used. Chemical weapons weren’t used in WW2. Using nukes doesn’t just mean losing the war. It means extinction for the country using them.
Assuming that the long war hypothetical is indeed true, where would it be fought? Europe?
I suspect what would happen is that we’d burn through a lot of high-tech ammo and weaponry really quickly, and then the first side to run short would get pushed back until the other side also ran short.
Then, I suspect it would become a much less mobile fight- mostly infantry, with the remaining armored vehicles carefully husbanded for armored spearhead attacks, etc…
The big question would be how the industrial bases would proceed. Would they continue making ca-2016 armaments? Would they revert to older, simpler, easier to produce designs? Would they simplify existing models? Would they bother to refurbish older reserve stuff (like say… the hundreds or thousands of F4 Phantoms in the Arizona desert)?
I don’t have a good answer to those questions.