Weapons production in case of long future war

Factual Questions
61

But I’m not sure any of that is so relevant to my rather open ended statement that it’s a lack of imagination to think the US would never have a problem running out of conventional platforms it couldn’t replace for many years, in combat with peer opponents.

I gave a relevant example from WWII of my point. The US had 7 operational fast carriers at the outbreak of the Pacific War. It lost 4 of them during 1942. But those losses were made good by mid 1943 (Essex class ships completed from the end of 1942 but not actually combat ready in a group till mid '43) from the building program of 1940. Now if the US lost 6 or 7 of its slight larger carrier force to, say, more effective than expected long range Chinese antiship weapons, it would take many more years to replace them.

Would that be the end of the US as a nation, no. But right now we assume the US ability to project naval power, importantly though not solely via carriers, to the Western Pacific. After that series of defeats, we wouldn’t have it for years. The Chinese as of now don’t have a comparable carrier force, nor expect now to be able to project similar force into the Eastern Pacific. So this scenario can’t be brushed away by some idea the effect of not being able to replace losses at WWII speed would be symmetrical. The force structures of the ‘peer’ opponents aren’t necessarily symmetrical nor do they necessarily expect to be able to achieve the same things with them.

We just to need to keep in mind that the US has various types of forces which would only be effective v peer opponent if they could avoid losses at anything like WWII rates*. They might. And in some cases losses suffered by the peer forces might balance things out. Or the US force type might achieve its goals before losses reduced it to ineffectiveness for the years it would take to build the force back up. But not necessarily. Or the US might act more circumspectly to avoid this risk (like a number of navies were highly reluctant to risk their essentially irreplaceable battleships in the WW’s). But it’s still relevant that the forces are so much less replaceable now.

*or at least loss rates sometimes seen in WWII. After 1942 the Japanese only sank one additional fast carrier, the CVL Princeton in 1944 (fast carriers=CV and CVL in WWII USN designations, not counting escort carriers, CVE considered too slow for fleet work except in emergencies). They damaged many with suicide attacks from late 1944 though.

62

People have been talking about nightmare scenarios for many years. I don’t know which are feasible, even in theory, let alone applicable against an enemy in war mode. Taking out electric grids would do serious damage to a country. Communication and financial systems are distressingly vulnerable. We might be able to shut down oil platforms and other critical industries. The amount of damage that can be done directly to military systems is unknown. I’m sure Stuxnet-type malware is trying to be planted by all sides: we can’t know that none exists and malware is more real than the sleeper cells that spy thrillers rely upon. Then the bottom line is attacking the Internet backbones. The potential damage is potentially catastrophic. What could be or would be done in the real world is unknown. But it would be far more likely to hurt us as individuals than a conventional war.

Who is saying this? What I see are statements that any conventional war would be costly to both sides and the corollary that conventional wars wouldn’t happen.

63

The thing was, the 8th AF decided to essentially use the heavy bombers as a sort of crowbar to force the Luftwaffe to come up and challenge the bombing raids, after the P-51 and drop tanks had been developed.

Both sides suffered terrible losses, but the US industrial production and military training schools were such that we could basically sustain those losses and the Germans couldn’t. From what I’ve read, at the end of the war, there were far more planes than pilots, because they didn’t have fuel or trained pilots (again, probably because of insufficient fuel) to fly them. And the fuel was in short supply because, you guessed it, the heavies were bombing the piss out of the German synthetic oil production plants.

Historical detour aside, I think that it’s likely that any fighting that is done would be small-scale stuff, and neither side would want it to escalate beyond maybe border raid type stuff. Getting involved in anything else would upset the applecart too much- it would expose the Russians to potential economy-strangling measures by NATO (i.e. all their ports blockaded, all Russian assets frozen/seized, etc… It would expose NATO politicians to uncomfortable questions about the conduct of the war, casualties, spending, etc…

64

I interpret a number of posts as essentially saying that, the US forces would not be the ones suffering debilitating losses.

But more to the point would be lack of either factual basis or logic for the second statement as stated. If you were to have to said ‘the relative irreplaceability of modern forces would result in much more circumspect use of them v peers’ (a possibility I brought up in the previous post) you’d have a leg to stand on. Saying conventional wars wouldn’t happen because both sides recognize they’d be costly can’t possibly be justified. Everyone knew based on WWI how costly another all out war might be*, that hardly prevented WWII.

Another plausible argument related to risk is how nuclear weapons would always limit direct conventional conflict between nuclear powers**. But again, one can’t support an argument that the possibility of heavy losses itself would prevent conventional conflict.

I still see no reason to suppose it impossible there could be a conventional peer conflict where one side or the other, including the US, was forced to desist by losses it could not replace except in very slow motion by WWII standards. The conflict just winds down because of that, and the side that doesn’t have to desist achieves some limited goal as a result (maintaining sovereignty in the South China Sea or something like that).

*though if you ran even WWI over a bunch of times it might not always turn nearly as costly, if eg. the initial German offensive in the west had succeeded, or been blunted while the initial Russian one against Germany succeeded, etc.
**the US and Soviet AF’s engaged one another in 100’s of combats in the Korean War with several 100’s a/c in total destroyed, but had the fig leaf of plausible public denial of something the Soviets obviously knew, but it’s not clear the US fully knew in all the details (‘secret level’ US documents only speak of possible Russian pilots etc, rather than full picture of the main opponents for most of the war being regular Soviet AF MiG units, the NK MiG-15 defector knew the details and told them to the US in 1953 shortly after the armistice, but at higher levels of classification it might have been know before that)

65

Was it a plan to bring the fighters up, or just a plan to disrupt German industry?

Look at all the aircraft that were trashed in piles after the war.

66

Yes, that’s all standard. The point I was adding was the 8th AF fighter operations over Germany eventually directly as well as indirectly impacted German day fighter training: the high fuel persistence of the P-51’s over large areas made them a direct threat to training units. Their night training also faced a threat from RAF Mosquito’s. No other combatant faced that situation to the same degree. There was a German night intruder threat to British night bomber training operations over the UK on and off, and a few cases where US fighters attacked Japanese training units, but they had more space to move training operations out of US fighter range.

67

Teaching experienced pilots to be night fighters, or putting some guy who had never flown a plane up in the dark?

68

I’m going to say this one more time. The reason there won’t be a conventional war between super powers is that there are alternatives. The sides in WWI had none. You can’t give them credit for not using nuclear weapons because they didn’t have them. They woulda if they coulda.

69

Both, and probably in parallel. What ever is in the pipeline goes to US forces, and what ever is in the desert goes to allies that need their forces regenerated quickly. For other classes of weapons, depends, the US has a crapload of M1 Abrams out in the desert, so other than regenerating Allies, they may not need mbt’s initially.

70

There was a book series in the 90s that sort of went into this. I never actually read them but read the back of the book summaries plus online reviews of the multiple (think there was 6) books. Totally forgot the name so if someone remembers that would help.

Basically a bunch of northwest/middle-America states attempt to separate from the United States after some massive economic downturn + more large scale Waco style government mess-ups. The militia-based succession movement is backed by a few libertarian billionaires who intend to become kings of this self-styled libertarian paradise but are unknown to the actual succession planners. Basically due to the remoteness of these areas plus ability to hide stuff easier they plan on winning the war in the air since they have no chance of actually beating the US Army and National Guard units which outnumber them 10 to 1, however they think they can reach parity via air power as the billionaires buy thousands of ex-Soviet or cheap Western fighter aircraft and recruit large numbers of local pilots as well as mercenaries.

The opening battles with the US military involve them leading the US into expending all their high-tec bombs and missiles on disguised drones or fake military formations and surprise the US air force by using local roads to launch interceptors at US air raids on short notice. The militia lose a lot of aircraft but are better able to retrieve their pilots and aircraft since their fighting over friendly soil (similar to the battle of Britain) . Once the Air Force is ground down due to losses they launch bombing raids on nearby major American cities to terrify the civilian populations to clamor for peace. They almost win but I think in the final book the US permanently restore air power by deploying F-22 Raptors which the militias aircraft and AA systems have no realistic way of shooting down due to their stealth systems and the US Special Forces find and decapitate the militias leadership and backers.

I believe the book was based on actual Serbian plans to fight the NATO air force since they too planned on using a lot of drones and decoys to trick the Western air forces into more costly close range air battles but Serbia lacked the number of aircraft to make this feasible.

71

The WW2 equivalent of relatively complex and expensive munitions were torpedoes. How did the USA do on the supply/expenditure ratio?

72

Possibly the source of today’s massive hack attack. Hackers Wrecked the Internet Today Using DVRs and Webcams.

All this discussion of tanks and bombers is just boys with their toys. If a real war breaks out, it will be computers all the way down.

73

Coercion campaigns almost never work and actually mean really, really long wars. That’s pretty much what Vietnam was, an attempt to coerce the North to leave the South alone.

If the Russians invade the Baltics, the only way to get them out is a conventional ground campaign. So either way, it would probably be a long fight, and neither side is going to be interested in using nukes for such a limited objective.

So that sounds like a long war. So I’d hope at least some thought has been given to how the US would fight one.

74

Both sides had chemical weapons and did not use them.

75

You can make a weak point as many times as you want or just once more, doesn’t make it any stronger. :slight_smile: It was commonly believed in Europe prior to WWI that the interrelated economies (that was an era of widespread freer trade in contrast to the post WWI period) and upper classes of the major countries would prevent a big prolonged war, turned out wrong.

Nuclear weapons are an obvious reason nuclear armed powers are more risk averse in directly confronting one another with conventional weapons, which I’ve acknowledged in each response. However saying that that would always prevent direct conventional conflict, or that conventional conflict between nuclear powers would always go nuclear, remains IMO in the realm of lack of imagination*. Non-nuclear conflicts between nuclear powers could happen but result instead in one or both sides backing down after losing too many of their essentially irreplaceable military assets (like big warships, a/c stocks of conventional missiles etc). It’s entirely plausible the loser would then back down, not go nuclear, assuming only limited goals are at stake in the conflict, not national survival.

If you assume a shared view of what’s reasonable on both sides, including one side judging that the other will back down without a fight and being correct about it, then there won’t be conflicts. But there’s no absolute gtee of that.

*and as I mentioned, also ignoring a significant exception, the air war between the US and Soviet AF’s over Korea, almost exclusively between them between November 1950 and September 1951, and non-Soviet units didn’t make up an effective majority of the MiG force until 1953.

76

The issue was mainly submarine torpedoes. Per “US Navy Bureau of Ordnance in WWII” official history, 9,000 of 11,000 Mark 15 (ie destroyer) torpedoes produced during the war were still on hand at the end. A lot of the expenditure early in the war was actually on ships lost. Likewise aerial torpedo expenditure wasn’t high until production was.

For submarines on a macro level production exceeded expenditure even in 1942, 1,445 fired in combat per Clay Blair’s “Silent Victory” (v only dozens of DD and aerial torpedoes fired in combat that year) vs 2000+ produced (eyeballing BuOrd’s production chart). However at the end of the logistical pipeline there was a serious shortage by late 1942, which caused the subs to fire fewer torpedoes per salvo. For example per Blair in the fall of 1942 the major US sub contingent in Australia (the other was based a Pearl Harbor) was expending 75 weapons per month but only receiving 18 per month.

Sub torpedo production increased to 7,000+ against 3,937 fired in 1943. However a lot of the reason for that was bringing on new production facilities including civilian firms. This is a basic question/issue of the thread, how feasible that is now given the increase in absolute level of complexity and specialization in weapons production, and the different (relatively smaller, more internationally interconnected) US industrial base.

77

Guess we’d be in a bit of a spot then if the war i with China.

78

It would really make your case stronger if I ever talked about nuclear weapons in a future hypothetical war. Yet I don’t. Wonder why that is?

79

Bumped six years later because the question of munitions and weapons expenditure in a prolonged conventional war is now much more topical.

80

Amazingly topical. Several points stand out -

How can a full conventional war stay non-nuclear (so far)? Because the pretext is it’s limited to one theatre, the Ukraine. However, what happens if someone is losing the war and develops a bunker mentality - anything could happen. Nothing we can do about it.

The other question discussed was trained personnel. Since it’s a proxy war, the problem will be training those people on novel weapons. (Vindman on CNBC mentioned that he had told the White House last year they should be training Ukraine on potential weapons so they would be ready to go. What are the odds?)

The issue is an interesting reversal of the above discussion - escalating levels of tech on the defensive instead of thowing it all in at once. Simple surveillance drones, those handheld smart antitank weapons, now Himars and Patriots, and so on. Leopard tanks coming soon. (Canada has just sent their tank…). Also, lines of supply beyond the border are (so far) immune from attack, and given how badly the Russians are performing, likely to remain so.

Still simple ammunition supply is still an issue. In a war of attrition, manpower will be an issue. Considering what it took for the Russian home front to turn on the heat about Afghanistan losses, I’m surprised there’s not more heat back home yet. Depending who you believe, somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 killed or badly injured. There’s only 8M males 20-30 in Russia. Many headed for the exits, you still need some to do basic home jobs, and man the rest of the military installations. Up to 3% of that cohort gone already is a staggering number. Between that and economic sanctions, can Russia keep going? It’s not like they’re fighting to prevent the homeland from being overrun and can whip up patriotic fervor.

Both sides, but particularly the Russians, have exhausted much of their pre-war arsenals. The Russians are reduced to using Iranian exploding mopeds, and the interesting question is whether they have the capacity to build more smart cruise missiles and similar equipment - or even tanks - without the western imports that have been embargoed.

Fascinating too is the key to winning a high tech war is air superiority. That Russia could not do that even in the early days says volumes about the direction of the war and the Russian forces.

The main takeaway from the earlier discussion might be every war is different, and this one certainly is very different. Russia’s biggest goal now, though they won’t admit it, is to prevent being thoroughly humiliated. Unfortunately, I don’t see Zelenskyy settling for anything less than complete withdrawal, and I worry that may trigger Putin’s bunker mentality. The Ukrainians held back from all-out attempts to take back the Donbas and Crimea earlier, for fear the Russians would escalate. That is irrelevant now.