Hi, it is later.
You said
I said.
Since you posited the western and northern hemisphere as the assumed arena, which hasn't been true since about 1811, I was generous to you and allowed for "splendid isolation" to have lasted to about 1898, though we only got slightly out of this hemisphere with the Philipines and Guam and such. Our commerce with Europe never stopped growing. That was a factor in the oceans becoming less than a buffer as the first U boat threat arose, WW I.
With a slight retreat behind the buffer, WW II and its after math saw US adopt new policy, and the desire to play as a power, rather than watch and try to exploit neutrality. For the past sixty years, and into the foreseeable future, that policy is the only assumption you can make, or axiom you can establish, about the requirements environment for American security and power tools spending, unless a dramatic, yet to be seen, policy change to a more isolationist style comes about.
With all due respect, I think you highly overestimate the capacity of modern aircraft. Very few modern military craft are capable of transatlantic flight. Even fewer are capable of doing that and a return flight. To the best of my knowledge,
none are capable of doing it with a significant payload.
Transpacific is so laughable it can be idly ignored.
So I'm failing to see how a few U-Boats count as a threat that needs 2,000 airplanes (or what 2,000 airplanes does against U-Boats. Wouldn't a few sonar stations and some torpedo missiles do much better? Oh well).
So what is this air threat to us?
Now you hypothesize the need to protect American interests overseas. With all due respect, what interests? Oil? Even Glenn Beck agrees that overseas oil is a commodity with 20 years left. Now he thinks we're screwed when it starts to trickle out, but beyond his relentless negativity, we'll be a lot less dependent on foreign oil in the coming years.
Steel? We're already recycling at least 60% of any steel in new buildings. Between that and South America, we're fine.
Beyond that, anything that 'screws us' also screws whatever country dings our trade, militarily. Since that's basically a lose-lose, I don't see the need for a massive drive to protect overseas interests. A rational coalition of countries can decide when they need to intervene. Frankly, the only thing it would hurt is France's economy when they have to spend some more money on the military.
Don't hold your breath. America is a power, whether you like it or not, and a global power.
But the point is, a global power of
what? The thing you're missing is that power costs us massive amounts of money when exercised, and when not exercised, it does... nothing.
We have the worlds most advanced military, but that and $5 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. It's a 20th century paradigm for a 21st century reality. The fact is, no one is willing to risk massive World Wars anymore, and we have a military geared up to fight it.
But you rather missed that point. Not sure why you wandered off into fantasy land, to be honest with you.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
That has nothing to do with the point I was making to you, which was your foolish attempt to presume North America and the Western Hemisphere as the entirety of American security calculus.
As I so clearly stated, US chose to become a power, and engage globally. That has its costs, one of which is a larger security and power tools budget. Is it currently too big? Maybe. WHat don't you want to be able to do? What do you want to be able to do. Recall, the entire globe is the arena of action, and has been for decades, and will be for decades, absent a profound policy change.
Did it? If we put the combined military efforts of every Democrat since Johnson together, we could have done them with a fifth of our military.
Did AMERICA choose to do this? Or did ONE PARTY choose to do this?
My point went so far past you as to be hilarious, but you also don't seem to grasp that industrial flexibility and strategic materials do not obey your silly axiom.
Your point, as you put it, is trivial. You seem to think we need to live in 1944 forever.
IN TIME is a critical factor when a requirement for the materiel of war is called for. It took three years to spool up for WW II, and the spool up began before we entered the war. We still never met the projected requirement by 1945, in terms of divisions formed, trained, and equipped. Then the war ended. Go Go A Bomb!
Strategic materials, thanks to the "inventories are a curse" attitude adopted for the past twenty years, have longer, not shorter, lead times now.
No, strategic materials have a longer production schedule. That's a bit different. There's many reasons for this (one of them is we simply don't need any of them very quickly - something you should admit rather easily). In terms of manpower, do I really need to educate you about the differences between a modern military and 1944? Regardless, personnel make up a tenth of the military's budget. And many of those are support staff for the systems. We could employ every soldier we do today, at half the price, with equal training, and no issues.
No, we can't make it FAST ENOUGH as you claim, in volume, we actually have to be prepared for a battle of the first salvo, since the lead times on force regeneration are prohibitive.
Really? We can't wait for anyone to come near our levels of spending, and then start buildup?
I mean we're responsible for 47% of the ENTIRE WORLD'S military spending. I'll tell you what, cut our budget in half, and if anyone equals 50% of our budget, we can increase it 10%. I mean seriously. 47%. Do you think that's sane?
Do you possibly think we WOULDN'T NOTICE some other country tooling up to half that level?
You're acting like this threat will drop out of the skies. Martians aside (and you accuse me of fantasy) we'll be able to retool and build up in time to get an army for any war we need... because NO ONE ELSE IS SPENDING NEAR WHAT WE DO!
The industrial base that the Defense Department worries about is not a fixed institution, but a moving target as both material and production method changes manifest themselves. The planners sometimes get it right, and sometimes wrong. (See why V-22 was never NOT the option for the Marine medium lift mission requirement, given the cost and time for respooling CH-46 line as a good example.)
Your fantasy world of infinite interchangeability is as real as the Easter Bunny, so why do I bother? Yes, we are more flexible than in 1943, but everything made is more complex, as is the integration requirement, thanks to 1986 and Goldwarter Nichols, not to mention the need to be able to work effectively in the field.
Effective change is evolutionary. As geni pointed out a bit earlier, the next face of armed air warfare has arrived in the higher end RPV and UAV classes. Like the F-22 or other complex systems (Comanche, which foundered, for example) their maturity does not take place rapidly. Their maturity takes years. In one case, Global Hawk for U-2 replacement, we have already arrived. Other forms, not so much.
When they mature, as discussed earlier, they will ultimately replace the manned aircraft. It will be another generation before that happens.
UAV?
The first one of any practical, albeit limited, value that I know of was called DASH. Drone Anti Submarine Helicopter. 1960's. Feel free to look it up. We thus see a fifty year maturation process for the UAV as it stands now, dependent on a lot of other tech.
Back to the industrial base. When you shut down a production line, you have a rippple effect on the material suppliers and subs who feed that production line. Your fantasy that "we could turn on the spigot for F-35" is based on sheer ignorance. Aircraft are orders of magnitude harder to build than cars, and helicopters an order of magnitude tougher than fixed wing aircraft.
*Sigh* At the moment, I am designing parts for railcars (as my last company went a bit caput, see: Economy). The factory that produces rail car parts can produce aircraft parts. Trust me, this is so (since we also do some aircraft parts, it's not a huge market, but it's there). You speak from ignorance. We regularly switch designs, switch shapes, switch production runs.
The people employed in our factory are not super-educated. They're average joes from, as they themselves call it, 'the hood.' If tomorrow I needed an information system for an aircraft, instead of a train, it would take us 2-3 weeks to figure out how to do it, we'd contact our suppliers, and in a month or two, we'd be churning them out. At great speed, mind you.
You're putting a mystique in this business that it simply doesn't deserve.
For a far less complex aircraft than F-35, let me illustrate.
If I wanted to order a custom UH-60L Blackhawk helicopter, for my own personal use, in 1999, (assuming I hit the lottery) while there was capacity to spare at the factory, I would still have had to wait 18 months for my bird to be built. Why? AMong other things, lead times on critical materials, pre existing orders and capaity constraints. Last analysis of the helo industry I read, a few weeks back (Teal), showed Sikorsky's order book a bit full, with both domestic and international sales of the Hawk family, and a potential S-92 and variants filling the books nicely. Or not, if a few sales go elsewhere. Eurocopter has some nice products as well.
The further consolidation of the aerospace market only exacerbates that time line, in direct contravention of your presumed flexibility assumption. So do the vagaries of the commodities markets, and the demands by more than just one major nation on the same critical materials.
Good day.
DR
But you miss the critical point - you're thinking small. If tomorrow you wanted one information system for an airplane or a missile, I wouldn't give a crap. It'd be half a million dollars to roll the first one off the factory. I could probably get it to you in six months, easy, but it would be expensive.
Now lets say the Federal government took some sum of money. Say, oh, 80 million x 2,000. Say they gave it to companies like mine, and said 'build factories.' And say they made a conditional.
The largest part of any of that is the suppliers. The second largest, the design. Give money to everyone on our supply chain to have on hand the contacts necessary to produce the parts we need for the design, and the designs on hand to do it.
We could start cranking them out very, very quickly. With the entire distribution network set up, we could do it fast. And we could make a LOT of them.
And meanwhile, most of the cash goes to expanding production and manufacturing capacity of factories within the borders of the United States.
Win/Win.
See, you've created some alternate reality where there exists unsolvable problems to retooling, and then decided we must make decisions based on this reality. But problems? They can be solved. And that amount of money? That buys a lot of solving.
