As an up front, I am pleased to see that you do understand metals and production. That makes my confusion over your wild assertions all the stronger.
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.
Besides a thing we call aerial refueling, the F-35 is not a replacement for a strategic bomber. It is a tactical aircraft for other roles and missions. They transpac all the time, our current tactical aircraft, using a combination of bases and aerial refueling. Have for decades. Likewise across the Atlantic.
Also, you do not seem to fathom how the B-1 and B-2 operate, do you?
So I'm failing to see how a few U-Boats
This deliberate non sequitur isn't worth wasting time on.
So what is this air threat to us?
Since we stopped using threat based planning in the 80's, and have been on capabilities based defense planning for over twenty years, you are over 20 years out of date.
Now you hypothesize the need to protect American interests overseas. With all due respect, what interests?
All. We have chosen, for sixty years, to make alliances and engage globally, and have chosen to enter into security partnerships all over the world, in most of them as senior partner. Unless that base line policy changes, the follow on won't change, in terms of needing X amount of tools to deal with X, Y, and Z amount of collective security concerns and Options.
Open the lens a bit wider.
There are other metals than steel, many of which are used in aircraft, and of those metals, there are many different alloys of varying availablilty in the GLOBAL market place. The number of suppliers has fallen.
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.
Wrong. The spectrum of action and conflict ranges from Non Combatant evacuation during local conflict to low intensity wars to larger wars. All of that capability to act is desired by America, as manifested by the actions and policies of America's government for the past sixty years.
The fact is, no one is willing to risk massive World Wars anymore, and we have a military geared up to fight it.
Irrelevant, and wrong ,since
1. the All or Nothing silliness you just posted has nothing to do with the actual world, nor the actual decisions made in sending military forces to do X.
2. US military is in its present form, absent the nuke forces, purpose built for expeditionary warfare, not global world war.
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?
This lame cherry pick ought to embarass you.
As stated, America as global power, as a policy, is traceable to post WW II and the 1947 Defense Reorg act. All parties and all governments we have had since then have remained consistent in that regard, choosing to be globally engaged and to retain X amount of punching power as a world power. We reduced our force structure by about 40% after the Wall came down, but didn't stop being globally engaged in the least.
More poignantly, Clinton did something bizarre, during the nineties when the Peace Dividend was to be realized. He accelerated the number and uses of the US military globally to three and four times its previous level, in varying scales.
You don't actually know what you are talking about here.
You seem to think we need to live in 1944 forever.
That is sheer falsehood, but given your silly attempt to posit Mexico and Canad as "threat," I have tried to point out the actual security environment the US plays in. Fingers, get out of GreyIce's ears! Now! (What is going on here? A guy who often posts very sharply has gone mad, or so it seems.)
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).
No, since we tend to prepare for the battle of the first salvo.
*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.
If that's what you do, why do you insist on this fantasy? TIME isn't somethng your factory can produce, which is why our military is formed as it is. To be ready to fight now. Trained forces, not simply a line of aircraft on the ramp ready to "go do something" some politician thinks is a good idea.
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.
But you cannot build time.
The 2000 F-35's will take over a decade and a half to produce, and the planes they replace will be phased out over time. I suspect that the number will fall before the production run is over, but that's a guess.
And meanwhile, most of the cash goes to expanding production and manufacturing capacity of factories within the borders of the United States.
Yeah, that doesn't change the fact that the factories you assume into existence aren't there.
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.
You can't buy time with money, which is why our force structure, and trained personnel, a perishable commodity, are put together the way they are: the battle of the first salvo, and expeditionary warfare.
That you assume you can grow from 100 to 2000 and grow 100 to 2000 trained and combat ready aircrews "rapidly" means that you are being fast and loose with time.
Once again, absent a policy change of a profound sort, the force structure will be maintained in a "ready to go" posture.
Could it be a third smaller?
Sure.
Could it be a half smaller?
Sure, if the politicians choose to have fewer, or different, options available.
DR
