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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me how the US continually produces tanks despite the armies recommendations, to the point where we have enough tanks to essentially fight WW3 with purely tanks and still have some left over, just so some congressmen can keep jobs in their constituency.

At least that was the situation in the 2000s, no idea if that wackiness is still continuing

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The production of armaments is a bit of an economic anomaly, to be honest. All businesses, including arms manufacturers, require a constant flow of business in order to cover their fixed costs and remunerate their investors (debt holders and shareholders). If governments only order weapons when they need them to fight a war, then the arms manufacturers would shut form at the end of a conflict and would take ages to “gear up” again when a new conflict arises, stymying response and lessening the deterrence implicit in having a standing army. Consequentially, it actually makes sense (from a strategic point of view) to keep weapons manufacturers “ticking over” with a constant flow of orders even if that just results in growing stockpiles. One of the reasons that profits are di high for weapons manufacturers is that according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) the rush of a government suddenly cutting off orders during peacetime and rendering the company unprofitable and probably bankrupt needs to be offset by high dividends in the here-and-now and with low historic volatility.

Now, I’m not saying I support this, far from it, but that’s (one of) the rationale(s).

It seems like it would be a better use of resources to just build up enough of a stockpile that the industry would be able to safely retool into a similar civilian industry, such as railroad locomotives, and then have time to switch back without a loss of combat capability. You'd just have to keep a small industry around for upgrades and maintenance.

Basically what happened in WW2

> then have time to switch back without a loss of combat capability

It's not that easy. You loose knowledge and vendors and people. Going from 0 unit production per year to 10 per year is more difficult than going going from 10 per year to 10000 per year.

That is unfortunately no longer realistic. The skills and supply chains needed to produce high-end military equipment are too different. The production lines have to be kept continuously running or else they would take so long to reestablish that in any serious conflict it would be too late.

The problem isn't that the skills and supply chains are fundamentally different but that supply chains for non-military equipment become globalized if not outright off-shored (often to geopolitical rivals) and therefore cannot be counted on in case of a major geopolitical conflict.

Pre-massive-globalization, we had no problem gearing up for WW2. Our industrial capacity was largely in-house. There were some things like rubber that were off-shore, but generally the industrial toolchain was domestically produced.

Nowadays, many domestic industrial producers rely heavily on these (bloated) military contracts to maintain relevance in a globalized industrial setting where the center of gravity for a lot of heavy industry and tool production has shifted to Asia.

I love international trade and I'm skeptical of military spending (and even more so of military adventurism), but this effect should be kept in mind when making trade policy. The military-industrial complex is keeping alive much of our industrial know-how that would otherwise be entirely be off-shored and retired domestically.

In WWII it was the domestic auto industry that converted over to building tanks. However today most of the domestic auto manufacturing is for foreign companies like Toyota, while our domestic companies largely manufacture overseas or in Mexico now.

It would be amazing if WWIII broke out and we had to call on Tesla to manufacture tanks.

The skills and supply chains are just fundamentally different in crucial areas. A prime example is the specialized techniques for welding together thick hull sections of specialized steel alloys to build a complete submarine. There's no equivalent in civilian industry. If that production capability is ever lost due to a long gap in new submarine orders then it would take many years to reestablish. Institutional knowledge if a fragile thing.

One of the benefits of globalization (and the EU) is that it's to everyone's economic advantage to not have a war between trading nations. This maintains supply, reduces costs, and crazily enough - reduces conflict.

You may lose the ability to make widgets because it's easier/cheaper to buy them from another country, but in theory, you make it up by selling them sprockets, and through the overall economic gains.

They used to do exactly this. Various agricultural and construction equipment manufacturers operated in such a way that they could shift production to tanks at a moment's notice.

When I was growing up my father had an ashtray from his days in the navy, which was made from the bottom of a three inch shell. On the bottom stamped in the metal was '1944', which as a child confused me because I knew my dad was in the navy from 1959-1965, so I asked him. "Let's just say they made A LOT of those in 1944."

That's why there are military surplus stores all over the country. Great stuff to be had -- cheap!

No cheap ones in the Bay Area though :-/

haha was just at Stevens Creek... yep, not cheap.

And what happens to those stockpiles...do they get smuggled around the world, feeding the arms race?

Some are sold to local law enforcement agencies. Some large cities are better armed that some nation states.

If you look at Electric Boat Company (they make our subs), and Newport News Shipyards(carriers), there is a big reason they get refit work etc. Because they would collapse as an industry and it would be impossible to build that kind of staffing/expertise up in short order again.

This fact is supposedly a part of the reason the f35 went to lockheed vs boeing.

It's also half the reason behind the Jones Act. Shipping between US ports must be done with US-made ships with US crews. If it weren't for this, US shipyards wouldn't have enough orders or expertise to stay open, and thus wouldn't be available for military orders in case of war.

To be fair, they've just massively upgraded the M1s to where they're nothing like the original tanks at all:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/armys-new-tank-here-c...

It isn't as though they've been building the same old thing since the 2000s, they've been incrementally and steadily improving them as technology and materials science improves.

I think the point is tanks in general have little use in the vast majority of modern American battles.

Is that really true when modern American battles seem to always evolve into endless occupations?

They should be building something that more closely resembles an armoured RV with a gun. Perfect for achieving and maintaining occupation.

You're describing the Stryker Combat Vehicle, and it has a remotely operated weapons turret. However, it can only carry 9 infantryman (in addition to its crew).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stryker

I’d say this is false, even as I myself am a US Army veteran who spent a year in Iraq 2003-2004. Tanks are still useful, but aren’t as useful against non-conventional forces.

The pentagon has spent the past 4-5 years retooling for what they call “near peer” threats which is to say China in the Pacific and Russia in Europe. Tanks, and really good ones in specific, would be required to push back a Russian incursion into our allies.

I just can't imagine a plausible scenario where a war between nuclear powers comes down to which side has more tanks. Does the US military actually think that it could invade China or Russia with a conventional army without the other side quickly threatening to use nukes? At that point it would become a two true outcome scenario: either the conventional fighting stops or we are all in big trouble.

Russia would threaten nukes to protect its homeland, but would it start a nuclear war over, say, Poland?

The EU is integrating it's military further. So Poland would essentially be a nuclear power. Even right know, Poland has allies, who have made the mistake of ignoring them being invaded for too long, and would probably not do so again.

I do have some blindspots when it comes to Poland. Would you be willing to elaborate further? From what I could tell, everything was done to prevent Poland from going on nuclear path. Why would that approach change now?

What I was hinting at was: France is a nuclear power and given a joint military, Poland also would therefor be one. Still a long way ahead before something remotely like this will happen, but there is movement in that direction.

Yes. Fear of this is why neither the USA or France ventured to protect Ukraine even after signing the Budapest Declaration.

You don't keep tanks around for what happens before the nuclear bombardment, you keep them around for afterwards. Most nuclear assets are pointed at either other nukes or military infrastructure; you'd still a large amount of civilian infrastructure around filled with angry civilians that would want to finish the fight one way or another before nuclear winter fucks everything. And tanks being tanks a fleet would survive everything short of nuclear carpet-bombing fairly well

I could be totally off base here but my impression, based on the staggering amount of nuclear warheads that could be deployed in a war, is that this line of thinking is wildly optimistic. I expect that any humans who survive a nuclear war will be focused primarily on staying alive and preventing human extinction, not continuing whatever geopolitical conflict led to the war.

The nuclear winter has been downgraded to nuclear autumn, and it is really really really bad if the war happens in the right time of the year. (Otherwise, it's only very very very bad.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...

Anyway, people is people, and after all the nuclear warhead are used, the survivors will seek revenge with conventional weapons.

You're talking about threat assessment while I'm talking about something slightly different, which is the usefulness of tanks in past (modern) and active conflicts.

Anyway I'm not sold on tomatotomato37's claim that recent levels of American tank investment are unwise, but also don't have enough information to know otherwise.

However, tanks are strategic weapons as well as tactical ones. Similar to why we have ICBMs but never hope to launch one.

Generally speaking, ICBMs are strategic weapons exclusively. The tactical version of ICMBs are just tomahawk cruise missiles, and they're in nuclear submarines all around the world just waiting for the signal.

I donno, the "fingers of god" are also loaded in submarines ready to go whenever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)#/media/File:...

Oh of course. Missile submarines carry both however. They're more likely to use the tomahawks however. The Navy loooooves to use them.

During the very first 48 hours (sustained) in the war in Afghanistan, a tomahawk missile was launched, on average, every 12 seconds night or day. The amount of boom those things made is unbelievable.

One of the problems with entirely ceasing production of a category of incredibly complex military system is that the engineering knowledge to build it retires, goes elsewhere or becomes unavailable.

The UK faced a number of problems with their domestic construction of the Astute class nuclear attack submarines, as they had not built a nuclear sub in more than 15 years. The institutional knowledge of how to build such a thing had become scarce or retired.

Why not instead build them slowly enough so that the last submarine of class n-1 would be finished just before/after beginning of the build of the first submarine of class n?

Because that makes the costs much higher. At some point, the unit costs are dominated by fixed costs, so producing 1 a year costs 10 times as much per unit as producing, say, 15 per year.

you are not wrong.. However we have lost a lot of such knowledge from the vagaries of the Space programs, civilian nuclear reactors, Tech in many ways far more important. It seems wrong tanks and nuclear subs should get better treatment than space.

Too bad we can’t field them all at once without depleting the entire national reserve of gasoline in 30 minutes :)

That’s OK - they can burn kerosene, diesel, jet fuel... I’m not 100% sure of it, but I bet they would run just fine off used McDonald’s fry oil if push came to shove.

Where are all these tabks located?

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