In crisis scenarios, you do things to mitigate risks. You can't project capacity for an unknown threat, and the costs of over-preparing are much lower than the costs of being underprepared. Overstocking is better than understocking
When COVID19 appeared, the logic course of action was to:
- Maximize vaccine capacity
- Maximize ventilator, N95 mask, etc. production capacity
- Maximize available hospital beds
- Prepare the economy for total and partial shutdowns
- Engage in heavy contact tracing to minimize spread
- Tell everyone to wash their hands and run dopey videos on hand-washing
- ... and so on
At that point, once you understand the threat profile, you scale back.
COVID19 has cost us trillions of dollars. These kinds of preparations cost millions or billions. That's 1000x-1,000,000x less.
Indeed, the failure of COVID19 was a lack of planning, lack of preparation, and lack of risk management. We did everything a little bit too slowly. The whole thing could have been avoided in 2020 if we had acted more swiftly to contain COVID, at a cost of billions rather than trillions.
And yes, like here, HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars would have been wasted, probably much more. It reminds of Dr. Evil asking for one MILLION dollars.
Likewise, with the war in Ukraine, we ought to be ramping up weapons production capacity right now, as well as preparing to help rebuild a country. The same goes for climate change and a million other issues.