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Comment by sherr | Hacker News Reader

Noah Smith (Noahpinion) had a decent post up a few weeks ago about this aspect of war - war production. He titled it "People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone" [1]. It was quite a sobering read. The thought that we might ever need this level of commitment in the future is frightening. War is always full of nasty surprises.

[1] https://archive.is/Ih3pm

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That piece is not well thought out in my opinion. The "magical shield" that's been protecting people in developed nations is simple - nukes. Countries with nukes don't get invaded. Countries without nukes, do. It doesn't matter if you're a democracy (which Iran was until they dared question our control over their oil, and so naturally had to be have... monarchy... brought to them), or a little dictatorship with an affinity for rocket building. The primary point of conventional weaponry (from the perspective of a nuclear power) is to fuel proxy wars and enable the invasion of non-nuclear nations.

Of course he's right that if there is a WW3, the United States will lose. As will every other single major power. And how many artillery shells you have won't matter a lick in this. The goal in WW3 will not be to destroy the other nation's military, but to destroy the other nation, such that it can never recover to pose a threat to you again. Every single juicy high-density economic zone in every single country will end up getting nuked to oblivion. New York City, Moscow, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris - these places will, in all probability, simply no longer exist.

Striving to win an unwinnable war is not only painfully myopic, but also just seems like a great way for humanity to kill itself off.

Problem is that everybody know that nuclear war is a no win option. So they try to avoid it.

You can game that. Simply give your enemy a way out. Don't press them too hard, just take something, not so much that they would feel threatened. Instead of invading them directly, take over their trading partners. Set up rebellions, insurrections. It's still your bullets in their bodies and their country taking damage. But you have plausible deniability, and nobody is going to break out nukes about it.

Soviet union did that very well. Despite taking over bulk of central and eastern Europe, kicking western interest out of China, and thus most of eastern Asia, ending colonial rule in most of Africa, they never "crossed the line".

Iran is doing the same thing now. Russia too. And others will follow. It's a good strategy.

> Set up rebellions, insurrections.

You fail to mention that the US are the best example for this strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

I wouldn't call that the best example. They failed way too often for that.

The US is a fairly aggressive power that gets involved in a lot of overseas wars. If you backcast the same logic to WWII; the US could have had a nuclear shield then and been perfectly safe from invasion, but what it actually wanted was the ability to get involved in Europe and the Pacific.

Having an impenetrable defence is nice, but the US hasn't fought a defensive war in ... I don't know how long. Maybe a century for all I care.

But if you send us back with nukes, you'd have to do so for everybody else as well. And in such a scenario WW2 would never have happened, and WW1 damn sure wouldn't have happened. A Bosnian Serb assassinates an Astro-Hungarian royal and Brits end up killing Germans over it? The whole world needed a nice ice cold shower there, and the mere existence of nukes is that perpetual cold shower.

The US are perfectly shielded from invasion by two oceans so. Canada is an ally, as is Mexico (less close, but still). And neither would be able to launch an invasion with any chance of success anyway (in reality, movies are different).

There was a RUSI [1] paper near the start of the war in Ukraine that pointed out that there wasn't nearly enough ordnance production in NATO countries. The one area that was in good shape was 5.56mm production, helped by the civilian "assault rifle" culture in the US using it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_United_Services_Institut...

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