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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.

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Everything you are listing is indeed very much strategic and Europe was indeed extremely stupid to let that go. The end of your paragraph is a demonstration of that. It doesn’t go against the core idea.

In the US, we have sextupled 155mm shell production.

If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain roads, build vehicles, etc.

Europe has a huge coastline, it's impossible to blockade. If war breaks out, it's better to shift workers from agriculture to war-related production, and import food from places that are not at war, such as South America. Food produced in Europe is basically a luxury. For every kilogram of beef produced in Denmark, you can buy 2.5 kg of Argentinian beef.

While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to feed Europe’s population. Blockade those and the entrance to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is done. Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.

Who is this hypothetical battle to be fought against? Surely anyone with sufficient power to mount a blockade has nuclear missiles and at that point it's kind of moot...

Note that I actually agree with your position but this is an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought about deeply enough!

> Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.

This happened before, twice. The solution was convoys, it worked both times.

The convoys barely worked. Parts of Europe were desperately short of food for several years. And the non-Axis countries couldn't manage to defeat the blockade on their own: they needed help from the USA to accomplish anything.

It didn't work for Japan though. The US could've kept Japan impotent and hungry indefinitely without invading or nuking it. The main reason for nuking it was to get it to surrender before Stalin could enter the fight and take part of Japan.

Let me see... Well, there was this thing in the past, called WW2, it was a WW, because well, Germany for example didn't want France buying Brazillian agricultural products, and sunk Brazillian ships using submarines. Thus making Brazil join the war.

Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding themselves, and not the EU still.

In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?

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