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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness.

That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.

If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.

We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...

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> The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1].

Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.

Weapons need to be replaced, even ones never used. To be capable of scaling production you need at least some degree of production constantly simmering in the background. Yet even then, there is a limit to how much you can scale up on demand.

The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.

The problem is you have these hugely expensive facilities like the tank plant in Lima that's pretty much only good for making tanks. Transitioning manufacturing to production lines that can be economically kept online because they make non-tank products when we're not fighting anyone is the way to go.

There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).

Or, simply open up the sales of tanks to the civilian market.

That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.

There definitely is a market for such vehicles:

http://www.exarmyvehicles.com/offer/tracked-vehicles/tanks

https://mortarinvestments.eu/ArmouredVehicles

https://miltrade.com/pages/military-vehicles-for-sale-in-eur...

https://tanksales.co.uk/sales/

Ten or fifteen years back, I had an ambition to buy such a vehicle and drive it around at Burning Man. I eventually settled for a deuce-and-a-half, which caused enough struggle and frustration that I'm glad I never actually bought a tank.

What was frustrating about it? From time to time your exact plan sounded appealing to me.

If we're talking actual functional tanks, then they're expensive as shit to buy, and expensive as shit to drive.

The conventional wisdom is that you need to buy several military vehicles in order to get and keep one up and running. Some things are going to come broken, some things will inevitably break, and the replacement parts aren't exactly at your local auto parts shop.

There is a market to buy a tank that originally cost $10m for $10k. You can drive it round fields and crush stuff for YouTube content.

I think there is a much smaller market for people wanting to pay the new price

I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

I'm not sure there is any law against owning an unarmed tank. But for "dangerous and unusual" weapons themselves, an important case is from 1939 - Miller vs USA. [1] And it's absurdly weird. Basically the defendant was a thug with a penchant for snitching on everybody.

In his final case, which he also snitched during, he argued that a law he had been charged under (a firearms regulation law) was unconstitutional. The judge who heard his case was very much in favor of the gun control law and had made numerous public statements as such, but he also likely knew that the law was on very shaky constitutional ground, and had been fishing for a test case to advance it. And he found that in Miller.

So he concurred with Miller about the law's unconstitutionality! That resulted in the case being appealed up to the Supreme Court. Conveniently for the state, neither Miller or his defense representation appeared. So it was argued with no defense whatsoever. And Miller was found shot to death shortly thereafter, which wasn't seen as particularly suspicious given his snitching habits. And that case set the ultimate standard that's still appealed to, to this very day.

This is made even more ironic by the fact that the weapon he was being charged for possession of as being 'dangerous and unusual' was just a short barrel shotgun, which was regularly used in the military.

[1] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060964.p...

> I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

Probably because if people could buy tanks to protect themselves, then the police would also need tanks to deconflict a situation where someone with a tank is upset and the damages are a bit higher when tank rounds start flying around. Imagine two neighbors getting into it in a a town, not to mention a city.

Even portable nukes are a stretch in the logic of "I need to protect my home" from intruders, not to mention the hundred kiloton yield ones.

The second amendment to the US Constitution doesn't concern itself with home defense justifications, but only with "we need to scare up a military force, right now". The "right way" to forbid tanks and tac nukes as arms that the people can own would have been to amend the Constitution with something that specifies the limits in some way, but instead we got creative interpretations of "shall not be infringed" to mean "can be infringed as long as a law or agency regulation is produced at either a federal or state level". Which is odd, as GP noted.

This movie is for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film)

People can and do own tanks. Since they are giant (hard to park), slow moving, consume a lot of fuel, tend to need expensive maintenance, and can't be operated on many roads due to weight / vehicle restrictions, few people want to do this.

As far as nuclear bombs go... there are restrictions on owning fissile material in general that would preclude owning enough to have a working bomb.

What is more critical as Ukraine has shown is ammunition, ie artillery shells, and of course any anti-drone ammunition (missiles are extremely expensive solution that should be reserved for ballistic missiles and not cheap drones).

More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.

If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.

Our scaling is human oriented - add more shifts. Maybe we can adapt new manufacturing methods like screw extrusion mentioned in the article

> The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.

As a big part of Europe is learning at great cost.

> What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.

How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Congress vs. running those factories in peacetime as a jobs program?

Invest in technology that makes the facilities that manufacture primers useful for more than just that one product. One might do that by changing the nature of the manufacturing facility towards a multipurpose "forge", changing the nature of primers so they're more like commercially attractive products, or some combination. DARPA has been working pretty hard on these topics over the years.

I was working on one when we got shut down due to a political squabble resulting in sequestrations. Reminds me of our recent shutdown in many ways.

I would even go one step back in the process. Make it possible to rapidly build factories in the US. And don’t idle that capacity — consider how quickly China brings factories online and how rapidly they could scale weapons production by shifting production of car factories to weapons factories.

This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.

Yes, this is absolutely part of it. Even if you had unlimited funding, unlimited trained workers, and a defect free, perfect weapon/product design, the urban planning regime would force you to spend 12 years in consultations before you could put one shovel in the ground to build the factory. Through p it all they would be trying to negotiate the size down and down and down until it finally was a factory the size of a single-family house.

If we needed it for war, I suspect everyone involved would be eager to eliminate the restrictions.

You would think so, but I’m not so sure. In Canada, during World War II, the federal government passed the law restricting municipal councils from their ability to prohibit people from renting out rooms in their homes to war workers. Vancouver city council, weighing the pros and cons of Hitler and the risk of tenants, living nearby, try to weasel their way out of it.

https://www.abundanthousingvancouver.com/vancouver_s_rocky_s...

> The response from Vancouver council was swift. Less than a year after the introduction of Order 200, council ordered a bylaw amendment expressly designed to constrain the order as much as possible. The city was still bound by the terms of the order for existing homes, but they could use a legal loophole to ensure that it did not apply to new homes. The city’s chief lawyer Donald McTaggart was incredulous:

The corporation counsel told the committee that the amendment it suggests will be quite legal, but he expressed the opinion that the idea of Order 200 is “being lost sight of.” ... “The government,” he reminded aldermen, “said ‘forget zoning bylaws’ for the sake of getting on with the war.”

> Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle?

Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.

Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.

Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.

> Springfield Armory

Side note, if you're ever in central Mass, the Springfield Armory is a great tour.

Agile, vertically-integrated weapons manufacturing... in 1820.

They've got an original wooden copying lathe: traces a finished master rifle stock with a contacting friction wheel, then carves the same shape onto a blank. https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/thomas-blancha...

It was finally closed in 1968.

Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts.

Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.

Re: NASA chasing around for Saturn V blueprints and the blueprints for the equipment needed to make the actual rocket parts.

Also the DoE having to figure out how to make Fogbank again (a classified material used in weapons which they lost the manufacturing documentation for)

> Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.

I think this is why the USA, UK and France are all big exporters in the defence sector.

We have scaled artillery shell production, it's about 3 times what production was prior to the conflict in Ukraine. And the Pentagon claims they'll double that again by next Spring.

Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.

But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.

Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.

The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.

And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.

It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.

Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.

> The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.

The thing is that size matters in wars of attrition, but experience almost always wins.

China's problem is that they lack the experience the US Navy gained over decades of pretty much non-stop war even if they did not go up any significant adversary since the Vietnam war.

To the extent that there is a gap in sea or air power, you fix that, you don't waste attention or money on side projects like artillery shells.

The administration claims that it isn't distracted by Ukraine and Europe, and wants to focus on threat from China, but the strategic imperative for increasing shell production is Ukraine and the threat from Russia to Europe. Let the Europeans sort that out. And, if the Israelis want lots of shells, let them sort it out, or better yet do without.

Or acknowledge that you are doing something that is apart from your main strategic focus. It is possible to walk and chew bubblegum. Bubblegum doesn't cost all that that much.

But the pretense that artillery shells are desperately needed for deterrence in the South China Sea is rather tiresome. There are far more important munitions supply gaps. Just because a couple of conservative think tanks wanted to make hay about about sending shells to Ukraine a couple of years ago is political drama, not something actually important.

Sure because we decided to gut manufacturing in this country. It was deliberate decision made not by DoD following Federal Acquisition rules but by beancounters who didn't want to spend money on keeping manufacturing alive. Since we don't have civilian manufacturing base in this country and military does not want to buy a ton of artillery shells just for them to go idle, here we are.

Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by treasonous politicians bribed by corporations to do an end-run around the environmental laws, workplace regulations, and human rights that had been hard-won by the people over the previous 50-100 years, by allowing these abuses to continue elsewhere without even being required to pay commensurate tariffs or penalties.

Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by the price of labor (read: rising standard of living relative to global averages).

1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages.

2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.

No, it was gutted by what I said it was gutted by. The price of labor I include in workplace regulations but I could have called it out on its own too.

If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.

Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.

Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.

> Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.

Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].

Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.

It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUBN212W200000000#:~:tex...

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul...

> Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].

> Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.

You're linking to employment. Like manufacturing, these industries have been significantly automated and mechanized. So yes they have been employing fewer people. Corporations can't move the land and minerals and oil and gas offshore though, so those industries have not been killed. The cost of labor didn't kill them. That's despite all these minerals and petrochemicals and farmland available all around the global south too.

The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US. The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.

> The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US.

I'm having a hard time parsing this. Also, source?

> The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.

... Yeah this seems fair. I think a lot of Africa has an infrastructure problem - it doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture if you can't move large volumes of raw materials/parts to the factory and finished goods from the factory. Plus many areas in Africa have security issues which make them less attractive places to do business. Geographically, a lot of the continent is cursed with hard to navigate rivers as well (the upper Nile being an exception), so only coastal shipping is really viable.

Re: wages, we have info from reporting. BYD had protests last year when they cut worker overtime at one of their factories, dropping salaries that were previously 8.5k-11.5k USD to 5-6k. Foxconn offers base rate around $2.50/hr, so 5k USD without overtime (which you'll inevitably work). This used to be higher as well.

Mexican autoworker wages came up during the GM UAW negotiations. Those range from about $9/day (~3k USD) up. Higher paying positions tend to go to Americans crossing the border.

Vinfast pays about 100M dong (4k USD with bonus) to their factory workers in Vietnam, which is quite a decent wage locally from what I understand.

Western countries wouldn't have moved manufacturing to China in the past if wages weren't cheaper.

I think the cost of labour now is kind of irrelevant. It was the cost of labour (and China being a stable country with favourable rule of law) that drove offshoring in the 90s and 2000s. The Chinese manufacturers chose to invest in process improvement and automation rather than just chasing the cheapest labour - and so now they've got a massive technical advantage.

US ammo for civilian use isn't magically much more expensive than in cheaper places around the globe. Could be many factors ie economies of scale but at the end it doesn't matter - price of labor isn't a deciding factor, definitely not when you have US military budget.

$300 drones are not doing much of anything in Ukraine. Maybe some light weight ISR, but they don't even go-to the front line before having several grand of hardened radio equipment put on them - at which point they're not $300 anymore...

The flippant commentaries about drones help no one: they're a significant change in the intel environment, but nobody carefully inspects assumptions about cost efficiency or on the ground conditions.

Expensive drones are being used to fulfill roles which artillery fires could fulfill far more effectively, except both sides of the conflict don't have enough artillery but for vastly different reasons (whereas significant amounts of supplies are coming from a party which is more or less arming both of them: China's factories).

It should be noted that Ukraine has invested significant effort attempting to acquire US spec long range weapons like ATACMS and Tomahawk, and F-16 and HIMARS were both a big deal which took significant effort to get. Drones have created a new warfare dimension, but I find the way they're often discussed lacks of a lot of rigor or bearing on how they're actually being used.

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