44AMP said,
Who is it today?
Right now, at this instant? One needs to set up some definition of scope in order to accurately answer that question. Some people are talking small arms, others heavy industry, or transportation, or resources, or ...
Just what needs to be included for consideration? You say we are not talking about WWII, but refer to the WWII situation and say we can't do it today.
Well, we didn't do it then either. Not instantly, not overnight. It took some time. And time is the one thing that is being left out of the discussion.
It takes time to gear an economy for wartime production. Those Liberty ships didn't come out of the shipyards at a rate of one a day starting Dec 8th, 1941.
We don't have the resources? I think we do. Just not in a form that is instantly utilised. Look around the country, and you will see that nearly all the "junk" (cars, etc) is from the 50s and later. Alot of the metal used during WWII came from "scrap". Scrap metal drives for the war effort collected significant amounts of useable material. And they would again today. Mines can be reopened, factories and foundries, shipyards and refineries can all be built or rebuilt. Workers trained or retrained. What it takes is a belief in the "need" for it to happen (willpower), and the time to do it.
Govt makes this happen, either by direct action (as in totalitarian systems), or by indirect action (our system generally) by allowing people to make a profit from getting it done. If the need was deemed great enough, laws and regulations that stand in the way of doing it would be waived and set aside "for the duration of the emergency".
It took this country about two years to get fully geared up for WWII, and the need was clear to all. For many things, peacetime rules didn't apply. If we felt ourselves in as dire a situation again, I have no doubt that we would be able to do it again. If we had the time.
Now, if you are not talking about a wartime (emergency) situation, we could still do it, if there was enough money in it. Today, at this moment, the public will isn't there. No need for us to be the world's arsenal, too many other things to make money at to bother with that. We don't have a need, we don't have the focus. But if we did, I believe not only that we could, but that we would.
To drag things back to WWII again (briefly), when informed that the USA was entering the war, Hermann Goering (head of the Luftwaffe) said "Don't worry about the Americans, all they can make is razor blades and refridgerators". A couple of years later, the Reich was being pounded by 1,000 bomber raids.
Don't think for an instant that we couldn't do it again if we wanted it bad enough.
Comments:
I mean "today", in the same sense that DMK originally posed the question. Go ask him what he meant.
Reflection on WWII was made as an example. There's nothing illegitimate about that, but much of this thread involves a debate about US's/England's relative contributions, which was largely based on mere patriotism and whether one read English or American history books. That's what I pointed out, not that WWII was irrelevant.
The main point was that the US already had the heavy industrial capability to gear up for the War, whereas now (in my opinion), we don't. Yes, it took a while to transition or "gear up" during WWII for military production, but the timeline nowadays would be enormous.
I applaud your optimism, but I don't think it would be possible to accomplish this in anywhere near the same timeline now, "today."
Once again I point out (as I tried to do in my first post) that "arsenal" includes all the ancillary materiel to produce weaponry --beyond the obvious ones of iron ore, coal, and oil. We brag of our high tech weapons, yet it must be asked: "Who is going to produce the circuit boards which make our weapons so 'intelligent?'"
Formosa? Ireland? Mexico? France? Oh, I forgot... China?
Let's face it. If you don't have bat guana, you don't have black powder, either.
Hermann Goering (head of the Luftwaffe) said "Don't worry about the Americans, all they can make is razor blades and refridgerators". A couple of years later, the Reich was being pounded by 1,000 bomber raids.
Yes. A couple of years later.
Don't think for an instant that we couldn't do it again if we wanted it bad enough.
I've thought about it for far more than an instant. You touch upon the "will" to do it, and I'm afraid that this is a major component of what constitutes an arsenal. Americans no longer have that will, in my opinion. Soon after the Isreali 6-Day War, a Jewish friend of mine remarked, "You know what America needs? A pair of stones this big." And he gestured as if he were describing the last fish that got away.
And that remark was a loooong time ago.
Sorry, but this thread has too low a signal-to noise ratio, what with the discussion about small arms, whether arms have their own will or not, and the England-US comparison. I apologize and confess that I have not read page three, and one thing that always irks me is posters who spout off without having read all the posts. I confess that I myself am guilty of this in this case --at least with respect to this third page..
73s
