The US Navy’s all-woman Poseidon crew put their plane into Kaneohe Bay a couple of weeks ago.

I cede the argument to you based solely on military and historical knowledge. Not only are you strong in those areas, I am fairly uneducated in military history after about AD 450.

Your points about the current state of manufacturing are correct, as are your points about the complexity of a nuclear sub or F-18, but I was writing in generalities.

Just as you and others wrote; in 1941 really talented people were given great resources to lead huge numbers of dedicated, talented people in a war effort that bore amazing fruit.

That is what I am naively optimistic about. Could we build 40,000 F-18s in a year? Almost certainly not, but would we make clever use of drone technology, find faster ways to synthesize carbon fiber, use cyber warfare to minimize our enemie(s)’ effectiveness.

I’m thinking of Elon Musk types.

And their challenge would not be; recreate WWII production levels of WWII materials. It would be; figure out iterative methodologies to use current production capacity to make effective weapons and equipment while simultaneously ramping up production on innovative, new tools for effective warfare.

We’ve seen resourceful Ukrainians using limited resources and brilliant technical innovation to great effect.

Years ago I read about the Army’s initial attempts to make an effective, small, unmanned fighter. They gave sacks of money to one or more of the usual suspects; Lockheed, McDonnel Douglas, Raytheon… Who then proceeded to try to shrink an F-15. After several years of pouring money into a gaping maw of non-success they abandoned the program and rethought their approach.

And they noticed two scientists in Israel’s armed forces who had a very capable and effective unmanned remote plane that cost about 1/gajillionth of the Army’s budget. So our Army hired them to teach us. How did those two scientists achieve what our best defense contractors could not? The Israeli scientists had a tiny budget so they started with existing, hobbyist, RC aircraft and found economical and effective ways to upscale that hardware to military demands.

This is the reason for my optimism. I think America still does a great job of developing such people and there are many alive today. Many under 40. Under 30. In a life or death struggle against an existential foe I think we could still out create most any other nation.

“My dad was a coastie in WWII.”

Wheter he was initially Great Lakes, or Manhattan Beach, St Augustine, or Cape May …

Here’s something for you. https://www.si.edu/object/engine-room-coast-guard-buoy-tender-oak%3Anmah_842767

https://thetidesofhistory.com/2019/12/29/treasury-class-cutters/

Yeah, I’m sure you are right. I probably should have written “and/or” since I could not bring to mind the name of the island.

Must have had a deep samdy beach that would envelop an artillery shell or mortar round without it exploding.

And Jack may have indicated that it was his idea to liberate the box, possibly having been sent down for another reason.

There was also somthing about his unit when he finally got back, but I cannot recall what it was.

I dont know what Jack looked like at 16 or 17, but at 45 and with a full head of prematurely grey hair, he looked like a square jawed semi-twin brother of the singer Charlie Rich.

I recall D’Angelo sitting on the floor of the living room – actually they may have moved in on our immediate post Christmas toy race car set up – and reminiscing with my dad; overhearing him mention the incident when the head of the lieutenant he had been talking to, just “disappeared”

These are not unique wartime incidents, and I have even seen these types of events portrayed in movies. A canonball takes some guy’s head off, Japanese charging through the night with swords waving, dud shells landing on the beach a few feet away.

But these were things I either overheard as the men solemnly and reflectively conversed, or were briefly recounted to me at the tail and late evening end of a holiday get together. Dont know why much of it seemed connected to holiday event wind-downs, rather than other gatherings.

I’m regretful now that I was not more attentive in a systematic way.

My first attempt at computer-based simulation I described previously as follows:
“When I was about 16, I had permission to use another WWMCCS [World Wide Military Command and Control System] computer that was in Virginia. I learned Basic by reading the manual and writing a Star Trek game (naturally). I charged my computer runtime to the Information Directorate of the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

The first professional simulation was for a USAF research project. I simulated the Soviet breakout in the Tom Clancy novel “Red Storm Rising”.

The area I am working now Is the Fall of the Philippines. I never knew until recently for example, that we sent mustard gas to Philippines in 1941.

I’m sure you know this, but regarding manufacturing capacity, I’m not sure we were in any better shape in 1941 than we are now.

No, we probably were in a much better position then than we are now. In particular in terms of industrial capacity and overall share of the pie. I am fairly active as a history nerd and gamer and one thing that keeps coming up with WWII and to a lesser extent WWI, Victorian, and early WW3 (ie 1950s ish) scenarios is how the developers tend to have to put their fingers on the scales to make things “balanced” rather than historical because otherwise the US would have about 35% of the world’s industrial capacity around the start of World War… One, and more than 40% around the height of the Great Depression.

At best we’re near the lower thresholds of that now and probably well lower due to deindustrialization and above all foreign industrialization, somewhat offset by information dominance but still an issue. Even if we believe the PRC is fudging its numbers – because it is – and the likes of India or Southeast Asia or Mexico or Nigeria have relatively inefficient industries they are still leaps beyond what they had then. The good news is outside of Red China and Pakistan the most likely countries that industrialized between then and now are likely to be on our side, while the enemy has had much of their countries ruined (Venezuela is far less competitive now than it was in the 1940s).

The U.S. did an outstanding job of ramping up capacity and wartime industry, but it took time.

Indeed. The issue I see is that the added complexity of war material means it is a lot more intensive to make, more dependent on foreign inputs and the supply lines there, and more difficult to ship.

With your aviation and military background I’m sure you’re familiar with these stats: in 1939 U.S. aircraft production was about 3,000/year. In 1945 we were making close to 4,000 a month! Nearly 1,000 planes a week! I have read that stat many times and am astounded every time I try to imagine it.

Indeed and rightfully so. The issue is that we aren’t going to be able to have quite those numbers now. Modern planes and tanks are exponentially more costly and more complex than they were then which is also why you see things like airframe and vehicle bull numbers drop like a rock very quickly after the war. Made worse because of the heavy reliance on advanced computers and circuitry not just in the machines but in their disposable weapons like missiles (which basically dominate air combat).

We built 1 aircraft carrier in 1941 and 15 in 1943! While also building 128 destroyers! 1943 also saw the U.S. producing just shy of 30,000 tanks from a total of only 300, 3 years earlier. So, your grandfather was right. Our soldiers, airmen and sailors could get the job done if they had the necessary equipment, and our nation could produce the necessary equipment, but it took time.

Agreed. The big issue I see is the lead time for the necessary equipment. Which has become much longer, more costly to obtain, more costly to produce and sustain, and more vulnerable to say nukes. In many ways the complexity of churning out tanks and airplanes today is comparable to that of doing so for naval warships back in the ages of Steam and Oil.

And ironically while more complex those were actually shorter to deal with than age of sail where you worked in literally generational time spans due to the trees needed for production.

For most of the US’s existence this has actually worked to our favor, especially after the British and French stopped being our major strategic threats. The single largest and most intensive military capability to make – and the one that needs the most forward planning – is the Navy. And it says something that Japan is the enemy that had the most capable navy, and it was still a pipsqueak.

Hitler in one of his more astute moments saw this as a problem and his unpublished Second Book goes into a fair amount of detail about the need to bring Eurasia to order and three build up a navy to defeat the US and destroy American Capitalism. But of course that’s be working at a disadvantage.

Nukes and other strategic bombing and rocket capabilities I fear make that a lot less of an advantage than it once was, because while also very costly and demanding they are relatively cheaper than running a functioning high performance navy (something the USN struggled with more) and also can be whipped out on a dime once developed. So now Hitler/Wilhelm/Stalin/Tojo/Lenin/Mao/etc no longer have to fume as they fight to control their own neighborhoods and try to build up a navy to go out and strike us at home.

I may be ridiculously naive, but I believe Americans could do that again if under threat.

I might be too and I do think we can do it again, but it will be hard

However, I cannot imagine a situation where such a huge amount of military material would be necessary. In 2023 a war brutal enough to require 1945 levels of men, bullets and machines would almost certainly escalate to nuclear weapons long before it reached the scale of WWII on land, air and sea.

I would not be so sure at that. Moreover even if it did escalate to nuclear weapons that wouldn’t mean they would escalate all the way. This is one part of strategic planning I think the Russian school of war has an advantage on for us because we seem to generally blank out when the concept of them actually being used in war comes up. Understandable, but unfortunate because that blinds us (if you will pardon the pun) to how things will escalate, the different ways they might, and that nukes are and ultimately remain tools for war and Moscow and Beijing have thought A LOT about how to use them as such in “limited” deployments, like the French have.

This is the first time I’ve seen anyone namedrop Smedley Butler without it being to reference JP Morgan purportedly feeling him out for a coup d’etat with Butler as the intended post-coup President.

The “Business Plot” was probably real (I am happy to call Butler out for his lies but this stuff probably wasn’t one of them) but pretty much all of the “evidence” that JP Morgan was involved is hearsay blown up by Stalinist propaganda in the same breath as claiming Jewish financiers were for it. The plot was probably real but nowhere near as well connected as MacGuire and Clark wanted to act it was. In any case Morgan was leery of Fascism in general and probably was not interested in it or working with Butler.

Molly Brown:

Waimea… We are not worthy!