| ▲ | mschuster91 4 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> I can only hope steel manufacture can someday be as efficient and competitive as US boat building. Better have expensive boats than no boats, particularly when preparing to wage war with a country that can be reached either by air - which means either missiles or nuclear bombers - or by water, the only option allowing for conventional warfare. That's the thing we all have to prepare for, the inevitable confrontation with China. In any case, the secret to cheap building is scale. When all you build is a few boats, planes or god knows what a year, of course each will be expensive. But if you build dozens, hundreds or - just look to WW2 - thousands of units, suddenly efficiencies of scale and standardization really kick in. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | Earw0rm 4 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is efficient if you actually _need_ hundreds or thousands of units. Which was clearly the case in WW2. And _might_ be the case if the confrontation with China is proxy wars. Hundreds or thousands of spare units (of tanks, AA, helicopters, fighter jets) would be useful in Ukraine, for example. But it's hard to see a use-case for hundreds of B-2s, for example. By the time those things are flying in anger, twenty or thirty will do everything you're ever going to do. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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