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fookeryesterday at 10:37 AM3 repliesview on HN

At the heart of this is the fact that America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale.

High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude.

It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.


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JumpCrisscrossyesterday at 10:38 AM

> America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale

We make plenty of stuff at scale. We just haven’t designed any of military around it since WWII.

> unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes

We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.

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petesergeantyesterday at 10:53 AM

Sorry, at the heart of this is that the Commander in Chief and Secretary of War are idiots. It's not clear how any of this situation would be any different if America had a dramatically higher production capacity.

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cyanydeezyesterday at 10:42 AM

is china helping ukraine also? The real "force multiplier" is basically the same as it was 100 years ago: fancy advanced tech works great to clear large, unoccupied spaces with no terrain costs; it still won't go into a jungle, climbmountains or fight in the streats.

Whats compounding existing reality, is how cheap it is to use commercial tech from any of these manufacturing hubs, china included, and turn it into a small but persistent offensive weapon.

So now Americas got billions of dollars worth of ammo up agains millions of dollars worth of fodder, and that won't clear the way to controlling a large, well defended plot of land.

America's leaders are drunk and high on their own propaganda, even while Ukraine has demonstrated just how useless the old, bulky and costly tech is.

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