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anovikovtoday at 11:34 AM0 repliesview on HN

Talking of military stuff: it's not a problem really. No one can keep the non-needed capacity in existence, it's not even possible if no one consumes the product. Make sufficient buffer stocks to have time to re-learn the process when needed, and that's it. There is no realistic way it could work any different, otherwise it's like: maintain entire Cold War era production capacity and keep it idle or working at 5% workload, just to be able to ramp up when needed? But it means keeping almost all of the Cold War budgets still flowing. Wasn't going to happen - and of course, in Russia it also didn't happen, and couldn't.

In the end of the day, Russia burnt through their entire Soviet stocks in roughly 2-2.5 years, while US spent a very small proportion of theirs and Europe, maybe about half. And now consumption on both sides is similar with expenses on the Western side to feed that machine being almost invisibly small. Nothing bad happened.