No, in order to win a war, it must have a clear objective which can be successful. The US is terrible at this because the objectives of war by a democratic country will be set by politicians, who've never seen an objective which couldn't be made vaguer. Operation Iraqi Freedom had so many sub-objectives key military leadership didn't even agree what the goals all were - and even then some of those goals are nonsense, predicated upon false narratives spread by politicians who wanted a war and needed some sort of justification. Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction your army was sent to find? Never existed. Terrorists they were sent to eliminate? More were created than had existed previously.
Battles may be won on logistics but you can't win a war without a clear and achievable objective. Corporate had a clear objective. Overlord had a clear objective. Take Desert Shield, to give an example of a US-led operation with clear objectives. If you turn up and the Iraqis all say "Fuck this, I'm off home" freeing Kuwait that's success. If you kill half the Iraqi population but they're still occupying Kuwait when your funding runs out that's failure. That's what you need if you want to win a war, clear objectives.
Under your premise that you must have a clear objective to the exclusion of other things, Russia would have handily won its war against Ukraine years ago. Their objectives are very clear.
I did, all the logistical prowess in the world can't help when your objective is too vague. Logistics are useful, often key to the final outcome, but they're nowhere close to the necessity of clear objectives.
> You joke, but wars are won on logistics. Famously, the US military can deploy a Burger King anywhere on Earth within 24 hours.
But not only on logistics. If the "US military can deploy a Burger King anywhere on Earth within 24 hours," but little else, it's fucked. Right now its production base is so addled and weakened that it can't even sustain the wartime production really needed by Ukraine without cleaning out the cupboards. It has only enough missiles to last days in a high intensity conflict, and the lead time for more is years. It definitely can't win in a sustained conflict against China (who has 40-effing% of world manufacturing capacity.
Which was part of the rationale for supporting Ukraine: the best way to build up a manufacturing base is if you have customers, and so supplying munitions to Ukraine was a win/win/win from the military's point of view: Ukraine gets ammo, the US gets to ramp up domestic military production with, effectively, someone else paying the bill. (Granted, some of that was US funds, so the 'someone else' was often another part of the US government, but the point stands in terms of manufacturing capacity.)
While there are shortages in some areas, I'm not aware of any reports of across-the-board procurement issues. In 2023 there was a shortage of 155mm artillery shells (at a production rate of ~8000/month), but no shortage of small arms ammo, APCs, or tactical vehicles [1]. By February 2025 the US was "manufacturing 30,000 155mm rounds per month" and "the Army is now “on a path” to producing 70,000 to 80,000 rounds per month by the end of 2024 or early 2025" [2].
That might not be enough to sustain a conflict with China if it started today, but it does demonstrate that the US is perfectly capable of scaling up domestic arms manufacturing if they choose to invest in it.
The increase in aircraft manufacturing during that period came at the expense of lost civilian automobile manufacturing. There were practically no civilian American cars made from 1942-1945. Same can be said for other industries. To a certain extent, this belies load shifting rather than increases in overall capacity like your statement may suggest.
Sure, if you want to stop making cars to make weapons instead for a long period of time. Have you ever retooled a highly automated assembly plant? I have, and I can tell you it’s not something that can be changed on a whim.
Is your contention that we should be churning out wartime levels of war materiel when we're not at war? Like specifically what do you think we should be doing?
To chime back in, my contention is that we should be churning out at least enough to keep Ukraine fully supplied without the need to ration, and the fact that we still aren't there 3+ years into this war is not a good sign.
Speaking more broadly, I think that the proper amount of war-related industry should depend not just on whether the war is ongoing or not, but on how likely it is. Right now I believe that a major war that US will likely need to participate in sooner or later is more likely than not by 2050.
I don't think our "not being there" has anything to do with ability but with political appetite. If both political parties wanted to produce a lot of shells, we'd produce a lot of shells. Right now one political party wants Ukraine to lose, so we don't.
My perspective is that we shouldn’t be trivializing the problem and recognize the tradeoffs and externalities. Pretending we have lots of manufacturing capacity for weapons systems because we know how to make cars misses the point of how difficult a transition from one to the other would be.
> A sustained conflict with a nuclear power is a no go. The risk of nuclear escalation is too great.
That was the rationale for letting the US military get into this state, but the conflict in Ukraine proved it to be unwise and founded on false assumptions.
You're conflating civilian production with military production. Does China have 40% of world military production? Or is the plan to throw electric golf carts at US aircraft carriers?
