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.
