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US Manufacturing Decline

Concerns about America's inability to produce military hardware at scale, dependence on foreign supply chains, loss of industrial base, and contrast with World War II production capacity

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The discussion reveals a stark divide between those who believe American ingenuity and emergency nationalization could spark a WWII-style industrial pivot and those who argue the nation’s manufacturing "muscle memory" has dangerously atrophied. Many commenters highlight a critical vulnerability in the cost-exchange ratio of modern warfare, where multi-million dollar interceptors are being exhausted by swarms of inexpensive drones that the current U.S. supply chain cannot match in volume. This decay is further evidenced by a crippling reliance on foreign precursors—from basic fasteners to essential chemicals—alongside a generational shift in the workforce from mechanical trades to software and advertising. Ultimately, critics warn that the U.S. military risks being neutralized by its own bureaucratic inertia and a preference for "gold-plated" high-tech hardware over the scalable, low-cost solutions required for long-term conflict.

65 comments tagged with this topic

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I think you underestimate how much of that 50% is just exports. And how much other plants can be scaled up quickly. And how the US can temporarily nationalize things, and ensure all the output goes domestic. Just a backroom threat of emergency, temporary nationalization, would ensure CEOs give the US priority. IE, they'd get to retain higher profits. What I think would really happen, is the rest of the world would suffer and run out of energy. Not the US.
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> Being able to fly non-stop B-52 and B-2 sorties from home air bases with single-digit-hour flight times is a different thing entirely. I agree with you in principle, but I worry that the United States hasn't been stockpiling enough ordinance to keep that up for very long at all. We don't keep many munitions factories on a hot standby either.
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> The US can fly not only F-35 but even B-52. Well, looking at the news, it turns out they can't because every time they've put something up it's ended in a horrific crash. The US is militarily weak, and is utterly reliant on its NATO allies, who don't want to get involved in the current round of war crimes.
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I like the size and population take, but the industry perspective is bad: Russia doesn't have air superiority. US and Israel do. Cuba becoming a base for Shaed drones? You are out of touch with how much industry you need for that. They are cheap, but they are not FPVs or off-the-shelf Mavics.
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Its not a false assumption. The world today is full of innovative products built with American capital and mostly American minds. If Americans want to do something then they have an rich pool of talent to do it well. Sure on average, the population of the US is stupid, but that's true of everywhere.
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> built with American capital and mostly American minds. I would say "built with American agency and commercial spirit", not minds. Most of the things that we have were first built elsewhere (Germany being a prime supplier here with the mp3 or the Zuse), but turning them commercial was the input that came from America.
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Just because you sold your soul to an economic superspreader meme that allows your products and inventions to percolate with the rapidity of an influenza-herpes-ebola hybrid doesnt mean that the minds behind it are brighter than the rest of the world.
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> You mean the people who voted for trump or those who voted for the democrats? I'm not talking about plebs, I'm talking about people who know their shit and work at government level. We could just look at the invention of the past century and pluck out relevant events like the moon landing, electronic computer, transistor or ARPANET. Clearly there are smart people living in that nation. They have the talent to draw from to get good advice about stuff like: what Iran's first response might be to an aerial assault. > Are there some causal reasons you think americans are smarter than people in other countries? I never said that. I said America is home to SOME of the brightest minds in the world. That sentence does not apportion all the brightest minds to that nation. What you read is clearly something different from what I wrote. Do you have a chip on your shoulder?
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> the US has enough intelligent people 'intelligent', yes, big scary performative navy/gear, very very costly, here take most of the tax dollars. This is whats going on since WW2, where are these intelligent people who couldn't understand this?
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> An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint. Problem isn't a single drone, it's the cost of intercepters. Iran could launch a swarm of 100s of drones with few antiship missiles mixed in to hone in at same time. CSG has to spend $million+ interceptors and will quickly run out of them. US hasn't taken anti drone defence seriously, or the cost of doing it seriously before going in.
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If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more, given they obviously have a lot more space. The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
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The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth. You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes. But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
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> This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world. Not quite. It is hard to build an airplane, it is easy to build a drone. So if the battle comes to who is going to send more drones, then a big carrier will lose: it doesn't have a factory to build drones.
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The news is outright wrong about that. Yes, as a last ditch measure patriots etc are used to shoot down leaker drones, but the primary weapon systems to take down the slow moving drones are APKWS rockets on fighters, and helicopter gunships using cannon fire. There is definitely an argument to be made that even APKWS is too expensive due to the cost of flying a F16 per hour, but it’s not at the level of a few million dollar missile. Obviously the US was in no way prepared for the Iranian response, but it’s not like zero development has happened in the last few years. It’s far too slow, but it’s deployed and in active use in combat. Hopefully this will be a wake up call that military procurement and domestic manufacturing needs to be wholesale reconfigured with breakneck speed. Doubtful though without much more pain felt directly by American citizens.
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We can barely build FFGs, to say nothing of bigger drone carriers that would still be dwarfed by aircraft carriers. So you'd say, OK, what drones can we launch from the tiny fiberglass-hulled small craft that we can build lots of, but the issue is that such drones will be very small and will necessarily have ineffectively small payloads to suit.
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sure but America's ship building doesn't appear to be at the level of being able to cranking out carriers should they start losing them. Conversely I imagine it might have a better shot at cranking out a smaller blue print en-masse.
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Irrespective of the political leadership, it's unlikely that USA military is completely oblivious about the new modes of wars - cheap drones, AI, rapid build-outs (e.g. in China). On the contrary, they are likely deeply aware of it. That being said, it is also likely true that USA has become more bureaucratic and there is a high chance of deer-in-headlights situation. USA remains the shining city on the hill, though probably not for long, unless we pull up socks and innovate, work, work, work and build, build and build.
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The USA military is losing equipment sitting unprotected on the tarmac 4 years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Your shining city is a polished turd.
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Ultimately, it's an internal battle. A battle of bureaucracy+ignorance vs democracy+optimism+innovation. The side that weighs more wins. And the adversaries are hoping it's the former.
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> cheap drones, AI, rapid build-outs Yet the USA military pay $10,000 for the toilet seat on a cargo plane.
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Well, the US is still dependent on foreign heavy oil for their refineries as it mostly produces shale oil (for export). So it very much isn't independent even though it looks like it when you see the numbers.
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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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> 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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"We make plenty of stuff at scale." Not the stuff that matters (chips, electronics, metals, etc). We don't even have a primary lead smelter, which we would likely need if we got into a peer conflict. It's also important to note that the US lacks the ability to quickly pivot and set up plants. Much of the knowledge to do so has been disappearing as employment in that sector has been steadily declining for decades. Sure we make stuff at scale using automation, but that automation can't be changed to significantly different stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
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We suck at ultra-heavy industry that outputs commodities. We're great at light industry, or specialised heavy industry, which includes a lot of electronics. You're correct on inflexibility.
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Can you give some specific examples of what light industry we are great at?
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Pharmaceuticals, medical devices and craft food and beverage products come to mind. Guns and ammo, too.
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Yeah, even if we can produce them now, we don't have the pipeline to keep them running - steel for guns comes from other countries, we don't have a primary lead smelter in the country, medical devices that rely on electronics rely on foreign components, etc. The only reason pharma can operate here is because of the regulations, and even then many components chemicals are sourced internationally.
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Worked as a chemical systems technician for a bit. Can confirm, lots of the chemicals we used (most, some of which were pharma grade but we weren't pharma), had to come from either China or Germany. And we really did try to source as much in the US as possible. So it wasn't even a question of cost, it was simply no one here wanted to make what we needed. Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think we should be able to be self-sufficient and manufacture everything ourselves. I think it is fine to import stuff. My bigger concern is, for some things, there just isn't a lot of options. I think its fine to buy some of the raw materials from Germany and China, but I'd also like to see a few more countries that they could be bought from.
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We don't even produce things like bolts, screws, and springs. If we suddenly had to, it would take billions of dollars and several months to spin up any real capacity.
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More like years. Perhaps decades if you needed to do it at scale across entire supply chains all at once. All this stuff requires people. And we simply don’t have them. The folks who could be trained to build such stuff are still in primary school.
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The folks who could be trained to build such stuff are being either deported or harassed for daring to come to the US for studying.
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A quarter of steel used in the U.S. is imported, and of that quarter, 40% comes from Mexico and Canada; very little comes from China[0]. So, not only does your point fall flat, the people we get steel from are our neighbors so it'd make sense to not sour with relationships with them like the current admin is doing with chaotic trade policy and invasion threats. I really don't understand the FUD around US manufacturing capability, you'd essentially need to craft the greatest conspiracy ever to think that every politician, defense agency, intelligence agency, etc. is asleep at the wheel to not recognize this supposed threat and do nothing about it. 0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/where-does-us-ge...
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> 40% comes from Mexico and Canada Where do you think this originates from? China ships a rather large amount of stuff to these countries to take advantage of the trade agreements. So much that you can find satellite images of large yards in Mexico that are used for this purpose with barely any effort.
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Okay, let's assume most of their steel is Chinese (I have my doubts because, yet again, more conspiracies), we only import a quarter of the steel we use. That would hurt losing it overnight, sure, but we wouldn't be absolutely toast like the autarkists are saying. These takes are much more doomer than I'm willing to bet the supporters of "bring everything back" realize. Do you have no faith in the US economy / populace adapting to a hypothetical all out war with China?
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Personally I have little to no faith in the adaptability of the US workforce for such things. It would be a generational shift. Exceedingly few people even have basic mechanical skills these days. It’s not like WWII where you have a majority population that works on the farm or in a factory with their hands, and at home fixing stuff that breaks. That sort of population can be rapidly redeployed. We would need to start from the basics like “how to turn a screwdriver” for a huge portion of the workforce. When you really start looking into things, nearly everything points back to China at some point. Pharmaceuticals? The APIs or at least important precursors largely originate there - even if they hit a middleman country first. Then you get into basic components and it’s the same story. That part from India or Mexico might not be available without China as a backstop. It’s not an impossible problem, but it’s a problem that took decades and a generation or two to destroy. It’s far easier and quicker to destroy things than build them.
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Have you heard about the great toilet paper scarcity of 2020 during covid? and facemasks? US couldn't make either toilet paper or facemasks or ventilators or build hospital beds or anything that matters when the entire economy was at risk of shutdown.
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I have a feeling that China doesn't export much steel. They more likely export their steel in the form of finished products.
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> We make plenty of stuff at scale Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is? https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
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I agree the situation is dire, but do not underestimate the US government’s ability to spend its way to gain a desired result. The first time a bullet hits US soil there will be 50 million people falling over themselves to manufacture shoes by hand if it helps “kill the bad guys”
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One thing that struck me is seeing his months long struggle, where the only injection mold designer he could find was near retirement age and wouldn't be doing it for too much longer, the tool & die expert he talked to died between when he interviewed him and when he made the video, he had to deal with suppliers lying about where their parts came from, and some American suppliers could only provide low quantities without him paying to upgrade their tooling. Then there's a comment from someone in China saying that over there, he'd be able to bring his product to mass production in about 5 days in whatever quantity he wanted, and at a higher quality (more corrosion resistant metal, more durable silicone, etc).
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TL;DW: skip to 17m55s for the important bit [1] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1075
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I saw hints of this ~20 years ago. I was working on software for a consumer device. For manufacturing it, we chose Foxconn. One non-negotiable point from their end was that they had to write some of the software on the device. They didn't care which part or how small. The device had a physical keyboard with a micocontroller that managed it and they ended up writing the code that ran on that micro as it was largely independent of the code we were writing, and easy for us to test. The first versions were not great, but they got better quickly. As we talked amongst ourselves about why they were so emphatic about this, it became clear to us that they were taking a long term view of the importance of moving into the intellectual property side of things. Dustin points out that, in some areas, they are there.
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There are multiple interesting bits, worth watching the whole thing at some point. Something that stuck with me was that dude had an uncle that worked at a bolt factory down the road, and now there is literally no way to source domestically made bolts. And that they could find one retired guy after scouring multiple states who could help make an injection mold. I'm sure some of the larger defense contractors have a few guys who can do this, but that makes for a pretty low bus factor.
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> Something that stuck with me was that dude had an uncle that worked at a bolt factory down the road, and now there is literally no way to source domestically made bolts. US manufactured fasteners are available*, the Build America, Buy America Act created a market for them. You’re not going to find them at Home Depot or your local hardware store, professional supply houses will sell them to you. Waivers are available if no US supplier is available, but there usually is a US supplier. I assume bolt manufacturing is automated to the point where you load up a CNC machine with steel hex stock and get boxes of bolts on the other end, there’s not a ton of labor involved. The machine cuts the hex stock to length, then removes material to create a cylindrical shaft and then threads are cut. * By US manufactured, I mean ‘compliant with BABAA requirements’, which is something like 55% of the materials and manufactured here.
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Only extremely specialized fasteners are CnC-milled or machined. Here is a video of how one American company makes screws: https://youtu.be/Z8siZfGmnjQ?si=24aAFhk87RRKdPt4
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> I assume bolt manufacturing is automated to the point where you load up a CNC machine I'd be shocked if bolts worth a damn weren't forged
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That talks about how they couldn't find someone US side to make the injection moulding moulds. We used to have a manufacturing business in the UK and got quotes for some moulds in the 1980s. You could get it done in the UK but the cost to get it from China was 1/5 as much. I guess people just went with the cheaper option.
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You can still get molds made in the USA, but they are indeed much more expensive than an equivalent one made in PRoC, and options/expertise are often more limited or specialized (depending on how you look at it). It is very difficult, but not impossible to make consumer products in the USA.
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I doubt that. If American soil was threatened I think you would see a mass mobilization. People like living in America and they won’t give it up easily. I know I would join. See how long Ukraine has lasted with far fewer resources. Americans are fat and happy now but we are not always this way.
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> We make plenty of stuff at scale. We just haven’t designed any of military around it since WWII. When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs, you get the "Oh we produce high value products, mostly military". Then you get posts like this. How is one to reconcile these ideas? Is Lockheed Martin the Ferrari of weapons?
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The US is responsible for over 10% of world manufacturing, putting them in second place of all countries (after China). >When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs That percentage goes down every year due to reduced manufacturing but also jobs are lost to high-tech automation in manufacturing. But it's still a buttload.
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The 10% in value does not account about the fraction of a final American product that consists of parts or raw materials imported from elsewhere. Many of the best known American products, e.g. computers, are only assembled in USA from imported parts. If the imports from certain countries would be completely interrupted, it is unknown how much of that US manufacturing would be able to continue.
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>We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America. The soviet union collapsed as a result of military overspending and massive supply chain corruption in an attempt to keep up with an opponent with lower levels of corruption and a far more powerful industrial base. Which is to say, inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons while showering them with cash would signal that that Christmas came early for Putin.
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Reality of course is the other way around: the US defense industry gets to build gold toilets (for the White House ballroom built on the ruins of the East Wing), while the Ukranians absolutely must build stuff that works and is cheap or they get a missile on their heads. The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.
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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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Ehm, there is the tiny issue of cost and overall inventory size ...
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Brightest minds of US were too focused on displaying ads and making teenagers addicted to tik tokies-like stuff instead of working security, defense, etc You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda :) Inb4: im from eu
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If you have an innovative idea, it's fairly easy to sell to the public, and extremely difficult to sell to the Pentagon. People are just making the obvious choice most of the time. Why risk your business success unnecessarily?
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The brightest minds were systematically bullied out of position, called DEI hires or accused of random crimes. They might not have been the best, but lets not pretend we're sending our brightest minds herw.
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What are you talking about? Better missiles dont stop Iran from closing a tiny waterway in their border. US weapons are pretty damn good for the most part. But trade protection is just not something fancy advanced weapons can solve. Military planners have known this for a long time. If anything, if you were serious you would say that the US didnt pay enough tradesmen and technician to build enough of the needed weapons.
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The pay levels seem more of an inherent problem than the political winds.
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The people I know leaving that sector have been steadily leaving for years due to the day to day bullshit/internal politics and poor leadership that they have to put up with, not the pay nor current administration.
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The problem shown by Ukraine was that large, expensive solutions were not effective when cheap weapons were used. The solution, which will take time, is to recreate some of the cheap defensive solutions that used to be available - guns, radar-bearing weaponry, etc. these are quite boring to the high tech industry, who prefer things like lasers, rail guns, etc. but ww ii showed they worked, and I suspect the approach speed of drones is similar to kamikazes. There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper. Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps. And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
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: Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible. Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam, which is about a fifth of the land area, and, in 1970, half the current population of Iran. Also, they’ll pack a bigger punch, but I think the USA has way fewer bombers now.