this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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In sure someone still knows how to make them.
That's a complicated one. Military tech tends to all be 10+ years old at time of deployment and the ones stockpiled are probably late 90s designs that went into production in the early 2000s. Most of the parts for the control and guidance systems are likely no longer produced at all and haven't been for a decade+ (think the kinds of computer chips you'd find in a SNES, maaaaybe an N64) so it's not that they don't have the blueprint somewhere, they would have to re design large parts of it to work in a modern supply chain. Yes, they could do emulation/simulation shenanigans to get some stuff to be compatible on modem COTS hardware but they'd still need to re qualify everything because nobody wants a 500lb ballistic warhead going stupid and killing someone in the wrong country.
The inability to restart production lines must be a huge strategic problem though.
What if the USA was involved in a large scale war against a larger nation state?
We're screwed at the moment because we do not have the manufacturing base that we used to have. We can and do outproduce most of the world when it comes to munitions in a time of peace, but we have a massive scalability problem because we've offshored so much manufacturing.
We used to be able to ask companies that produced mundane consumer goods to retool for producing war materials, but they don't exist many places anymore. Much of our domestic manufacturing already produces for the defense industry and wouldn't have enough tools to increase production much to meet demand.
We've seen the government take some steps to mitigate this in the electronics space by encouraging Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel to build more foundries stateside, but there's a long way to go to solving the problem.