…Let’s start with the terrible edifice of the GAE war machine. At the risk of being accused of lazily falling back on ‘every war is World War II’, we’ve seen a very similar situation to this before. At the outset of the war, Germany’s military was larger, better trained, and far more technically sophisticated than any of their competitors. Not only was their kit superior in every way, but they’d adapted their war-fighting doctrines to account for the advances in military technology that had taken place between the Great War to End All Wars (hah) and their contemporary conflict.
Germany had one big problem, though: they didn’t have much in the way of natural resources, nor did they have much in the way of an industrial base. Sure, they had factories, obviously, but it was simply nothing compared to the overpowering productive capacity of the United States. Once American factories were converted from making Model Ts to churning out Shermans by the baker’s dozen, it was all over but the mass raping. In fact, just the Lend Lease program with the USSR was enough to seal the deal. It didn’t matter that German tanks, aircraft, rifles, and so on were superior in every way to the crap America shat out. The US buried the Reich with sheer mass of stuff.
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. Over the last several decades America’s industrial base has rusted out, becoming a wide swath of graffitied devastation that produces nothing but environmental blight and opiod addiction. The country relies entirely on imported goods, and this is almost certainly true for enough of the critical inputs for the maintenance and replenishment of munitions that a supply chain busted up by global hostilities would almost certainly result in crippling shortages of essential components. Read more…
