[TheForge] Conventional wisdom- Wrong again?

[James Binnion]

If you will think about it a bit you will see that we are no longer 
in a place where a protracted war like WW2 is really remotely 
possible. The main combatants with the resources to fight such a war 
are very limited and are all nuclear powers with more than enough 
remaining nuclear weapons to render the world uninhabitable. So the 
MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine that kept the lid on the 
Cold War still applies. Future armed conflicts involving the US will 
be more of the Viet Nam , Desert Storm or Afghanistan variety.  As 
far as tanks go we still have plenty of tooling resources to make 
them. And sadly to say (as I am a Navy veteran) the Navy is mostly a 
freight company and portable airport delivery system now as there 
just is not anyone who has any kind of naval power left except us. So 
Battle Ships are irrelevant in that there is no one to fight with 
them and modern naval weapons systems are such that the heavy armor 
does not really make much difference in survivability to a ship 
killer type missile or torpedo.

Jim



>Well you do have a point there, I still wonder if it is wise to rely on a
>number of smaller shops with limited resources do all of our large industry
>production.
>There are many HUGE machine tools that would be needed to reproduce some of
>the pieces just for a main battle tank.
>Now think about a battleship.
>Is that shop down the street going to be able to tool up to make a barrel
>for a main gun?
>No matter what we still will need some big manufacturers to do the really
>big stuff.
>Yeah, we probly will never get in a situation where we need to turn out war
>machinery like we did in WW2.
>And if we did we could probably make do somehow.
>But it's still a shame to lose some of the companies we have lost the last
>few decades.
>But on the upside at least blacksmithing is a growing back.
>
>Jim
>