12 thoughts on “A War On Three Fronts”

  2. We cannot fight a war on one front. We rely on very high tech weaponry (guided missiles and artillery shells, for one) that are not stocked in sufficient depth for a war. The last time the US Navy bought a Mk-48 heavy torpedo (still the standard) was last century….

    1. Correction: We could fight a war on one front for 3-4 days if everything went just right, after that we’d be out of everything for 6 months to 5 years.

      It’s not like we were better prepared on 12/7/41 although we’d been building up for a year and the production of arms for Britain had started the process moving. It still took 1942 and into ’43 before we were up to sustaining prolonged combat. The weapons were a lot simpler and cheaper then as well.

      It’s not likely we’d get anywhere close to that much leeway now. As it is, in the Red Sea we’re shooting down $10,000 drones with $2,000,000 missiles and once a ship has expended the strictly limited number on board, they have to withdraw to port to be reloaded. That will be a problem at Taiwan where the Chinese have thousands of anti-ship missiles already sighted in and waiting.

      In WWI, we never managed to field a single tank or airplane and only about half our rifles were U.S. made.

      1. The first year of a war you have nothing that you need, the second year you have half of what you need and the third you have all that you need, you just can’t use it.

        Winston Churchill

  3. “It’s not like we were better prepared on 12/7/41 although we’d been building up for a year and the production of arms for Britain had started the process moving.”

    Although the Iowa class battleship’s keels were already laid and 16 aircraft carriers of various types – including the Essex Class were ordered. So it wasn’t a standing start.

    I agree with you and Doc that in a full blown peer war we would use up our stock of complex weapons in less than a week. And so would the other side. What happens then is anybody’s guess. Do we start making less complex weapons so that we can have more of them faster?

    Has our potential adversaries already thought of that and have complex weapon’s industries ready to go to grind them out?

    Or does it take too long to build something like an F-22 (I read a while back it took years to make one wing carry through forging because it has to sit for a while)
    and so we build F-16’s?

    On 12/7/41 we had raw materials and industries.

    Now we have woke.

    1. Now we have woke
      Rainbow colored Pipers and Cessna’s dropping glass jugs of gasoline ethanol with flaming rags onto tanks?

      Oh the horrors of war unfettered carbon!

      1. Maybe people will wake up when a chunk of our West Coast is invaded and occupied.

        OTOH maybe “they” should keep it!!

  4. Something about an air force deploying a few hundred jet fighters against an adversary equipped with 50,000 piston-engine bombers.

    Back at the beginning of the Ukraine thing, someone took note of the fact the Russians had more obsolete tanks in storage than the US and NATO had total antitank munitions.

    How many F16s against how many F35s or F22s? Or how fast can the latter shoot down the F16s? Because once the surviving 16s close in…

  5. “How many F16s against how many F35s or F22s? Or how fast can the latter shoot down the F16s? Because once the surviving 16s close in…”

    In a serious war you always boil off aircraft (and ships, and soldiers) just because….things like accidents, bad luck, casualties.

    We have so few F-35’s and F-22’s that they would be gone very soon.

    I wonder what it would take to get a boneyard F-16 operational?

    It would be interesting to see an analysis of how fast one could ramp up F-16 manufacturing and how long the raw materials would hold out for that. Anything you ship overseas to the US for use in manufacturing is a juicy target for enemy subs. And it would also be interesting to analyze how far back you have to revert your tech in order to generate good build rates in a prolonged war.

    Would you get back to P-47’s for ground attack?

    1. Somebody (John Campbell?) put some thought into this and ended his essay picturing an enemy who would “darken the skies” with a million Sopwith Camels. I don’t know if anyone could come up with a million cloche pilots but note the use of ultralights on Oct. 7. The Piper Enforcer (P-51) stayed in production and Willy Messerschmidt moved to Spain and started up Bf-109 production. Back in, I think, 1967, there was an Analog story called “Hawk Among the Sparrows” that dealt with some of the issues.

  6. We don’t need to be able to fight a war on three fronts, we need to be able to fight a war with China.

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