Reply #30: Industry is not strategically important in modern warfare. [View All]

Industry is not strategically important in modern warfare.

People think longingly of WWII and are ability to build weapons faster than they Germans could destroy them. What they forget is that in the following decades our ability to destroy has grown a thousand fold while our ability to protect has barely budged.

In WWII it took hundreds of bombers flying dozens of missions to drop enough ordinance to knock out a single key factory. Today a couple million dollars in cruise missiles using GPS navigation and ultra accurate map of the earth can fly just over the horizon and destroy a $2 billion dollar factory on the first try. Multiply that by a thousand and that would be just the opening salvo of a war between peers. If you can spend a million dollars and cause your opponent to lose a billion why wouldn't you? It simply is not cost effective to not completely wipe out the "other sides" industry in the first days if not hours of a war.

Modern war is fought with what you have one day one not what you can build once the war is started.

Of course that ignores the even more destructive reality that all our peers are nuclear capable.