It took them 6 years to even think about fixing 'em

America would lose a near-peer war in the first month

as somebody reading The Capital Order by Clara Mattei which is partially about WW1 and Britain and Italy discovering what an industrial war is, reading how the British government was just like “Oh, surely the invisible hand of the free market will step in and produce all the materiel we need for this war, as if we have high enough demand, the supply shall surely rise to meet it, this is literally economics 101,” and when that obviously didn’t happen and the capitalists were even selling British ships for profit while they were increasingly needed for the basic survival of Britain as a functioning country, the government had to finally step in and do nationalizations or they would have collapsed…

all of this really rung a bell with the current way that the American military is structured. except I’m unsure if the capitalists of today would let the president actually do any of this. Although, part of the British military production (in fact, most of it) was a hybrid of government ownership and private ownership where the government essentially handled the companies and told the workers what to do and told the capitalists that they needed to make X amount of stuff in Y weeks, but the capitalists were guaranteed significant profit (and because this non-market production was so much more efficient than market production, and because workers were essentially not legally allowed to strike or mass bargain anymore, this profit was actually higher than what they made pre-war in many cases). So I wonder if current-day capitalists would tolerate that kind of arrangement or if they would cut off their noses to spite their faces.

though tbh it might not really matter anyway - the war would start and might - might - be effectively over quite quickly if China/Russia decides to just take out carrier groups with hypersonic missiles within the first month or two. It would then take years to establish domestic military production at sufficient scale to build the naval and air power that the US would need to be a fighting force, especially if they needed to source all the critical minerals they needed for their fancy shit from places other than China for obvious reasons. And those are years where, like, what is the US gonna do without half their aircraft carriers? China will be chewing through the island chains and because they’re just kinda right there, they don’t need the ability to project force on the other side of the planet, they can just use facilities that they already have in mainland China to strike whatever they need to strike. I guess the US will just threaten to nuke the world I suppose, or even actually do it.