[H8crilA]

I think your concern is valid, but the answer would be something like "we can reopen production lines when someone else ramps up their production first". In other words - do not escalate, but respond to foreign escalation. This is a much better approach, notice that if you escalate first you leave everyone worse off, including yourself. Perhaps others are worse off than you, but you are still worse off than you were before.

If you're wondering how would you know that someone is ramping up production (can be underground, etc.) the answer is detecting underground testing via seismographs.

About the tanks, it is indeed a problem. Just look at Germany, their military industrial complex used to be one of the best in the world (I'm talking post WW2, for example Leopard tanks) but they effectively killed it. Luckily there's always another modernization behind the corner, so as long as you don't reduce the vehicle count there's enough production. Which is what Germans (and not only them) did.