[phil21]

> For that matter, why aren't we spinning up a few factories to build artillery shells?

As with most problems in the US today - short term thinking and seemingly lack of any sort of long-term strategic planning whatsoever.

I was a teenager when they were shutting down the (mostly mothballed, but still kept in enough working order to spin back up) ammunition factories in my state. I thought even then it was a stupid short-sighted move, and it's only proven worse since then.

Not only do we not have any production capacity to speak of - we also are now completely reliant on a handful of plants that are vulnerable to two or three well-executed attacks to take them completely offline. We entirely lack geographic diversity when before our arms manufacturing was spread throughout the country and fairly resilient.

As a nation we completely forgot the lessons learned in WWII. Production capacity is almost all that matters so long as you can hold the front long enough to spin it up. China is quite obviously orders of magnitude better positioned for this in the modern era. Perhaps even moreso than the US was in the 1940's given the types of arms that are expected to win future wars.