[hedora]

Why would you waste the factory output during peacetime?

It seems like pork spending to me. Put the factories to good use, and maybe have 1% of output go to prototypes; 10% to dual use.

Miniaturization of weaponry (like drones) makes this even more attractive. Also, a iPhone factory (if such a thing existed) could certainly convert to drone manufacturing in short order. Aluminum and glass aren’t great materials for drones, but aluminum is useful for things like machinery that manufactures plastic.

[dgroshev]

That's because the modern weapon tech tree is vast and complex. It's not factorio, there are no factories that can switch from producing DSLRs to MWIR cameras. A playdough factory can't cast solid rocket motors. A Tesla manufacturing line can't just switch to welding 10cm steel slabs for tanks. Moreover, those military-relevant processes and techniques require know-how that gets lost if the processes are not run.

Small quad hype is just techbro delusion. Those quads have their place, but the vast majority of the defence toolkit needs to be much more sophisticated. For example, Ukraine is still struggling to manufacture a domestic ballistic missile four years into the war, despite having tons of funding, a ballistic program pre-war, and Western experts willing to help. If western countries stopped low-rate production that normally goes into stockpiles, the timeline to start manufacturing up would be similar.