How far does the military-industrial complex really reach?
Its ironic but the state controlled arms industry of the Soviet Union and China is actually more transparent than in the West. The Soviet's built a tank factory to build tanks, and they built a refrigerator factory to build refrigerators. In the West private enterprise plays a much bigger role in industry and its harder to discern the true arms manufacturing capacity.
In America for example a corporation builds a factory to make trucks, or steel plate or widgets. But how many were originally designed with the capacity to be able to switch over to military production relatively easy. Given the extent of America's military-industrial complex I would be very surprised if such factories don't exist.
Also building a new tank factory may not be that difficult. The blueprint would already exist to build a factory with the right dimensions, equipment, machine tools, and for what type of materials and parts would be needed from suppliers. In fact the suppliers would also have their own blueprints for what they need. America wouldn't have a new tank factory on the scale of Lima or Detroit up and running in two months, but in a year?
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