Quote:
Originally Posted by mpipes
You are so right. In the 90s, military industries had the capacity to ramp up production fairly quickly. Plus, the tooling for a lot of weapon system not in current production was still maintained. For example, production of B-1B was supposed to be able to resumed with stored tooling within at most one year. Mothballed aircraft were suppose to be returned to service within about 30 days. There were plans in place for aircraft refurbishment lines at all the major USAF depots.
Most that poo poo any ability to rapidly expand production seem to forget that the US went from no nuclear weapons program in 1942 to a fully operational weapon and massive support infrastructure within 3 1/2 years.
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I will give you an example - we had the tooling for the M8 AGS in storage in a warehouse near BAE York from when the program was cancelled all the way until at least 2015 - we could have taken it out, set it up where we were producing the M109 (and moved that line) and been in serial production within 4 months of go, with limited production at first and full production 6-7 months after go under wartime "get it down now" conditions. We even proposed to do just that in 2012.
Same with the tooling to make new Bradley's. Its still in storage and we can be back in limited rate production within 6 months and full rate new production within 8 months of the go signal.
When we built new M88's for Iraq (i.e. new builds not reworks of older vehicles) we pulled the tooling out, made new parts and got the first one delivered to Iraq six months after program Go.
Keep in mind this DOES NOT apply to turning a car factory into a tank factory - this is ramping up production at existing military production facilities. You want to build a new factory from scratch or convert a factory that takes much longer.