Good points, guys.
re Cold War-era stockpiles, I wonder how much relatively high tech weaponry would still be functional/effective after many years in storage. I wish I'd linked it when I first saw it, but I recall seeing an article about how stock of old, former WTO MANPADs being sent to Ukraine in the first couple of weeks of the war might not be effective because of age-related degradation of seeker heads and rocket engines.
Re increasing production of high-tech weapons, this article might provide some helpful insights.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...-almost-double
From the piece:
"Speaking to CBS News yesterday, James Taiclet, the chairman, president, and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, said that the company aims to boost production of the Javelin from the current 2,100 missiles per year to 4,000 per year, a process that could take up to “a couple of years” to achieve. One of the sites where the missiles are manufactured is in Troy, Alabama. Overall, production is shared as a collaboration between Lockheed and Raytheon Technologies."
So, doubling production rates could take "a couple of years". That seems to suggest that expenditure would quickly outstrip production in a full-blown WWIII scenario.
In a couple of ways, the situation today with NATO and Ukraine could apply to the T2k situation between the West and the PRC. Like what we're seeing today in Ukraine, the West would initially send older and/or obsolescent weapon systems to the Chinese (e.g. Dragon ATGMs and Redeye MANPADs), whilst ramping up production of current gen systems to replace depleted stockpiles.
In a v1 timeline, the Soviet adventure in China would probably prompt an increase in weapons production, both to supply China and to the strengthen the US military for the contingency of a wider war. However, this uptick in production would likely fall well short of "total war" levels.
Lastly, the more advanced the tech, the longer, I reckon, it would take to increase/expand its production. In WW2, one of my grandfathers worked as a salesman for a regional cannery. The US government asked the company to produce torpedoes instead of canned food. It took some doing to convert production lines for the task, but they did it. I'm not sure that sort of conversion would, by the 1990s, be possible on the scale it was in the 1940s. It's one thing to switch from tin cans to torpedoes, but it seems like quite another to switch from making clock radios to making laser-guided missiles. Also, by the 1990s, a lot of our electronics components were imported from abroad. A war in China would likely prove disruptive to that particular pipeline.
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