Comment by jdietrich
18 hours ago
>But, if you are in a active war and being actively bombed, then you absolutely design your factories to be resistant to sustained aerial bombardment.
That's not really a viable strategy. It has been tried a few times - Mittelwerk and Kőbánya spring to mind - but you can't really build a self-contained factory. If your enemy can't bomb the factory, they'll bomb the roads and railways serving your factory, they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions.
At least during WWII, it was generally far more effective to rely on camouflage, secrecy and redundancy. Rather than having a super-fortified factory that shouts "this is vital national infrastructure", spread your capacity out into lots of mundane-looking facilities and plan for a certain level of attrition. Compartmentalise information to prevent your enemy from mapping out your supply chain and identifying bottlenecks. Your overall system can be highly resilient, even if the individual parts of that system are fragile.
All of those are methods to be resistant to aerial bombardment in my book.
If nobody knows where your factory is, it looks like a parking lot from the air and you have multiple smaller factories instead of one big factory to mitigate the impact of a damage event you are resistant to aerial bombardment, even if your ceiling isn't any sturdier than a normal factory roof. Same if the factory is out in the open but everybody thinks your drone factory produces windshield wipers
Yes, I am aware. I was using “resistant to sustained aerial bombardment” in the general sense of all classes of mitigations, not just fortification.
But thank you for elaborating when I was too lazy to. It helps further reinforce my point that the key is mitigating the risk however you can, not specific risk mitigations somehow absolving responsibility.
> they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions.
All true, and German WW2 production kept increasing despite the bombing.