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Comment by echelon

6 hours ago

That's a genius move!

We should get every country to do this.

Build your nuclear subs here, in the US shipyards. We'll help you!

We can massively expand our capacity, which will be important for self defense in the coming decades.

An interesting example of this is the US modernizations of its military industrial capacity by supply pre- and during WWI. There was intense debate in the international community as to whether non-warring countries could supply nations at war without being considered combatants.

If they aren’t, you can’t neutralize the enemies supplies. If they are, those third countries are effectively part of the conflict.

The US had to take the latter stance because it didn’t have a strong industry to product its own weapons. If it supported nations from buying from non-warring parties, it would be shit out of luck if it had its own wars. So it received a lot of investment from European powers, generating jobs, economic growth, and the funding to expand its domestic production without having to take on debt or wait for a war to break out.

Come its entry into WWI and then WWII, the US had a strong home base of industrial capacity for arms manufacturing.

I imagine countries would only do this begrudgingly out of necessity. The U.S. has positioned itself as unworthy of trust and respect and is basically taking the mafia protection approach to getting other nations to work with it.

  • I would be very worried about any form of built in kill switch / degrade effectiveness based on recent F-16 fiasco that sobered entire Europe into massive military spending.

    Trust lost is trust that either never comes back or it takes tremendous, long term continuous effort. Not holding my breath.