GMC, Ford, Chrysler. They're all down sizing, the American automobile just ain't what it used to be and foreign cars are apparently the way of the future.

During WW2, all American Auto companies fell rank and file to fight fascism, the consumer vehicle was put on hold and tanks, jeeps and planes were mass produced.

If the recent trend of the American Auto industry continues, will America still have the ability to churn out mass amounts of vehicles to wage a large scale, on going war in the future? Possibly on multiple fronts?

If we go to war with China, we're going to depend on them to build our weapons for us. "Please could you make some more parts for our tanks, we don't want to lose to you in a land battle!"

It would be great if we had leadership in DC that actually had America's future interests in mind instead of a few select large corporations. We have no economic plans, everything done is done as a reaction to something that occurs. We need a national policy and plan for the next 5 years, the next 10 years, etc. etc. We need national health care, etc.

To just poo-poo it and say "oh well, we'll just buy it from overseas" is a pretty defeatist attitude. We don't have to give up manufacturing and it is not a foregone conclusion that we lose all of our manufacturing. We just need to act as a nation to help each other out.

Despite the US automakers on again off again woes, it is still the largest industry in the world. The "Big 3" are the fourth, fifth, and sixth largest companies in the world (in terms of sales). Chrysler, of course, is now a German-owned company.

They have problems, but it isn't as if they are going to fold up tomorrow.

The United States is still the largest producer of vehicles in the world. Source While the US has been producing fewer and fewer cars, it isn't cars that are used in war. The US is still the largest supplier of tanks in the world.

The US accounts for 63% of the world's arms market (excluding China). Europe accounts for around 30%.

I don't think we have any problems making weapons or vehicles.

The answer is "it depends." The transition from the Depression to the wartime economic productivity did not happen overnight. The best example of this is the aviation industry, which produced more aircraft in a single month of 1944 than it did the entire year of 1939. Most of the industrial capacity that produced those planes in 1944 didn't exist in 1939.

So, if we get into a long war, then the US economy is quite capable of creating the industrial base necessary, as long as we're willing to do so. Are we willing to toss aside Medicare, Medicaid, 95% of welfare, farm subsidies, etc? If so, then yes, we could be turning out the volume of war materials we would need in an extended conflict.

Can we do it if a conflict only lasts 1-2 years? Maybe. The question there would be do we have sufficient steel production? Can we muster the political will rapidly enough for such a radical economic transition? Perhaps just as important, can we find the right balance between quality and quantity?

If the recent trend of the American Auto industry continues, will America still have the ability to churn out mass amounts of vehicles to wage a large scale, on going war in the future? Possibly on multiple fronts?
Even though America is the largest Arms manufacturing country, the rest of manufacturing in America is not doing so well. Many of the weapons that America's military use have different subcomponents. If we had to fight WW3, we would have to manufacture the weapons and their subcomponents and do so very efficiently.

Regardless of the state of manufacturing, America might not be able to wage another large scale war period, if large scale happens to be on the same scale as the Korean War or WW2. In those wars, America was the largest oil producing country in the world, and thus could wield a fleet of battleships, heavy tanks, and fighter planes for several years at a time. Could we do that on $100/barrel oil? I don't think we could.

If the recent trend of the American Auto industry continues, will America still have the ability to churn out mass amounts of vehicles to wage a large scale, on going war in the future? Possibly on multiple fronts?


Not to put too fine a point on it, but something happened at the end of WW2 that meant that any subsequent war on anything like the same sort of scale would be dramatically different.

They're called nuclear weapons. (That's "new-KLEE-ar", George.) Any future war that involves the number of countries and troops that could possibly compare to WW2 would almost automatically involved at least two nuclear powers, possibly on opposing sides.

Heck, the "War on Terror" involves at least four: US, UK, France (in Afghanistan), & Pakistan. Five if you include the Chechen conflict. The reason the really BIG balloon has not gone up, adn we're still thinking in terms of tanks, jeeps and troops is that they just happen to be on the same side this time around.

And this is hardly a "war" at all (except for rhetorical effect) - we had bigger operations in WW2 (D-Day being one example).

But these days, with nuclear weapons, it's very very unlikely that a conventional war could ever get to anything like the scale of a world war without 'going nuclear'.

I daresay that this is one reason why the US has felt comfortable outsourcing it's fuel supplies to the Middle East. (skeeterses makes a good point on oil sourcing.) It's also, I daresay, a reasons why America feels that what goes on in the Middle East is a matter of pressing national interest (aside from any predictions of pending apocalypse). Not to mention one of the most prominent reasons why America - and the rest of the world, who mostly rely on the region for their oil supplies too - doesn't want to see anyone there develop nuclear weapons of their own.

So, even if the state of the American automobile industry is as desperate as you think (and, as Amlord points out, any potential enemy in World War 3 has more to worry about on that score than America does), it's fantastically unlikely that the type of militarisation of the economy that we saw in WW2 would ever again be necessary.

Let's hope, though, that none of us ever has to find out who's right, and this stays as a theoretical argument.