1. I don't think Hanania is correct about the main causes of the war (Donbas, Crimea, and NATO). Donbas and Crimea became issues when Russia couldn't force Ukraine to abandon its aim to join the EU. In that sense, the war started 8 years ago.
2. American views, on both the left and the right, are largely formed with respect to domestic political interests. If you're a neocon, you're salivating to sell arms and change the regime. If you're vaguely "on the right" and feel like you don't have a home, you look at Twitter and mainstream media and think this mob runs the country. If you're a casual not strongly affiliated person, you look at one country invading another as a relic of a savage past that shouldn't be tolerated. If you're on the mainstream left that's welcomed the neocon element into the Democratic Party establishment and pushed nonsense about "Russian interference" you see the KGB under every bed. If you're on the hard left, you just kind of call for chaos and misrule as usual, and aim potshots at targets of opportunity.
The common element is simply that everyone's priors are based very little on Ukraine and Russia and very much on whatever they were originally concerned about. As such, I have very little concern that the US will much influence a settlement to the war.
3. That, a negotiated settlement to the war, will probably happen sooner rather than later.
3A. Contrary to Hanania, Russia has no practical military options for victory. It can cement control over territory it already controls. But unless it resorts to nuclear weapons, which would unleash long-term consequences that would probably be counterproductive to the Russian regime, it has no practical means of victory. Its army is fully extended and exhausted as a fighting force. Modern operational tempo and equipment are simply not sustainable in war, and there's no practical means for Russia to effect the sort of WWII mobilization that people are crediting them with as being capable of. Nor would it be effective if they did. Instead, note that they're rather pathetically trying to recruit Syrian and Central African (Replubican?!) mercenaries. This, coupled with their stalled offensives and rapidly dwindling supplies of advanced arms, is a strong signal of the end. Stalemate at best.
3B. Likewise, Ukraine has no practical method of recovering Donbas or Crimea. Contrary to what the Twitterati might think, this isn't a video game. They're dying in large numbers and want that to stop. Which is why, by every account I've seen, both sides have called negotiations productive. Counter to the anti-Twitterati, it's extremely irrational to believe that they are going to be influenced by Twitter or by the silky words of American politicos to actually "fight to the last Ukrainian" unless they want to fight to the last Ukrainian. Assuming otherwise seems to be an assumption of extreme irrationality that we would never employ upon ourselves.
Simply put, if you consider yourself rational enough to know that the talking head's words of encouragement on CNN are empty, the folks who are living in the Kiev metro system to avoid shelling probably can too.
"Kotkin takes the view that NATO’s expansion did not trigger Russian hostility, but rather that Russia is just reverting to historical type: an militaristic, expansionist autocracy trying to expand, and, because weaker than it thinks, biting off more than it can chew." - from Rod.
NATO expansion to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland was many years ago. Weak Biden running away in Afghanistan, and castrating the US oil & gas production, happened in the last 12 months.
Biden as President is the opportunity, NATO is the external excuse, Ukraine neo-Nazis (more real than US media note) is the Russian-language reason; but "Greater Russia" expanding is the main real reason.
And NATO expansion IS a threat to stop Russia expansion - but that is not existential.
"And NATO expansion IS a threat to stop Russia expansion - but that is not existential."
In terms of short term security and survival, sure. But what I have been trying to say is that it's a mistake to analyze this war strictly in those terms. Certain countries have a spiritual need to be Great or else what holds them together and sustains their ethos will break down and they will degenerate and evaporate. "Make X Great Again" resonates deeply in the US, in China, and in Russia too.
While one may disagree with it, there is a coherent line of thinking in which Russia can no longer remain Russian without being Great, and it cannot be Great without accomplishing the irredentist goal of collecting up all the lost Russian Lands from its period of Greatness. Kiev is perhaps not quite to Russians what Jerusalem is to Israelis, but it helps to convey the perpetually demoralizing thorn in the side implied by the prospect of it turning away from Moscow and toward its rival the West, i.e., America.
This line of thinking would say that Russia faced a terrible choice between being apart or falling apart.
My point is that the falling apart is indeed existential for them in the medium to long term. And Putin chose being apart.
Hanania has defined victory in a way that precludes a negotiated settlement. Maybe fair: any settlement should let Russia withdraw with honour.
But even if Russia keeps all the "people's Republics" and more, it will still go away exhausted, knowing better than to try to conquer Ukraine and unable to effect regime change through threats.
That leaves Ukraine in a much safer position than last year. The shame is that it took so much horror to get there.
Did I misinterpret what Hanania said? Here's the quote:
> Russian victory: 70%
> I’m defining “victory” here in the sense that Russia is better off than when the war began regarding its key foreign policy aims. It either has more land or territory under its control than when the war started, gets international recognition for what it already controls, i.e. Crimea, changes the status of the Donbas, or gets a no-NATO pledge or some other guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality, whether it can be enforced or not.
------------
I actually think this is a somewhat ridiculous position for exactly the reasons you state. Calling this a Russian victory seems very strange.
It actually bothers me about Hanania. He puts so much thought into some things and comes up with really interesting ideas, but then he'll say something like this that just seems astonishingly out of touch.
It's probably true of almost all public intellectuals (and the people in general). We have to really think hard to escape our base, emotional predictions. And even when we do realize we've made mistakes (e.g. "Russian absolute military superiority will lead to victory"), we seem to let those mistakes creep back into our analysis instead of truly rethinking most of the time.
‘… there just aren’t enough young people to grow the economy.‘
That’s because about half of them will get unproductive jobs where they will get a wage without having to generate a profit, in the many Government department offices dotted round the Country, in quangos, or in the industrialised charity business, causes and activist lobby groups, and jobs such as outreach officers, climate change and gender equality compliance, plus of course all those on welfare.
Nearly 50% of European economies have able to work citizens in parasitical jobs paid via the State with money plundered from the other half and redistributed, or from begging-bowl donations from a gullible public.
The birth rate isn’t the problem, too many who produce no wealth and live off the rest, is.
That doesn't matter. It's simple math. Output is people times productivity.
So, if working population declines, then output can't grow unless productivity increases more than enough to compensate. And productivity growth has been too slow for that.
Sure, there are 'parasites' who drag that down, but that's always been true, and hasn't been changing fast enough to matter. Also, it's not the main contributing factor, which one can see by looking around the world to places with different levels of population growth or 'parasite load'.
It's true that building big social institutions based on the assumption of steady and high levels of growth is a pretty bad mistake if your contingency plan for what happens when productivity or procreation slows down was 'hope'. "I'm gonna let future me deal with that, lol."
Now, whether one should care about absolute or per capita growth is a different question. Still, as recent events have reminded us, it's a scary world out there, and for certain things, absolute size matters.
I think both of you are right, in your way. Population growth matters, and productivity growth matters.
If you combine a lower population growth rate with an ever increasing amount of people going into low or negative productivity jobs you are going to kill economic growth. Even if the few people going into productive roles are getting more productive all the time you can still get low or negative growth if much of their productivity is getting invested in zero marginal productivity roles.
How economists manage productivity is pretty spotty, so one has to be careful in how the numbers we are looking at are cooked up.
"Some on the Right have seen in Putin a counter-example to Western decadence — this, because he promotes religion, and stands against wokeness (e.g., “antiracism,” gender ideology). I get the temptation, and I have praised Putin in this space before for things he has said about wokeness. Some things are true even if Vladimir Putin says them. That said, you don’t measure decadence only by whether or not a leader says the right things about religion, family, and sexual morality."
Truth, as well as goodness, remains true and good even if bad people claim them. They are bad for their bad actions, despite being true or good in some other actions.
Kotkin claims the West standing up to Putin shows that we are not decadent, Dreher (and I) disagree:
"we are busy destroying the family, the bedrock institution of any civilization. In Florida, the state passed a law forbidding teachers from talking about sexuality and gender to children up through third grade — that’s nine years old — in response to widespread reports of indoctrination aimed at small children, without the knowledge or permission of parents. This is denounced by our propagandistic media as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and Disney is now seeking to punish Florida politicians for defending parental rights in this way. Gov. Ron DeSantis makes the necessary point — one far too rarely made by Republican politicians — that the interest of parents has to be more important than the desires of woke corporations like Disney".
As usual, Rod writes a long column (almost daily!), more than Freddie and maybe more than Scott Alexander. If the West can use the finance/ bank power against evil Putin, they can and will use it against protesting truckers or those protesting election irregularities and possible fraud.
In colleges and now in jobs, our elites are being indoctrinated to lie, in order to get along and continue in living an upper-middle class consumerist, secular lifestyle. The lying is terrible.
Also see Glenn Loury on the truth about Roland Fryer, young Black professor at Harvard:
"One reason US policy is so frustrating is that it seems to be putting a lot of stock in this outcome, and I think it’s unlikely."
Is Hanania talking about US policy here, or the opinions he reads on Twitter? What makes him think the US government is banking on a Ukrainian victory? I haven't seen any evidence of this.
Obviously they aren't going to say publicly that the Ukrainians are going to lose.
"The same thing is happening everywhere in Eurasia."
True, but it can't go on forever, and so it won't.
A sufficiently determined state can reverse this the moment it thinks it can get away with what is required to make it happen. My guess is that we'll see these measures within 15 years, probably in China.
If you ask someone at the UN Commission on Population and Development or at Harvard's School of Public Health how to reduce a country's fertility rate, they will not hesitate to answer additional female education and participation in the workforce.
If you ask them if that process runs in reverse if you wanted the opposite effect, they will call in an air strike on your position. Because it does.
Many countries have done nothing but display the impotence, so to speak, of more palatable efforts like just giving people money. What's acceptable doesn't work, and what works isn't acceptable. Something's got to give.
So, sooner or later - and I'd bet sooner - some state out there powerful enough not to care what anybody else thinks is going to decide that what needs to be done is more acceptable than the alternative.
Some people want to smash the patriarchy, and they don't realize it already got smashed. But just wait until it smashes back.
Re Hanania: I do not know what the Administration is telling Russia in private. At the least it should be offering Putin the status quo ante bellum. No Russia troops in Ukraine (except Crimea). No sanctions. No NATO for Ukraine. Putin's fall from power ought not to be necessary to achieve that (although some nervousness about internal discontent with the war ought to help him make the right decision).
Re West: Financing SS with a wage tax was a forgivable mistake in the 30's; the VAT had not been invented. to continue that mistake today is really unforgivable. Not only would the wage tax require constant adjustments to keep revenues and expenditures in balance (that would be true for a VAT as well if less so) but it also biases employers against labor costs over other inputs. That it is capped only makes it worse.
But the replacement could be made quite explicit and done in the context of a deficit reduction effort. That ought to get Republican support or at least make opposition more difficult, and why would any Progressive not want to substitute a somewhat less regressive tax for a more regressive tax?
I don't think that this was the primary motivation, but was rather a side effect of the government seeking more moolah. I don't think the book goes into enough detail on the Bernard Baruch / Wilson WWI war communism apparatus as an example of an alternative way to mobilize more of the economy for war purposes. Also I suppose WWI's war mobilization task was quite different from the task in WWII, because in WWI it was mostly about exporting commodities and munitions whereas in WWII it was more about exporting lots of trucks, ships, munitions, sophisticated weapons systems, and other things that just required a more sophisticated system.
Savings has completely overtaken production in importance. Wars for major powers* go too quick for anything big to be built during hostilities with an expectation that it will be deployed and used on the battlefield. Everything depends on the stocks of both trained personnel and equipment one was able to accumulate and has on hand before hostilities. So "full mobilization of the economy" for the purposes of fighting a major war is an obsolete anachronism. That's true even for assembly-line type production, for example, simple ammunition. Even more true for anything complicated, and throwing in any requirement for research and development makes it a total fantasy.
*Long-term occupation operations are different. If you are going to do something stupid like that for decades, then, sure, that's enough time to put out bids for companies to satisfy urgent operational needs for tons of money. But even then, "full economic mobilization" which is only sustainable temporarily doesn't make sense for something expected to have long or indefinite duration.
1. I don't think Hanania is correct about the main causes of the war (Donbas, Crimea, and NATO). Donbas and Crimea became issues when Russia couldn't force Ukraine to abandon its aim to join the EU. In that sense, the war started 8 years ago.
2. American views, on both the left and the right, are largely formed with respect to domestic political interests. If you're a neocon, you're salivating to sell arms and change the regime. If you're vaguely "on the right" and feel like you don't have a home, you look at Twitter and mainstream media and think this mob runs the country. If you're a casual not strongly affiliated person, you look at one country invading another as a relic of a savage past that shouldn't be tolerated. If you're on the mainstream left that's welcomed the neocon element into the Democratic Party establishment and pushed nonsense about "Russian interference" you see the KGB under every bed. If you're on the hard left, you just kind of call for chaos and misrule as usual, and aim potshots at targets of opportunity.
The common element is simply that everyone's priors are based very little on Ukraine and Russia and very much on whatever they were originally concerned about. As such, I have very little concern that the US will much influence a settlement to the war.
3. That, a negotiated settlement to the war, will probably happen sooner rather than later.
3A. Contrary to Hanania, Russia has no practical military options for victory. It can cement control over territory it already controls. But unless it resorts to nuclear weapons, which would unleash long-term consequences that would probably be counterproductive to the Russian regime, it has no practical means of victory. Its army is fully extended and exhausted as a fighting force. Modern operational tempo and equipment are simply not sustainable in war, and there's no practical means for Russia to effect the sort of WWII mobilization that people are crediting them with as being capable of. Nor would it be effective if they did. Instead, note that they're rather pathetically trying to recruit Syrian and Central African (Replubican?!) mercenaries. This, coupled with their stalled offensives and rapidly dwindling supplies of advanced arms, is a strong signal of the end. Stalemate at best.
3B. Likewise, Ukraine has no practical method of recovering Donbas or Crimea. Contrary to what the Twitterati might think, this isn't a video game. They're dying in large numbers and want that to stop. Which is why, by every account I've seen, both sides have called negotiations productive. Counter to the anti-Twitterati, it's extremely irrational to believe that they are going to be influenced by Twitter or by the silky words of American politicos to actually "fight to the last Ukrainian" unless they want to fight to the last Ukrainian. Assuming otherwise seems to be an assumption of extreme irrationality that we would never employ upon ourselves.
Simply put, if you consider yourself rational enough to know that the talking head's words of encouragement on CNN are empty, the folks who are living in the Kiev metro system to avoid shelling probably can too.
"Kotkin takes the view that NATO’s expansion did not trigger Russian hostility, but rather that Russia is just reverting to historical type: an militaristic, expansionist autocracy trying to expand, and, because weaker than it thinks, biting off more than it can chew." - from Rod.
NATO expansion to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland was many years ago. Weak Biden running away in Afghanistan, and castrating the US oil & gas production, happened in the last 12 months.
Biden as President is the opportunity, NATO is the external excuse, Ukraine neo-Nazis (more real than US media note) is the Russian-language reason; but "Greater Russia" expanding is the main real reason.
And NATO expansion IS a threat to stop Russia expansion - but that is not existential.
"And NATO expansion IS a threat to stop Russia expansion - but that is not existential."
In terms of short term security and survival, sure. But what I have been trying to say is that it's a mistake to analyze this war strictly in those terms. Certain countries have a spiritual need to be Great or else what holds them together and sustains their ethos will break down and they will degenerate and evaporate. "Make X Great Again" resonates deeply in the US, in China, and in Russia too.
While one may disagree with it, there is a coherent line of thinking in which Russia can no longer remain Russian without being Great, and it cannot be Great without accomplishing the irredentist goal of collecting up all the lost Russian Lands from its period of Greatness. Kiev is perhaps not quite to Russians what Jerusalem is to Israelis, but it helps to convey the perpetually demoralizing thorn in the side implied by the prospect of it turning away from Moscow and toward its rival the West, i.e., America.
This line of thinking would say that Russia faced a terrible choice between being apart or falling apart.
My point is that the falling apart is indeed existential for them in the medium to long term. And Putin chose being apart.
Hanania has defined victory in a way that precludes a negotiated settlement. Maybe fair: any settlement should let Russia withdraw with honour.
But even if Russia keeps all the "people's Republics" and more, it will still go away exhausted, knowing better than to try to conquer Ukraine and unable to effect regime change through threats.
That leaves Ukraine in a much safer position than last year. The shame is that it took so much horror to get there.
Did I misinterpret what Hanania said? Here's the quote:
> Russian victory: 70%
> I’m defining “victory” here in the sense that Russia is better off than when the war began regarding its key foreign policy aims. It either has more land or territory under its control than when the war started, gets international recognition for what it already controls, i.e. Crimea, changes the status of the Donbas, or gets a no-NATO pledge or some other guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality, whether it can be enforced or not.
------------
I actually think this is a somewhat ridiculous position for exactly the reasons you state. Calling this a Russian victory seems very strange.
It actually bothers me about Hanania. He puts so much thought into some things and comes up with really interesting ideas, but then he'll say something like this that just seems astonishingly out of touch.
It's probably true of almost all public intellectuals (and the people in general). We have to really think hard to escape our base, emotional predictions. And even when we do realize we've made mistakes (e.g. "Russian absolute military superiority will lead to victory"), we seem to let those mistakes creep back into our analysis instead of truly rethinking most of the time.
Hanania is a very intelligent and thorough scholar. And he is also a blinkered ideologue when it comes to foreign policy.
His gut instinct leads him dislike any attempt by his country to stand up to rivals. It makes him desire failure.
And yes, it's a warning: anyone might have such intellectual weak spots in some field they hold dear.
“When you’re rich, they think you really know!” -Tevye
‘… there just aren’t enough young people to grow the economy.‘
That’s because about half of them will get unproductive jobs where they will get a wage without having to generate a profit, in the many Government department offices dotted round the Country, in quangos, or in the industrialised charity business, causes and activist lobby groups, and jobs such as outreach officers, climate change and gender equality compliance, plus of course all those on welfare.
Nearly 50% of European economies have able to work citizens in parasitical jobs paid via the State with money plundered from the other half and redistributed, or from begging-bowl donations from a gullible public.
The birth rate isn’t the problem, too many who produce no wealth and live off the rest, is.
That doesn't matter. It's simple math. Output is people times productivity.
So, if working population declines, then output can't grow unless productivity increases more than enough to compensate. And productivity growth has been too slow for that.
Sure, there are 'parasites' who drag that down, but that's always been true, and hasn't been changing fast enough to matter. Also, it's not the main contributing factor, which one can see by looking around the world to places with different levels of population growth or 'parasite load'.
It's true that building big social institutions based on the assumption of steady and high levels of growth is a pretty bad mistake if your contingency plan for what happens when productivity or procreation slows down was 'hope'. "I'm gonna let future me deal with that, lol."
Now, whether one should care about absolute or per capita growth is a different question. Still, as recent events have reminded us, it's a scary world out there, and for certain things, absolute size matters.
I think both of you are right, in your way. Population growth matters, and productivity growth matters.
If you combine a lower population growth rate with an ever increasing amount of people going into low or negative productivity jobs you are going to kill economic growth. Even if the few people going into productive roles are getting more productive all the time you can still get low or negative growth if much of their productivity is getting invested in zero marginal productivity roles.
How economists manage productivity is pretty spotty, so one has to be careful in how the numbers we are looking at are cooked up.
Rod Dreher writes on Kotkin,
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-west-still-declining-russia-ukraine/
"Some on the Right have seen in Putin a counter-example to Western decadence — this, because he promotes religion, and stands against wokeness (e.g., “antiracism,” gender ideology). I get the temptation, and I have praised Putin in this space before for things he has said about wokeness. Some things are true even if Vladimir Putin says them. That said, you don’t measure decadence only by whether or not a leader says the right things about religion, family, and sexual morality."
Truth, as well as goodness, remains true and good even if bad people claim them. They are bad for their bad actions, despite being true or good in some other actions.
Kotkin claims the West standing up to Putin shows that we are not decadent, Dreher (and I) disagree:
"we are busy destroying the family, the bedrock institution of any civilization. In Florida, the state passed a law forbidding teachers from talking about sexuality and gender to children up through third grade — that’s nine years old — in response to widespread reports of indoctrination aimed at small children, without the knowledge or permission of parents. This is denounced by our propagandistic media as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and Disney is now seeking to punish Florida politicians for defending parental rights in this way. Gov. Ron DeSantis makes the necessary point — one far too rarely made by Republican politicians — that the interest of parents has to be more important than the desires of woke corporations like Disney".
As usual, Rod writes a long column (almost daily!), more than Freddie and maybe more than Scott Alexander. If the West can use the finance/ bank power against evil Putin, they can and will use it against protesting truckers or those protesting election irregularities and possible fraud.
In colleges and now in jobs, our elites are being indoctrinated to lie, in order to get along and continue in living an upper-middle class consumerist, secular lifestyle. The lying is terrible.
Also see Glenn Loury on the truth about Roland Fryer, young Black professor at Harvard:
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-roland-fryer?s=r
His careful research showed the police were NOT using more lethal force against Blacks. That's not the BLM/ Dem truth that the elites want known.
Good little documentary (25min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8xWOlk3WIw
"One reason US policy is so frustrating is that it seems to be putting a lot of stock in this outcome, and I think it’s unlikely."
Is Hanania talking about US policy here, or the opinions he reads on Twitter? What makes him think the US government is banking on a Ukrainian victory? I haven't seen any evidence of this.
Obviously they aren't going to say publicly that the Ukrainians are going to lose.
"The same thing is happening everywhere in Eurasia."
True, but it can't go on forever, and so it won't.
A sufficiently determined state can reverse this the moment it thinks it can get away with what is required to make it happen. My guess is that we'll see these measures within 15 years, probably in China.
If you ask someone at the UN Commission on Population and Development or at Harvard's School of Public Health how to reduce a country's fertility rate, they will not hesitate to answer additional female education and participation in the workforce.
If you ask them if that process runs in reverse if you wanted the opposite effect, they will call in an air strike on your position. Because it does.
Many countries have done nothing but display the impotence, so to speak, of more palatable efforts like just giving people money. What's acceptable doesn't work, and what works isn't acceptable. Something's got to give.
So, sooner or later - and I'd bet sooner - some state out there powerful enough not to care what anybody else thinks is going to decide that what needs to be done is more acceptable than the alternative.
Some people want to smash the patriarchy, and they don't realize it already got smashed. But just wait until it smashes back.
Re Hanania: I do not know what the Administration is telling Russia in private. At the least it should be offering Putin the status quo ante bellum. No Russia troops in Ukraine (except Crimea). No sanctions. No NATO for Ukraine. Putin's fall from power ought not to be necessary to achieve that (although some nervousness about internal discontent with the war ought to help him make the right decision).
Re West: Financing SS with a wage tax was a forgivable mistake in the 30's; the VAT had not been invented. to continue that mistake today is really unforgivable. Not only would the wage tax require constant adjustments to keep revenues and expenditures in balance (that would be true for a VAT as well if less so) but it also biases employers against labor costs over other inputs. That it is capped only makes it worse.
I would favor replacing SS taxes with a VAT, especially a somewhat progressive VAT where the rate on $100k cars is higher than on $10k.
I hear some talk about replacing the "income tax" - but most working poor don't pay that tax, now. SS taxes are higher.
Most anti-VAX, er VAT folk fear, probably rightly, that no other tax is eliminated, only somewhat reduced, temporarily, so the net tax is higher.
But the replacement could be made quite explicit and done in the context of a deficit reduction effort. That ought to get Republican support or at least make opposition more difficult, and why would any Progressive not want to substitute a somewhat less regressive tax for a more regressive tax?
RE: Social Security and Medicare: this pamphlet from the Army War College argues that one of the primary purposes of entitlements is to create a tax structure that can support greater levels of wartime government spending. https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2015/pubs/gold-blood-and-power-finance-and-war-through-the-ages/
I don't think that this was the primary motivation, but was rather a side effect of the government seeking more moolah. I don't think the book goes into enough detail on the Bernard Baruch / Wilson WWI war communism apparatus as an example of an alternative way to mobilize more of the economy for war purposes. Also I suppose WWI's war mobilization task was quite different from the task in WWII, because in WWI it was mostly about exporting commodities and munitions whereas in WWII it was more about exporting lots of trucks, ships, munitions, sophisticated weapons systems, and other things that just required a more sophisticated system.
Savings has completely overtaken production in importance. Wars for major powers* go too quick for anything big to be built during hostilities with an expectation that it will be deployed and used on the battlefield. Everything depends on the stocks of both trained personnel and equipment one was able to accumulate and has on hand before hostilities. So "full mobilization of the economy" for the purposes of fighting a major war is an obsolete anachronism. That's true even for assembly-line type production, for example, simple ammunition. Even more true for anything complicated, and throwing in any requirement for research and development makes it a total fantasy.
*Long-term occupation operations are different. If you are going to do something stupid like that for decades, then, sure, that's enough time to put out bids for companies to satisfy urgent operational needs for tons of money. But even then, "full economic mobilization" which is only sustainable temporarily doesn't make sense for something expected to have long or indefinite duration.