Car manufacturers serve many purposes. Aside from keeping the UAW membership onside, they are a strategic buttress for an emerging future war risk.
Australia maintained subsidies to Ford and GM for onshore production precisely because of this. And they stopped when a strategic realignment made successive governments decide the risk didn't justify the expense. A decision they may now be regretting.
This seems so anachronistic.... When was the last war where tanks were important..?
Car are made using components from all around the world... How would you even make a tank in a Tesla factory?
It describes how tanks were modified to protect, first, against attacks from the top, and then, from drone attacks from all sides.
They claim “But they remain important, especially for trying to take and hold territory. With their heavy firepower, they will continue to have a role in attacking, defending and supporting the foot soldiers of the infantry.”
FWIW, I agree with your general sentiment, though.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the car industry as it is now would fight retooling their factories tooth and nail, move production to other countries and do anything else they can to be able to continue making as much profit as they can.
I wonder how much you couldn't though. Obviously you'd need to retool the whole thing, and the cannon is a bit more complicated than simply a metal cylinder, but just how much more complicated? The reloading system is probably the most complex after of the jet turbine that powers those things.
My other question is, with gigacasting, how much better could a Tesla factory build an M1 Abrams compared to a traditional automakers?
A tank weighs like 60 tons or so. The engine and transmission alone are heavier and bulkier than whole cars, so basically none of the infrastructure you have available in many car factories is dimensioned correctly. Modern armor is composite and includes stuff like ceramic components which you would not have the machines, processes and knowledge for. "Gigacasting" sounds impressive but it's "just" aluminium injection molding that can do relatively big and integrated parts and you can't just fill in some steel-composite armor material mix in the hopper and have a fully formed Abrams fall out the other end of the machine. Things like barrels are forged (I think), which you again would not have the right infrastructure for. And so on and so forth.
My guess would be: It would be more sensible to apply division of labor and - for example - have many of the car factories spit out CNC and cast parts that fit into their usual production envelope and are then integrated into other/bigger systems at your friendly neighborhood US armory (Krauss-Maffei or wherever, more likely), specalized stuff like aircraft parts from their Gigapresses, have them do electrical work for other systems, produce lighter (support-)vehicles, use their skills and infrastructure in quick mass production for things you really need a lot of (shells, basic supplies for your war-torn population's needs, and so on), have their prototyping labs work on more cutting-edge/improvised stuff like the Drones we see in Ukraine and Russia. I'm sure there are plenty more good (terrible) ideas to be had.
> so anachronistic
tell that to ruzzia
what a load of warmongering bs.. I literally can't think of a single example. Korea, Vietnam, France, Britain, Japan, Germany every country involved in a war in the past ~100 years had prepared for it. Maybe maybe Iraq under Saddam Hussein didn't properly prepare? Though they were highly militarized. On the contrary, the more you prepare and get people frothing at the mouth the more likely it's gunna happen.
Thank god none had been between two nuclear powers so far
> tell that to ruzzia
They had a bunch of tanks and seemingly lost huge amounts of them. They seem to be a prime example of tanks not working in the modern context
Without proper strategy nothing works. Size of the russian army was too small for the task to fight and occupy such a huge county as Ukraine.
Also russians had bunch of old tanks, almost all of them made in USSR.
"Car are made using components from all around the world..." That's part of the problem. Building more here may bring some of the components closer, at least to friendlier countries.
The average Chinese person is very gung ho about invading Taiwan
It's 2025. We're still asking what happens when one group has lots of guns, tanks, fighter jets and missiles, and the other doesn't? Also, there is a difference between stockpiling arms and maintaining the ability to produce them if necessary.
We have had very little peace in the rest of the world in the meantime between the colonial wars, the various proxy wars of the Cold War, then the numerous stupid adventures of the modern America and now Russia wanting to be an empire again.
(Nuclear) deterrence is why we’ve only had proxy wars instead of direct wars
