Lethe
Captain
Industrial capacity has long been sidelined under the assumption that a major conflict is likely to escalate to a nuclear conflict, conditions that would preclude making much of anything. The idea is that what you have on Day 1 is most of what you're ever going to have.
The nuclear angle should not be casually dismissed. Nonetheless, even allowing for the prospect of sustained high-intensity conventional conflict, the complexity of modern platforms (especially ships, submarines and manned aircraft) creates endless opportunities to disrupt them while under construction, while their high cost and correspondingly limited quantities make the return on investment from doing so very high indeed.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict provides many illustrative lessons here. Despite tactical successes, Ukraine's ability to disrupt Russia's military-industrial machine is limited. Yet where they have been most spectacularly successful is in targeting infrastructure and platforms that Russia is not able to regenerate on the scale of months, most notably ships and strategic aviation assets. Conversely, despite prolonged bombardment, Ukrainian defence industries remain very active, but they are mostly producing small-scale items such as drones, with more complex systems overwhelmingly drawn from either existing stocks, or abroad (from existing foreign stocks). In Russia, too, use of existing equipment stocks still predominates over the construction of new equipment.
In the modern context, it seems to me that privileging the ability to sustain and regenerate over maximizing the mass of the standing force is a roundabout way of arguing for the deprecation of those large, complex platforms that are unlikely to be successfully regenerated under war-time conditions.
P.S. A major factor behind the success of the American war industrial machine was its geographic isolation and self-sufficiency. To a considerable extent, those advantages still hold, with China having little ability to deliver meaningful and sustained effects in CONUS without resorting to nuclear arms.
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