Matt Pogue: 1/Very cool (and looong) piece about the aircraft industry and the buildup before WW2 - open.substack.com/pub/construc.... For those less nerdy than I, the TL;DR is that America once had the mfg capacity to massively retool from producing pretty much everything to making stuff for war.

1/Very cool (and looong) piece about the aircraft industry and the buildup before WW2 - open.substack.com/pub/construc.... For those less nerdy than I, the TL;DR is that America once had the mfg capacity to massively retool from producing pretty much everything to making stuff for war.

How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Yearsopen.substack.com It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output. Even before the U.S. entered the war, the Americans provided hundreds of millions of dollars’ wort...

2/War is most decidedly NOT cool, but the world would be a very different place if we had failed. Would *we* be speaking German or Japanese? Probably not, but most of Europe would be. And for multiple reasons, Biden's statement about Putin going after Poland, etc. after Ukraine is, I'm sorry, a lie.

3/Arguing that Putin is going after Poland makes him sound Hitlerian, and maybe it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. To argue that today's Russia is anything more than a shadow of Russia of the 1940s is kind of absurd on its face. If they had the military might, they wouldn't be floundering in Ukraine.

4/I know Putin is a bad guy. Not arguing that point at all. But does anyone really think he has the stones to attack NATO? Getting back to my original point, US mobilization into WW2 was a literal once-in-forever situation that we couldn't repeat today. The point is tho, neither could anyone else.

He (or the next guy) absolutely will go after Poland, if not stopped in Ukraine. They've already probed NATO's willingness to act and found no resistance. Of course, they won't declare a war on any NATO country officially, just like they didn't declare a war with Ukraine.

Russian imperialism has very deep roots, and the only language they understand is force. So on a historical timescale they will march forward up until the point where they get their ass kicked.

They already view all of western civilization as "rotten" and "degradated", so in their heads, they'll be the saviors of Europe, bringing "enlightenment" and "happiness". In their worldview there's absolutely no reason to stop at conquering Ukraine.

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