Reply #8: I totally agree.

[Fovea]

And that war will require a command economy, and probably a new, non convertable currency. We will use raw materials in trade for what international trade we will be doing.

There is a book called World War Three August 1984. It was written in 76 or so, IIRC, by the Nato Chiefs as a bitch slap to the Soviet Union. In it, they showed that the Soviet client states would not support a nuclear exchange, and that an exchange would have to happen if total theater war went on longer than two weeks, because 20th century conventional war consumed resources at a furious rate, half of our military command school these days is about location and logistics.

A month of theater war in the middle east would collapse the US like a paper cup under a mack truck. We don't have the troops, the carrying power, the fuel, the armaments. We don't even have the refinery capacity. A month after invading Iran, we would be rationing gas like mad, we would be in total war production, but we would not have the infrastructure for the heavy manufacture needed. We could roll out bombers in ww2 because we had industrial capacity fallow from the depression, and a large workforce. Putting a huge number of young workers in uniform helped promote labor.

We have a rust belt where FDR had steel mills.

By the time we rolled up to speed, it would long be over.