Rossticus said:
I remember reading
Red Storm Rising and
Team Yankee (among many such) back in the late 80s-early 90s, and one of the constants was the massive expenditure of weapons, munitions, and equipment. Granted, that's fiction, but one of the constants in large scale warfare at least since 1914 has been that the armies burn through supplies, especially ammunition, at rates well in excess of all pre-war predictions.
And the production of weapons aside from basic small arms has become so specialized that few, if any, countries have the type of industrial base that can move quickly to large scale production of high end weapons systems. How many Javelins can Raytheon make in a month? Probably not nearly enough.
And that's not even talking bigger ticket items like tanks (we have ONE tank factory. ONE. They build 11 tanks a month, and only that many thanks to a lot of lobbying to keep the production line open. The Army (quite rightly, IMO, especially given events in Ukraine) really, really doesn't want to find out how long it would take to restart production if the line went totally cold) or fighter planes (F-35 production is like 14 planes a month. During WWII, Boeing would build that many B-17s in a day. At one factory.)