This has been lifted from comments and made into a post. It is by Altandmain.
The US hasn’t fought a serious opponent since WW2. Even then, the US vastly overstates it role and understates the USSR’s role in defeating Germany.
Likewise, the UK had this problem. The UK was not prepared for WW1. It also suffered from that problem in WW2. The reason is because it was focused on imperialist colonial wars. It’s military in early parts of WW1 and WW2 didn’t do so well at first and had to undergo a very steep learning curve.
The US has this problem now as well.
The first problem is that industrial warfare is fundamentally different than guerilla warfare. It means that the US doesn’t have overwhelming industrial strength. US troops and mercenaries that have served in Ukraine didn’t do so well. They aren’t used to fighting in an environment without total US air and artillery supremacy. That’s a huge shock. One fear is what the US will do if the US gets into a war and they take losses of carriers and the like. The main risk, in other words, is that it would go nuclear after the US ruling class panics.
A second problem is doctrine. Early WW1 era fighting was built around fighting a war in the 19th century. If one looks at the tactics that the European powers used in the opening phases of WW1, it was almost like they were fighting the Napoleonic Wars again. They ignored the trends that had developed during the Industrial Revolution, along wars like the US Civil Wars and the Crimean War about the implications. Similarly, the US and NATO doctrine is built around the Gulf War, with a very limited appreciation of what had changed and how it affected war.
The US is in a similar position, having waged wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. These were mostly Neo-colonial wars meant to enforce US hegemony and steal the natural resources of the nation they were invading. In other words, they were like the wars the British Empire waged.
A third problem is greed. The US military industrial complex is not built around weapons made for best combat effectiveness, but corporate profit maximization of companies like Lockheed Martin. Western governments are all corrupted by the rich, who act through intermediaries like lobbyists to corrupt any pretensions of democracy and accountability.
A fourth problem is declining Western innovation relative to the rest of the world. Russia for example has more advanced electronic warfare and hypersonic missiles, which the West doesn’t have.
This will be an even bigger problem if the US is stupid enough to go to war with China.
As for who has more manufacturing, China has more manufacturing than the US and EU combined. Most of China’s military is closer in structure to Russia’s, with large state owned enterprises that do both military and civilian products.
It’s not just Israel which is weak, it’s all of the Western armed forces.
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