Losing the War – by Lee Sandlin

Lengthy and somewhat aged (1997) article about WW2. This part caught my eye:

The plan set the true clock time of the war. No matter what the surface play of battle was in Africa or the South Seas, the underlying dynamic never changed: every hour, every day the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Europe. They were stockpiling thousands of landing craft, tens of thousands of tanks, millions upon millions of rifles and mortars and howitzers, oceans of bullets and bombs and artillery shells — the united power of the American and Russian economies was slowly building up a military force large enough to overrun a continent. The sheer bulk of the armaments involved would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. One number may suggest the scale. Before the war began the entire German Luftwaffe consisted of 4,000 planes; by the time of the Normandy invasion American factories were turning out 4,000 new planes every two weeks.

[via Losing the War - by Lee Sandlin]

Wars test the limits of our capabilities. By refocusing in response to an imminent threat, production of aircraft soared. If we could do this in the 1940’s, I feel much more comfortable about our ability to respond to climate change. Unfortunately, we probably have to wait until the threat is much more imminent.