I would argue that these are not mutually exclusive, and the west is rebuilding for total war BECAUSE it’s collapsing, but a very interesting discussion nevertheless.
Also as an aside, I love how bro is just fascinated by this woman’s research. His pupils are properly dilated the whole ass time.
EDIT: Also I just want to point out the extremely obvious that 100% of what NATO is saying about their adversaries being brutish and only understand violence etc etc is pure projection 
as always
and also, in peer wars, complicated, expensive, slow to build stuff tends to get its shit kicked in by cheap disposable stuff you can manufacture in vast quantities. like drones and artillery shells.
the americans used to have some awareness of this back when they were building for ww2. then they paperclipp’d a bunch of nazis and caught their idiot disease. or something, i dunno.
The funny thing is I subconsciously learned this as a kid many years ago from playing real time strategy video games. A few dozen expensive units are more powerful and look intimidating but can eventually be beaten by hundreds of cheaper units, especially when your opponent runs out of resources to keep producing those expensive units. War economy is everything.
Also adaptability. Making sure you have a counter/ can quickly counter every unit the enemy can throw at you. In real world present day warfare, the US Air Force is the hardest thing to counter which is why nobody outside of Russia, China, and the brave as f Houthis would ever directly engage the US militarily.
i’m a pretty bad rts player so when i just wanted to get the last few starcraft 1 zerg missions over with so i could get the story, i just produced fully upgraded hydralisks in vast quantities and just threw them at the enemy. it worked nicely. i was able to keep up the pressure even as they died en-masse.
but that’s me being uninterested in a game, and the capabilities of AI :)
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TBH, the primary reason Nazis built few expensive tanks instead of mass-produced ones was that they simply didn’t have enough oil even for their few tanks, and numerous tanks would be simply useless without fuel.