In Warfighting, the USMC doctrinal manual, there is a discussion of war as a process of seeking out and exploiting weaknesses in the enemy's system.
This press strikes me as such a weakness: it is the only one of its kind in the US, a pretty clear industrial chokepoint. And there are lots of such chokepoints. German military production was stunted during WW2 by the bombing of ball-bearing factories.
German military production was stunted during WW2 by the bombing of ball-bearing factories.
I've read that that was a goal of the strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany, but I've also read that even with the famous raid on the ball bearing plant in Schweinfurt--repeated with unsustainable losses of air crew and aircraft after the Germans learned how much the Allies valued that target--the strategic bombing campaign was much less effective than the Allies had hoped.
The moral of the story appears to be that it takes a nearly total trade embargo as well as direct attacks on factories producing critical supplies (as well as stockpiles of those supplies in other places) for "strategic" attacks to have actual strategic effect.
AFTER EDIT: Farther down in this subthread, the prediction is made that future wars might involve the massive destruction of nuclear missile attacks. As the thirtieth anniversary of the Falkland Islands War approaches, I am reminded that contemporary commentary on that war pointed out that nuclear weapons had ceased to be a deterrent in the modern world, in which nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare since 1945 (in the same war as the Schweinfurt ball bearing plant air raids, against a combatant country that had directly attacked a neutral country's main military base in the ocean between both countries by surprise attack). Argentina was not deterred at all from occupying the Falklands by Britain's possession of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. And of course the terrorist attacks on the United States in the year 2001 were not deterred by the the United States possessing similar weapons. There seem to be a lot of kinds of warfare that can go on with no resort to nuclear weapons, and thus no deterrence by nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons don't stop attacks in general, but they do stop existential threats. It's unlikely that France will ever be invaded and occupied again for as long as they have a nuclear deterrent, for example. France (or other such countries) may well be attacked, but not conquered. This is at least an improvement over the previous state of things. Warfare without the existential threat leaves room to be considerably more gentle.
Considering the decimation of the manufacturing base here in the USA, I shudder to think what would happen were we required to make war on the scale of the previous World Wars.
Virtually all our electronics are made somewhere else. We can't even build our own infrastructure[0]. Who will build the Liberty Ships[1]?
As long as we don't forget how to do everything, we can ramp manufacturing back up quickly. Currently there are manufacturing plants pumping out aircraft, tanks, ships, and munitions at a slow rate. They are limited by money and lack of demand, not by the ability of the manufacturing plants to pump out more. If suddenly we needed to double or triple capacity you bring in more people and machines to do the work, but the process is in place.
But if we stop building - even for a few years - we will lose all that and be back at square 1. This is why the Navy has a huge number of aircraft carriers. We don't need that many really, but if we stopped producing them we would lose all the institutional knowledge and experience. So they dribble one out every 5 or 6 years so that lots of people are constantly working on it.
That will not happen again. It is a bygone era. Now it will either be country to country attacks (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam) or full blown nuclear wipe-out. In either case protecting Cleveland won't make much of a difference.
We manufactured more in 2009 than Germany, Japan, Italy and the U.K. combined. China's growing fast, but we're still outputting something like 40% more.
In Warfighting, the USMC doctrinal manual, there is a discussion of war as a process of seeking out and exploiting weaknesses in the enemy's system.
This press strikes me as such a weakness: it is the only one of its kind in the US, a pretty clear industrial chokepoint. And there are lots of such chokepoints. German military production was stunted during WW2 by the bombing of ball-bearing factories.