"The Japanese military was highly effective until they launched too many wars and were embargoed" is another way of saying "the Japanese military was equal to the task of bullying a third-rate military power." Which, yes, it was. This is not relevant. The underlying problem was that Japan could not win a war with the US despite a very long string of early victories, because it simply was not grounded in a civilian economy sufficient to the task.
You are ignoring the crucial point: The reason the japenese war economy was not up to the task was because of the reliance of crucial resources that couldn't be gained domestically. Spending on butter does not fixing the structural dependence on oil imports. This in turn means any war you start needs to be won shortly, which necessitates a strong first strike against opponents if you try to win the war. Crucially, Japenese military performance during the war would have been worse if they followed your advice of "more spending on butter", since it would have blunted the edge and reduced the initial victories they had. The historical case you are citing does not support your argument. There is a pretty direct link between higher military spending and better military performance. This link also exists between industrialization and wartime performance. A strong positive link between social spending and military performance has yet to be found.
In regards to your next paragraph, the underlying problem is "will we prepare our economy for war, or will we overinvest in the wrong military capabilities because they're the capabilities we can buy immediately and we must spend heavily on the military NOW DAMMIT, only to find that those capabilities do us little good when the day comes for war?
Simon, I very explicitly mentioned industrial development and military spending as desirable when it comes to the war. I'm not advocating for every cent to be spent on barracks, nor for putting our economy on a perpetual war footing. But I'm advocating for putting it into infrastructure, industry, education and military. And I think the spending you played devils advocate for isn't well linked to improving military performance. Lacking investment into military capabilities actually carries a real risk.
My core argument is that military spending as a share of GDP much higher than the more enthusiastic spenders among the Western democracies tends to backfire. Spending 20% of GDP on the military is, outside of immediate wartime, not a viable long term strategy, and even in the medium term won't get you twice as much actual combat performance as you'd get from spending 10%.
Cool. I think you are mistaken if you approach our preparations from a long term perspective, since we are facing a major existential threat in the medium term. The utility you get by increasing the likelihood of beating Victoria is vastly greater than the risk of avoiding economic problems two decades from now. Medium term thinking for a medium term threat.
If you are advancing an argument of the form "we can't rely on importing industrial capital goods because we'll be too busy importing arms," you are implicitly assuming that we're discussing the peacetime import and economic policy, that the line of traffic will stay open during wartime, or both. Those assumptions cannot then be revoked after I point out that arms will not make up the majority of our imports.
That is in no way related to my argument. My argument is that we should keep the war time import of capital goods minimal, and develop a wartime industry not dependent on foreign capital goods, since I would like to keep as much space as possible for arm shipments and minimal potential for large economic disruptions due to the uncertain availability of foreign trade. It's a bad idea to give the Russians another weak point to strike, no?
By the same token we cannot rely on ongoing import of arms during wartime, by the same argument and for the same reasons. Indeed, less so, because the civilian economy relies more heavily on sheer bulk of imports and thus makes water traffic the most important, whereas things like guided missiles could reasonably be air-freighted to us in useful quantities if our allies on this continent wanted to help us with that.
See, I would agree, if modern arms were something the CFC could produce domestically. But we can't. If we had a choice, I would be screaming from the roof tops to build the relevant armaments industries. Furthermore, you can stockpile foreign arms supplied to you far more than you can stockpile foreign goods to last trough embargoes or blockades.
The same thing can't be said for heavy industry. We are producing steel, we had factories prior to international trade, and those presumably ran on domestically produced parts. Our production lines are likely antiquated and horribly inefficient compared to modern international production, but they work and churn out goods. They would keep working even if the Mississippi suddenly turned into lava. Consequently, building industry that relies on non-domestic parts is building industry which might suddenly be interrupted if the Russian put together an embargo or a blockade. Just to be clear: I'm not against importing machinery during peace time. I would just like to keep our reliance on imported, not domestically reproducible machinery in the war-related sectors minimal. Stuff that can't be internally produced could very well become literally irreplaceable.
