What happens after the first 6 months of major conflict?

[republic]

I've been playing Command Modern Air/Naval quite a bit and I've been thinking...

If we were involved in a major non-nuclear conflict with China/Russia, what do you think would happen after the first 6 months?  Our ships nolonger have armor so any hits from SSM's will be devastating.  Misses could put ships out of commission because of damaged electronics.  We have a dwindling number of tomahawks, harpoons are antiquated, and our air force is powerful but our airframes have a lot of hours on them due to global policing.

After 6 months wouldn't be out of advanced weapons, and then what do we do?

In a forward to one of his Lost Fleet books, John G. Hemry states that he served on board a Ticonderoga.  If the gas turbines are powered off or go down, they have 2 shots to restart it, if that doesn't work the ship is essentially dead in the water.

I don't see the industry sector of today pulling together to mass produce new ships/weapons and even if we did...where would we get our computer/electronic components?  Can you imagine today's world having rations for cell phones/iPads so those components could be used in weapons?  We'd have riots in the streets....not to protest the war but to protest the rationing.

[besilarius]

This has always been a sort of dirty secret that everyone tries to ignore.
During the Cold War, the navy regularly gamed out sending carrier task groups across the North Atlantic to support Norway.  The Soviet plan included attacking the groups by attacking with long range bombers carrying Air to Surface missiles.  They planned on their Backfires launching at ranges in excess of 200nm in salvoes of perhaps 100 missiles, in conjunction with submarine launched missiles, to overwhelm the group's defences.  The carrier defences could knock down the incoming missiles, but it was difficult to destroy the bombers which launched the missiles.
The problem was that most DDGs carried forty missiles.  After two or three days of these attacks, the groups would be low on missiles.
The Sovs expected to be able to keep this up for days, by having land based bombers re-arm with unlimited missile resources.  (In Red Storm Rising, Clancy used a tomahawk strike from submarines to catch the Backfires at their bases.)
The USN is very aware that ships are extremely fragile, look at the Falkland's exocet strikes on vessles like Sheffield.  They are also very conscious of the dangers of running low on munitions.  (Possibly the best move of a land based power, would be to target the supply ships which bring munitions to the groups at sea.  This would seriously limit the options for a carrier group if the Sea Train was out of action.)