I'm pretty sure that most of the women in those pictures weren't previously trained as welders or aircraft mechanics. My worry is not if we have the technical savvy to make lots of war machines, but if our populace has the guts to support it.
No they were not, but they did have the advantage of having a pool of trained people to learn from. They also had an advantage in numbers, that allowed complex tasks to be broken up into simple repeatable tasks.
We also used to be able to draft a man off the street and turn him into a competent soldier in about 4 months. I doubt that it would be possible in anything less than a year now. When Korea started in 1950 we traded lives for time. Look up Task Force Randall sometime and you can see what I mean. Then it was just a matter of recalling WWII vets and breaking equipment out of storage and shipping it over. Now we don't have that pool of trained manpower, nor the equipment. Think about how long it would take to pull a carrier out of storage, gather a ship's company and form and equip an airwing.
