hckrnws

>The Nation Needs a Shipbuilding Revolution

Somebody noticed :)

Too late now, Nixon "opened up" China and Ronald Reagan said "NO!" to the kind of prosperity that would be needed in the 21st century.

It's like political parties haven't been paying attention at all for a "little" while now.

If American voters can not get over electing media "personalities" acting as leaders, those kind of fakers are not going to be far enough in the rear-view mirror to allow pulling ahead by the 22nd century :\

We're already 1/4 of the way to 2100.

And more gloomy than ever in the 21st century so far, recovering industrial leadership just got dramatically more unlikely in the last few months :(

There are lot of MAGA people in tech too. Seems party won't last any longer for Americans

Seems the party wasn't good for us anyway.

[flagged]

Sanders would sell the country to China

tell us more about how you know nothing of american politics

I had one interesting comment, conversation with Zyuganov... They talked about they don't want this NATO expansion. They know it's not in their security interests, and on and on, and said, well, if you do that, we may have to look to China. And I couldn't help using the colloquial expression from my state by saying to Zyuganov: "lots of luck in your senior year." You know, good luck. And if that doesn't work, try Iran. I am serious. I said that to them, and they know I knew they knew. Everybody knows that is not an option. And everybody knows, every one of those leaders acknowledges and needs, and they resent it. But they need to look West. - Joe Biden, Atlantic Council, 1997

https://streamable.com/v531nj

A lot of folks are saying big ships are outdated. Keep in mind that war is 80% logistics: and if you are going to engage an enemy far away from your landmass (or project power for that matter), you need huge capacity to move materiel to said location, and that normally means ships.

An interesting thing to look at is something called the "Fully Burdened Cost of Fuel": for every gallon that the US delivers to a Forward Operating Base, they spend something like 6-20 gal getting it there.

The point is that you need to move insane amounts of stuff to fight a war effectively. The actual fighting is just the tip of an iceberg of logistics.

I think fully burden fuel costs greatly skewed by GWOT where a shit load of supplies was brought in via air or land convoys since AFG land locked. Napkin math Vietnam war cost 1/8 of GWOT adjusted to same dollar which is argument for big ship logistics.

But big ships are outdated crowd surmises big ships used to support logistics (including of other big ships) are also not survivable especially against peer power, not irregular forces that can't touch rear. TBH once adversaries can hit logistics tail (or even CONUS), and they increasingly can thanks to proliferation of rocketry/missiles, the backbone that supports US global expeditionary model breaks. And if enough adversaries can threaten that model, it's value drops even against irregular forces with larger power backing.

The point is, for the first time in modern history, the era of US having uncontested/effective ocean logistics during war time, especially vs peer may be closing. And there simply may not be viable alternative to support expeditionary model that relies on heavy tooth-tail ratios. Which isn't to say sea power is over, just value diminished. At some point it maybe not be economical / feasible to fight large wars on other side of world against adversaries fighting in their backyards. And that's something planners need to account for.

> if you are going to engage an enemy far away from your landmass > (or project power for that matter)

Here's an idea: How about _not_ engaging far away from your landmass and not "projecting power"? The rest of the world has had quite enough of your projections.

Bad idea. I want the US to continue projecting power because the alternative is worse.

Somehow, all those people whose countries get bombed, embargoed, invaded, or have their governments switched by the US - generally seem to fail to agree with you.

Oddly and apparently surprisingly, it is possible for the US to be misguided and heavy handed in some cases, like overthrowing South American governments not willing to be exploited, while also, for example, contributing to the relatively peaceful and democracy-expanding end of the Cold War.

I very much disagree with you here. I am from Germany and the majority of people agree that the allied invasion and win by the allies was good to restore our democracy after the 2nd world war.

Just don’t blame the us or anyone when there’s another Rwanda massacre and nobody intervenes

"The rest of the world" is famous for sharing one single opinion on things.

both can be true! if a huge ship can be destroyed by a $100k drone boat, we still have a problem

“Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars”

That said, for smaller engagements when you have a forward operating base, you can air drop a massive amount of tonnage on a dime with C-5s. And if we ever turn Starship into an orbital equipment delivery system, we'll be able to open new salients quickly.

Planes are tiny.

The largest plane can carry 225 or so tons.

The largest ship can carry 225,000 tons or so.

That is 3 orders of magnitude different.

Not as much as ships and not nearly efficiently enough to fight a war

I don't share the confidence in large ships being the future of naval anything. Even in the 90s, surface ships were easy pickings for submarines and antiship missiles. Smaller ships acting as drone carriers combined with arsenal ships can allow local power projection to keep shipping lanes open.

Submarines and aircraft remain the safest, and best way to deliver offensive firepower. The aircraft carrier does have a role, but it is far behind the contact line.

But submarines require a shipbuilding revolution too! The total number of submarines in US Navy service has been steadily decreasing over the last decade or so. We don't have the industrial capacity to build submarines faster than our old ones are decommissioning. The issue actually isn't with carriers, I believe we're more or less on schedule with carrier building. The issue where this is most apparent is submarines, and also with the merchant fleet (which would be needed during wartime to ship supplies).

I'm not sure how much longer submarines will be militarily relevant. Longer for sure than large surface combatants, but we're relying largely on hiding for defense... and there's no guarantee that hiding will work forever.

Sure, but if you are holding out for something that will be militarily relevant forever, you're going to be waiting a long time :)

I also think the concerns about the the ability of large ships to defend themselves in modern combat are a bit overblown. Just because there exists a weapon system that can defeat something, doesn't mean that thing is irrelevant. You'll see all these comparisons of the cost of a surface combatant with the cost of an anti-ship missile or drone as though that decides the matter. But it really doesn't. It costs a ton of money to train and equip and infantry soldier, and yet you can kill that solider with a bullet that costs pennies. Does that mean infantry have been obsolete for the last few centuries? Of course not! A system is not obsolete until something comes along that can perform that same role, but better.

> The aircraft carrier does have a role, but it is far behind the contact line.

That's why they're called 'aircraft carriers'. The entire point of them is that the offensive firepower in the form of aircraft can reach out pretty far. They don't need to sail the carrier right up beside the enemy in order to hit him with their swords, you know.

Jokes aside, there might (eventually, maybe not today?) be a point in what you're saying. It's been a long time since 1945 when carriers last were used in a major peer conflict, and a lot has changed since then.

> The entire point of them is that the offensive firepower in the form of aircraft can reach out pretty far.

Cruise missiles have ranges >1500km:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_family)

And they're putting missiles in shipping containers so as long as you have a flat surface you can place them just about anywhere:

* https://gcaptain.com/pacific-dragon-is-the-shipping-industry...

NATO exercises always ended with the nukes.

Hence the emphasis on cyber and (US) dollar attack vectors. War without the bullets.

US dollar attack vectors are gradually drying up. Ironically, the more they are used - e.g. in sanctions - the stronger the motivation for detachment from USD as a reserve currency and direct trade in the parties' own currencies. Plus - how much of the world can the US sanction at the same time before it's only the select few that it trades with? Russia + Iran + China + Venezuela + Mexico + Canada + + + ...

I agree. Mao once said that he was willing to accept US atomic bombs. But that was when China didn't have fancy cities... Both sides are simply too vulnerable in an all out war.

Xi wants to make China great again he doesn't want a nuclear wasteland.

Agree - this is a key lesson of the Falklands War which, despite being in the 80s, is one of the few hot naval wars of the missile age.

The problem with arsenal ships is twofold. One, we don’t have enough missiles to fill the ships we have now, let alone a ship specialized to carry as many missiles as possible. Two, missiles and ships are like eggs and baskets. To counteract the egg/basket problem you want to distribute your missiles among multiple ships, and then equip those ships with sensors and defensive systems so they’re harder to sink and so you can develop a detailed picture of the battlespace. We have a name for that kind of ship; it’s a guided missile destroyer.

You can go smaller (that’s called a guided missile frigate) but thanks to the square cube law, a bigger ship can carry much more than twice as much missiles, sensors, etc. as two ships that are half the size. You also get economies of scale on maintenance. There are tradeoffs here, and the DDG as the backbone of the surface fleet and the guardian of the aircraft carrier is a great solution to those tradeoffs.

Don’t be a doomer when it comes to the arms race between missiles and air defense. Air defense can defeat a concentrated missile/drone attack, as we’ve seen in the two recent Iranian attacks on Israel. There are novel air attack threats from drones, but there are also novel air defense systems to counter them such as lasers (https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1886259012632535520). If I had to guess I’d say that the balance is actually shifting in favor of air defense on net.

I do agree with you that submarines are important. In fact the Ohio class SSGN practically is an arsenal ship. The problem with submarines is that they have to operate as lone wolves. Surface ships and carrier aircraft can share sensor data and use sensor fusion to construct a shared picture of the battlespace, but submarines can’t be looped into the network without exposing themselves. Again, tradeoffs. And usually the solution to these tradeoffs is combined arms—you build a task force with a carrier, some surface ships, and some submarines and each ship has its own job to do to cover the weaknesses of the others.

The aircraft carrier needs to be protected by surface ships. Submarines can’t shoot down missiles. Drone ships can’t do the job unless they are the size of destroyer. Ships on long deployments need maintenance, so now you have manned ship. We almost can’t make automomous ships, they need

Arsenal ships are a bad idea because putting all the missiles in one basket. It is better to have 3 destroyers that can cover different directions, or go on separate missions. The Navy has finally figured out reloading, it is much better to send one ship away to reload and still keep defense.

>Submarines and aircraft remain the safest, and best way to deliver offensive firepower.

Until drones carrying drones carrying drones becomes a thing.

That doesn't mean anything. There's no reason to think a drone carrier ship would be smaller or cheaper then an aircraft carrier (if it was providing air capability at similar ranges, and if it's not then it'll be much more vulnerable).

Ships can also loiter and provide better cargo capacity for that sustained presence compared to aircraft which is it's own benefit. To replicate that with an air based carrier you'd have to have more of them flying in shifts to maintain presence and coverage of the area.

It depends on what kind of drones you are operating doesn't it? Range, speed and payload seems to be the drivers for gigantism in military vehicles. So if you look at shorter range, or more accurate, smaller explosive delivery, you don't need a USS Ford size thing to act as a mobile base for them. One of the big lessons in Ukraine is that small, cheap and accurate works.

The Marines are working in close support drone for their amphibious ships. The proposals are the size of helicopters.

The problem is that can’t do short range from ships because it is too dangerous to get close to shore. Anti-ship missiles are common now, and guided artillery and glide bombs are possible.

Finally, drones haven’t been useful against ships in Red Sea, and some are good size. Speed matters for getting through defenses. The slow and small ones can be shot down by guns or rockets, the fast ones are anti-ship missiles.

> Finally, drones haven’t been useful against ships in Red Sea

Comparing a Houthi attack against a peer adversary drone & missile attack would likely have very different results. Defense depletion (i.e. out of ammo) is the current weakness of defenses. That is why energy weapons are the next big thing - you don't run out of shells for a laser. Counting on defense is a historic proven way to fail at war-fighting.

> Speed matters for getting through defenses.

As does stealth, surprise, maneuverability, timing, rules of engagement and many other factors. Defense is really difficult - especially given you may be countering something unprecedented. The recent Red Sea activity did not have the element of surprise, no stealth weapons were used and the timing was well known. Not a good bellwether.

There are already submarine drones and sub drone 'fleets'

Arial drones are a subset of aircraft.

close ship on ship battle is dead but large ships are needed for large long range weapons that can hit opposing targets that cannot be seen. a wwi battleship could ignore a small drone of today - a much larger system is needed to sink a ship.

Can a large ship, or any ship, intercept a hypersonic missile? Because that's the reality of today.

The term "hypersonic" is not a particularly helpful one. The generic term refers to an missile system traveling faster than Mach 5, but there are 3 distinct types of weapons that fall into this category, which are very different.

1. Ballistic missiles: most ballistic missile systems are hypersonic. We've had ballistic missiles since WW2, the very first American ballistic missile (the redstone) was hypersonic, and that was back in the 1950s. This is not new. People make a lot of missile like the Khinzal, but this is just an air-launched version of the Iskander missile, which is from the 1990s.

2. Hypersonic glide vehicles: normal ballistic missiles drop a re-entry vehicle that just falls to earth. It might have some stabilizing fins, and some ability to make minute adjustments to its course to improve accuracy, but this is limited. In a hypersonic glide vehicle, the re-entry vehicle is meant to be more of a glide body, and is able to make actual maneuvers and turns. The technology here is also not new. For example, the Space Shuttle is an example of a hypersonic glide body. Research in this field has been around for a long time, though it's only in the last few years that countries have begun actually fielding weapons featuring glide vehicles. The annoying part with this is that the term "hypersonic glide vehicle" implies that the reason these are so difficult to intercept is because of their speed. But it's actually the opposite: in order to maneuver, a hypersonic glide vehicle actually has to travel slower than a traditional ballistic re-entry vehicle! The advantage of a HGV is not its speed, but its ability to maneuver, which makes it harder to intercept.

3. There are also hypersonic cruise missiles. These are missiles that use ramjet or scramjet engines to fly at hypersonic speeds. These tend to be even slower than HGVs, and will have much shorter ranges because they have to consume fuel to maintain this speed. Several of these are in development, but I don't believe any have been fielded. The main advantage of these is even further maneuverability, and a lower flight altitude which should make them harder to detect. Additionally, because they are flying in the atmosphere, it requires a different type of interceptor to defeat.

There are trade offs. That missile is expense and (see other discussion) might not even hit. A ship is mobile and moves erratically - the enemy needs to find it (not as easy as it sounds even with satellites all over). A missile that lands in the sea 100 feet from a ship does no damage. Hyper sonic often means limits to how you can maneuver it, so you have a chance of figuring out where it can be and thus getting the ship away (depending on your ability to detect it and predict where it is going). The rest of interception was covered by other comments.

A ship lets you get closer to the action. The closer you get the easier it is to overwhelm electric warfare - either because the slow drones can be programed and so don't need a radio (or fiber connections), or because you can make your signal strong enough to overcome it.

Missiles don't have infinite range. Different ones have different limits. Longer range costs both more money and payload. A ship can laugh off anything a tiny drone can do (even a commercial ship).

The above are all trade offs. However navy warfare is not dead and unlikely to die.

Yes. Patriot has intercepted Kinzals in Ukraine (and older versions of Patriot at that), so the tech is well established. SM3/SM6 missiles on Aegis equipped ships can defend themselves against hypersonic missiles.

Patriot has not reliably intercepted Kizhals, they needed an uneconomic interceptor ratio which in a ship would lead to interceptor depletion and failure; at the same time Kizhals is even slower than something like the DF-21 or DF-ZF.

It's a similar story for SM-2/3, in the Red Sea they faced massive interceptor depletion and had to leave, and even then many missiles were not intercepted, we just got lucky that they missed.

> faced massive interceptor depletion and had to leave

Depletion is the problem with destroyers. Something like an arsenal ship (think instead of 90-120 missiles, being loaded out with 300) would make more sense. Cheap drones are more of a depletion problem than are hypersonics.

Again, the versions of Patriot handed over to Ukraine are not the latest versions, so their performance might not be illustrative. And we don't know the strategy used by Ukraine; they might feel like bigger salvos are worth bringing down hypersonics.

SM6 is the primary USN weapon against hypersonic, not the SM2/SM3. SM3 is primarily designed for ballistic missile defense.

Ugh, this is why the term "hypersonics" is misleading. Ballistic missiles ARE hypersonic systems, they travel faster than Mach 5. And that's not just me being pedantic. The Kinzhal missile is regularly touted as a "hypersonic" including in this thread. But the Kinzhal is just a ballistic missile, it's actually just an air-launched version of the Iskander.

Which interceptor would be used against a target largely comes down to whether the intercept is endo- or exo-atmospheric. The SM3 is an exo-atmospheric intercepter: it's designed to collide with the target in the vacuum of space. The SM6 is an endo-atmospheric interceptor. SM3 can be used against ballistic missiles, including both traditional re-entry vehicles and hypersonic glide vehicles, before they enter the atmosphere. The SM6 can be used against anything in the atmosphere: including ballistic missiles in the terminal descent phase.

> Again, the versions of Patriot handed over to Ukraine are not the latest versions, so their performance might not be illustrative. And we don't know the strategy used by Ukraine; they might feel like bigger salvos are worth bringing down hypersonics.

So why even bring it up? Kinzhal is just a slightly faster ballistic missile, the fact that it can be intercepted in ideal conditions is not new. What matters is the interception probability and the engagement envelope, so what's the point to bring it up and then immediately discredit whatever useful inference can be made while still jumping to a conclusion?

SM6 is just an upgraded SM2, it's intended for BMD just the same - it's just better at it, but not better enough for the Red Sea situation.

CIWS does a pretty decent job but the reality is that a hypersonic missile would be met with a large nuclear response as it's a first strike weapon.

If you can read between the lines of the posture reviews, any potential full scale war with China would include a massive nuclear first strike by necessity.

Everyone is aware of this and is avoiding a large scale engagement.

Most likely a regional war with China (probably over Taiwan or less likely, the Philippines) would draw in lots of regional players because everybody want's to pick China apart.

True, Hitler mostly lost a war due to megalomania and spending 1/4th of naval budget on big destroyer instead of producing more ubots.

How did lack of Uboats make him lose the Eastern Front?

Failure to disrupt US shipping lanes to the Allies resulted in Germany having to fight much better-equipped Allied forces. A tank, a howitzer, or a truck on the bottom of the ocean is not a threat. The amount of equipment shipped to the USSR by the US is staggering as well, and one can argue that the Eastern Front would have collapsed without those supplies. More U-boats likely would have dramatically changed the war.

[dead]

Didn't warfare changed big enough that big navy might be more obsolete? Ukraine-Russia conflict showed that you can make hordes of cheap naval drones that can easily harass your very expensive ships or put them out of combat. By now probably you can still make more advanced but cheaper underwater drones, smart torpedos etc.

The jeune ecole thought that torpedoes and small torpedo boats would doom battleships; they were wrong. People thought SAMs would end bombers, and anti-tank missiles would end tanks. There’s always a new weapon, but it doesn’t mean the old ones are obsolete.

Not always, but sometimes it does. Cavalry charges aren't a thing anymore, for instance.

No but mechanised assaults are. Mounting up on a fast transport and charging the enemy lines is still a viable tactic, what changed is the horse got too vulnerable and the robots aren't cheap or fast enough yet.

Humm-Vees, Bradley's and other infantry mobility vehicles with mounted guns for fire support have very much stepped into the tactical role.

The idea of a cavalry charge is nonsense. Rarely done, and mostly a relic of cinema. The Polish cavalry actually performed quite well during WW2 despite being tarnished as outdated.

The roles of a "cavalry" unit are reconnaissance/scouting, raiding, pursuit. Whether they're on horseback or mounted in M2/M3s doesn't matter. Today the cavalry role still persists in most large militaries because the fog of war requires it.

Cavalry charges absolutely were used to break lines of infantry. It just became obsolete earlier than you think.

Cavalry charges were obsolete once the pike was implemented. Using cavalry after that point in time was limited to chasing down retreating troops and the previously mentioned roles.

Not so. See the battle of Kircholm from 1605 as a particularly successful example. Anyway, the discussion is about whether new technology (naval drones) could make old weapons (warships) and tactics obsolete. I thought you were saying that cavalry charges never happened and so never became obsolete. I'm glad that's not the case. But you yourself are saying that technology rendered cavalry charges obsolete. There are countless other examples; no one could argue in good faith that the once-dominant bronze chariot still has any role on a battlefield.

I just realized you're not the guy who said "it doesn’t mean the old ones are obsolete", so probably moot

It's 2025, now. I would say that drones do better than horses, nowadays.

Or revolvers, bolt action rifles, muskets, bow and arrows, spears, swords, shields, catapults, castles/ land forts.

Vulnerable, not obsolete. Unless the war is in North America, you need cargo ships to get the heavy equipment and fuel there. And then you need a navy to protect the cargo ships from those cheap naval drones and other threats.

> Ukraine-Russia conflict showed...

Hordes of cheap naval drones is what Ukraine had the ability to produce. And long before the current conflict started, Russia's navy was well-known for having very serious maintenance, performance, and survivability issues. They would have proven similarly vulnerable to a very wide variety of weapons.

You can't get a revolution, but it appears you have managed to get a coup.

A democratic election without using violence to force a result is by definition not a coup.

It is ok to not like the result, but don't misappropriate words for it, thus diluting their meaning. Words having concrete meanings are important for reasonable discourse.

I think they're referring to the unelected people doing illegal things completely unchecked (currently)?

Also elected people doing illegal and unconstitutional things, repeatedly.

Yes, and that.

Violence is not inherent to the definition of a coup, and Elon Musk, who is not a government official, who has no official status in the government, has taken direct control of the Treasury's payment systems. An unelected billionaire has illegally and unconstitutionally taken control of the United States government.

That is a coup, plain and simple.

There are already thousands of unelected government workers that already have control over these government systems. I understand it is different that one person now has access to them all now, but the unelected part of this story I think is a nothing burger.

Listen, you need to start somewhere..

Look, If you MUST implement Tariff's then do it in a way that triggers explosive manufacturing.

IMHO thats on the only way a tariff can be successful. If you want vertically integrated growth then by logic you should run Tariffs for all the parts and resources needed for triggering that growth. If you decide that ship building needs a shot in the arm thats going to be iron ore and steel (largely).

throwing tariffs around for imaginary slights isnt going to trigger anything useful in your country... (unless thats the idea of course. There is a theory that a collapse is the point)

The UK has been in a similar situation. We have a ship building industry plan and it seems to be going ok. Top of the range ships like type 26 are massive, expensive and cutting edge so will take time to build and commission. So what we've done is gone and brought an off the shelf design (Iver Huitfeldt-class frigate) and started building it. It's not cutting edge or massive, it should need less crew and most of it's system should be off the shelf. The first in class was paid in April 2022 and is to be launched this year with an inservice date of early 2027. To compare that against the first in class of the type 26, that was laid down on 2027 and is looking to be in service at the same time as the first type31! We're also building nuclear subs as well!

laid 2022 * Type 26 laid 2017

> [...] if the nation is destined for maritime irrelevance and the laying of its prosperity at the whims of autocrats a world away.

Considering what happened in the last two weeks alone this lack of self-awareness is simply brilliant.

What has happened exactly in the last two weeks ?

Our former allies are going to stop sharing intelligence with the USA. That's for sure.

They're also going to start finding ways to go around the USA with trade, military alliances and more.

Interested readers may enjoy Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman, which chronicles, amongst other things, how Henry Kaiser led the rapid construction of the shipyards used to build the merchant fleet that helped the United States win the second world war.

The book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/208564/freedoms-for...

Recently read that on a recommendation from a friend. Great review of the sausage making necessary to get something as big and complex as the US moving in a different direction.

Only quibble about the book is that the author seems to subscribe to a great man theory of manufacturing, where having a CEO say "we will do it" is all that is needed and the rest of the engineering is left as an exercise to the reader.

> Interested readers may enjoy Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman

Please note that, while a good read, the book was initially financed by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a group of large corporations who have a vested interest in making business look good.

* https://www.aei.org/research-products/book/freedoms-forge/

I, too, have read this book and was struck by the tone the book took every time the topic of unions came up. You'd think that unions were Nazi sympathizers wanting to sabotage the war effort or something.

So while it's worth a read, please be aware of the slant of the book.

* https://www.aei.org/profile/arthur-herman/

* https://fedsoc.org/contributors/arthur-herman

Impossible.Beurocracy.Insurance.Unions.No demographic with the skills that must be learned early in life to do the work, hard ,dangerous work that requires trust and inate skills to acomplish quickly and safely. I aprenticed with some of the last marine smiths, and also worked(very briefly) in a shipyard building military frigates, and spent 95‰ of my life next to the salt water. Add to that my repeated attempts to conduct business as an entrepneur, only to be undermined by impossible (new) regulatory requirements, insurance requirements, labour (ha!) trouble, and lack of scaled banking services. I fill out the same tax form as the very largest companys in the world, and the government is generous enogh to give me a 9 digit space to fill in the amount of my return. It is 125 years since the steel ship building industry took off, there are no mysteries around how it must be done, but the nature of the greed machine, means that China and Korea can put a finnished ship into service, for much less per pound, than I can buy raw steel. The revolution we ARE going through, is the one where, fat, lazy, complacent,etc,etc,etc, so and so's, have very successfully captured all of the relevant power and control. U'r not gona talk a ship into the water. Lead, follow, or get out of the way and cheer!

>labour (ha!)

Where are you, and how much are you offering per hour?

you are assuming he isn't paying much but think you assumed that there are many people who can do the job that are unemployed when the reality is that most or almost all are either overworked due to under staffing and paid well or retired and it would be difficult to just pay those already working more to just bring them because they are working on an actual US Navy ship and can't be bothered.

Pay, and the people will come.

Sadly, and I say this with an equal measure of sadness and conviction, the bell has been rung on this (and industrial might in general )for 2+ decades.

There was a chance to rebuild the us into a formidable industrial power, but it was lost in the early 2000s.

We gifted all of our knowledge advantages to an industrial adversary with a 4:1 population and resource advantage. They have improved their primary education to be vastly superior to ours, and their secondary education is not far behind.

Strategic goals were superseded by greed, and we will now have to settle for second fiddle or lower on the world stage with no hope of recovering a leadership role. Our military might will eventually be eclipsed by China as well, and in the interim will only serve to slightly slow our fading into irrelevance, while being an increasingly heavy yoke to bear as the expense of maintaining aging systems that we cannot replace continues to grow.

Yet, There is one inflection point that we might possibly be able to change this at: an all out, no holds barred investment in space resource and energy harvesting:

this expands our high technology edge, gives us a resource advantage, gives us new territory, incentivises rapid robotic expansion of our industrial capacity….

We could leverage dominance in the space frontier while we still possess the military advantage on-planet to defend our will to do so. But we will have to throw everything behind the effort, in basically a wartime footing, or we cannot hope to succeed.

This is quite literally the last chance to avoid a CCP dominated world within 5 decades.

Repeal the Jones act, get a commercial shipbuilding market going again domestically.

In the meantime, leverage the best asset we have: alliances with western nations. South Korea is really good at shipbuilding, to the point they are now authorized to repair US Navy warships based in the PACCOM AOR. Let them build ships for us too.

> get a commercial shipbuilding market going again domestically.

How do you start a flywheel? Our industry is light years behind China and would be prohibitively more expensive.

Tariffs? That's a moral equivalent of the Jones Act, just with more options for buyers.

The thing that worked really well for China was to force Western manufacturers to partner with their domestic industries so that they could learn the tricks of the trade, then be kick the Western companies to the wayside and discard the relationships when they're no longer useful.

I don't think we can mimic the China playbook because of our labor costs. There's no gradient or arbitrage to exploit. Maybe a partnership between the US and Mexico where we take advantage of Mexican labor, yet use US capital and retain ownership?

A part that at least helped with China was that after the Great Recession (and somewhat before), China was also willing to subsidize and invest heavily in local manufacturing and helping individual businesses and communities finance "relatively" expensive purchases for equipment that might have been prohibitive otherwise. Low cost loans with relatively forgiving terms. [1][2]

An example is chain link fencing. It's not especially glamorous, yet its a huge industry. The machine's don't have to be especially advanced, yet for somebody normal to even consider purchasing a chain link fencing weaving machine (especially in early 2000's China) look(s|ed) prohibitive. It still looks prohibitive in 2025. A lot of manufacturing looks that way. You need 10-50k up-front in machinery and capital purchases at the low end.

In America, the ROI calculations would always look bad, and the standard lenders would "almost" always turn you down for suggesting investment in a thin margin industry with "old" tech. You're not proposing 10x returns. You're not proposing get out tomorrow VC. You're proposing a decade long relationship of manufacturing chain link fences. Except now China rules the entire chain-link fence manufacturing industry.

The focus on scraping America's modern tech has a lot of the same issues. China didn't get a quick jump in naval ship building by scraping America tech and twiddling more silicon. They got it by buying an old Russian aircraft carrier from Ukraine and tugboating it half-way around the Earth. (Liaoning, original created as Riga for the Soviet Navy in Ukraine) [3][4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_stimulus_prog...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Development_Bank

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Liaon...

[4] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-very-first-air...

Surely any peacetime military contract in the US (or, perhaps anywhere) is just a signal to get snouts in the trough and start hoovering up the cash? While wartime begets its own kind of profiteer, my sense is that it could only be done when businesses put the national interest first.

The nation doesn’t just need a shipbuilding revolution—it needs a broader industrial revitalization. Strengthening semiconductor manufacturing, modernizing military and civilian aviation, reinvigorating automotive innovation, and more are all critical. Tackling this alone would be overwhelming, but collaboration with trusted neighbors and reliable allies could make these ambitions achievable. Luckily we have a real bridge builder in cha...

Honest question, is it at all possible for us to have an industrial revitalization given that we have the highest average wages in the world?

Probably. The original industrial revolutions were happening in nations that quickly became wealthy, and the US was doing pretty well with high wages vs. Asia for most of its industrial period. Higher wages in theory should be linked to higher productivity and output per worker in the US due to deep skillsets - otherwise where do the high wages come from? But something might have broken that link.

The issue looks from afar like a double-whammy of (1) pushing capital investment offshore to China resulting in most of the productive capital formation happening in Asia and (2) banning a lot of industrial activity in the US for environmental reasons. A lot of what the Chinese did to get ahead was literally illegal in most Western countries - some of it was labour laws mind. Even today there I question whether something like Shenzhen would be legal in the US. If Shenzhen was magically transplanted to the US, what would happen when the lawyers move in?

> Higher wages in theory should be linked in higher productivity and output per worker in the US due to deep skillsets

I don't think this always have to be true, e.g. I'm polish and used work in uk and by crossing border to uk overnight I increased my salary 2-3x but that doesn't mean my productivity increased 2x.

You want to google concept called "Dutch Disease", an economic phenomenon where a resource boom (like oil) causes currency appreciation and decline in other sectors. Norway and the Netherlands faced this issue.

Lyn Alden’s Broken Money argues that modern financial systems fail to protect savings. For high-income countries like the U.S., the issues include:

- Currency devaluation: Persistent inflation undermines wage growth.

- Debt reliance: Governments and households depend on borrowing, creating fragility

- Technological gaps: Financial infrastructure lags behind energy/tech advancements, exacerbating inequality.

> You want to google concept called "Dutch Disease", an economic phenomenon where a resource boom (like oil) causes currency appreciation and decline in other sectors. Norway and the Netherlands faced this issue.

Isn't this just the downside of comparative advantage?

Like you have the classic example of island 1 can make 5 apples or 15 oranges and island 2 can make 15 apples or 5 oranges so island 1 makes 15 oranges and island 2 makes 15 apples. What happens to the apple industry of island 1? It gets destroyed as they only focus on making oranges.

The only way you avoid dutch disease (Natural Resource Curse nowendays) is to intentionally have an inefficient economy.

I think that that’s the crux of the issue—efficiency is very often in tension with resilience. In an economic system that optimizes for efficiency above all, you end up with fragility. Not only do you have fragility, but because the system is complex, the fragility shows up in unpredictable places.

Red Queen races are also terribly inefficient and that's a big part of our economy today. Unfortunately Red Queen races are net positive on GDP.

>intentionally have an inefficient economy

Yes, but the economy should serve the people. The people do not serve the economy. Or at least that's the way it should work. Wall Street tends to disagree with this sentiment.

You've not fully comprehended the nature of productivity. If a doctor saves the life of a lazy labourer then they've created a certain amount of economic value. If they save the life of a very hard working labourer they created more economic value with the same actions [0]. Your productivity isn't just you, it is the entire system your work take place in and what capital it interacts with. Otherwise engineers would be worthless, we barely do more than mumble and wiggle our fingers.

It is entirely possible that moving from Poland to the UK doubled the amount of wealth you were generating. Dutch disease is an expression of that - if all your customers are wealthy then the economy signals that you are more productive than if all your customers are poor. Because you are.

Although I'm all aboard with Lyn Alden’s complaints. The US keeps disabling economic feedback mechanisms rather than reform failures and it is starting to catch up with them since the Chinese just work harder than they do.

EDIT And I think you might want to talk about the Baumol effect, not Dutch disease. Dutch Disease is typically invoked for countries that find high mineral wealth and then experience problems but Baumol effect is more relevant to productivity increases.

[0] We make no moral judgement, but economics is a harsh accountant.

The original industrial revolutions were explosions of productivity. We aren't going to get that again by onshoring jobs from low cost regions unless we again seriously explode productivity again, and even fully automated factories are unlikely to see the same gain as going from all goods being handmade to having factories.

I'm highly dubious the post WW2 economic boom is much more than the after glow of the US being the only industrial nation on the face of the Earth that didn't get bombed [0] to smithereens. China couldn't pose an economic rivalry at the time because it wasn't significantly industrial and had had years of civil war before the Japanese threat came in, Europe was a burnt husk, and Japan had weak industry even before it was bombed and cowed.

And yes China did what most industrializing nations do, sacrifice their environment and burn natural resources at prodigious rates to super charge and grow their economy. It's a horrible place to be long term and even China is starting to implement some environmental protections because that kind of pollution is terrible long term. They're even seeing their neighbors do the same thing that drove so much of US production to China, cheaper labor and fewer government hurdles, it's a cycle many countries have followed.

[0] In any meaningful capacity, have to say it or the pedants will mention Pearl Harbor or the tiny number of attacks from things like balloon bombs etc.

It's probably possible but certain low level things have been all but wholly outsourced for a generation or two. The know-how isn't there to do a lot of stuff at various places on the scale and cost axis.

I'm not what a realistic path to come back from that looks like.

- high wages are not evenly spread geographically in the USA

- high wages are not evenly spread demographically in the USA

- the wage distribution seems to me to be unusual in that it has a very long fat tail whereas the UK's is very clustered (I've forgotten the right term) on the median.

- modern industry can be highly automated

- modern logistics mean that industry can be decentralised

I believe that the last two are new since the USA and Europe outsourced large amounts of their industry to China. However the bigger issue is that competitive industries require very significant capitalisation because on the one hand modern products are staggeringly well engineered (with the trade offs of cheap, good and sophisticated taken into account) and on the other hand the processes used to make them require lots of tools, infrastructure, and robots.

> the UK's is very clustered (I've forgotten the right term) on the median.

Normal (Gaussian) distribution?

nahh - when a distribution is very tight but with very shallow tails - I think low variance.

Due to underdeveloped economies, developing countries cannot avoid economic dependence on developed countries, especially in areas such as high technology, equipment, and precision instruments. However, this dependence varies depending on the development stage of each country. For example, African nations primarily require food to sustain basic living conditions.

Regardless of their specific needs, this situation has resulted in a unique exchange mechanism: developing countries must offer their best products in exchange for goods from developed countries. As a result, people in developing countries are unable to enjoy the finest products produced in their own countries, and sometimes not even second-tier products, as these are reserved for foreign consumers.

The U.S. market features products from various countries and regions, including China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Jamaica, and Mexico. The world's finest products flow into the U.S. market in exchange for U.S. dollars. As everyone competes to obtain dollars, competition intensifies, leading to high product quality and low prices. This has created unprecedented prosperity in the U.S. market. This outcome is a result of market mechanisms and the benefits that the U.S. has gained from the global status of the dollar, established by the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II.

However, the massive influx of foreign products into the U.S. has also impacted its domestic industries, causing factory closures and rising unemployment. This issue cannot be ignored, which is why the forces of free trade and protectionism in the U.S. have been in constant conflict.

— Wang Huning, America Against America

Sure.

We do not need to rely on foreign labor which is a tiny fraction of American labor to maintain our quality of life. Lots of things need to be reorganized to make this work and some people with a lot of wealth will have a lot less certainly.

But foreign manufacturing of nearly everything is relatively new, you have to remember. America was plenty prosperous not so long ago before we started exporting so many jobs to Mexico, then China and beyond. We had the highest wages in the world then too.

American goods used to be exported across the world until somewhere in the 1960s Japan made cheaper cars and televisions.

> some people with a lot of wealth will have a lot less certainly.

I mean, this alone makes whatever you are proposing a non-starter in America, surely you realize that

This comment of mine is light, so don't take it too seriously, but I'm reminded that the factory in the film Minority Report (2002) has no people in it. It is entirely automated.

I would argue that it isn't only possible, but on track to arrive sooner than most people realize:

* AI models are steadily continuing to improve in capabilities and efficiency

* Massive investments are being made in scaling up AI infrastructure (see Stargate and xAI Colossus)

* Tesla expects to produce a few thousand Optimus robots this year and use them for some level of internal production workload, meanwhile Hyundai has acquired Boston Dynamics with what I can only assume is a plan to take its tech out of the research labs and commercialize it at scale

* Aside from all the other recent and ongoing advances in energy tech and infrastructure, production fusion power is coming; if you take sama-backed Helion's word for it, they may be fulfilling a contract to deliver it to Microsoft as soon as 2028 (knock on wood)

Add all that together, and it's not difficult to see a trend that converges on a rapid massive expansion of global and particularly US manufacturing output kicking off within the next decade or two. As soon as the hardware and software are good enough for robots to outcompete average unskilled human laborers at most tasks on cost and quality, expect fully automated assembly lines to start pumping out humanoid robots 24/7, which will then be put to work 24/7 on any number of manufacturing and construction projects with logistics based around autonomous vehicles.

The overhead of US labor cost and safety regulations will become moot with machines doing the work, while our abundance of resources and first mover advantage on AI will give us a big headstart over the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our low population density means we'll have a ton of empty land to build on and a population size that will make UBI payments comparably easy. In that scenario, eclipsing 2025 China's shipbuilding capacity will be the least of our concerns. Whoever wins the AI race wins global hegemony, and right now that race is America's to lose.

All of which is to say, there's a reasonable argument that America is currently sitting at a firm local minimum in strength and prosperity, which conversely means that China is plausibly approaching a ceiling on its own relative military and economic power for the foreseeable future. If that is the case, it means that the next decade or so may be an exceptionally high-risk period for Taiwan. However, it also means that competent US leadership would throw everything it has at a defense of Taiwan in the event of an invasion; irrespective of any fabrication capacity that may end up built out in the US, allowing a Chinese takeover of the main TSMC facilities would be surrendering far too great a strategic asset in the AI race. That being the case, while Chinese leadership may or may not agree, I would argue that the rational move on China's part would actually be to give up on Taiwan and focus on investing heavily in SMIC and other fronts of the AI race. Invading would at best yield a pyrrhic victory, at worst yield an expensive defeat and burn a bridge with the people of Taiwan for generations. The right move would be to put aside the short-term economic gambit and nationalistic fervor, and instead lay out a roadmap for a possible future peaceful unification or alliance by proving themselves to be a good neighbor over time.

[dead]

South Korea can train the US navy. Teach them how to build again:

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-navy-looking-to-s-korean-japane...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJkyurhnAQo

And start treating the alliances as vital part of the whole, and stop betraying the fragile trust they are built on. Use Korean industry until the industry at home can catch up.

And hopefully teach them how to not run into each other

'Tis sadly interesting that the article, from USNI, never really mentions all the Navy Yards that America once had - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_Yard - where the Navy could (and very often did) build and maintain its own warships.

Before the navy yards were shut down, they provided pretty much the exact capabilities which the author bemoans the US desperately needing now. And were extremely useful for keeping private shipyards honest - "You want HOW much? It'll take HOW long? Sorry, we'll just build the ship ourselves."

Similar (and again unmentioned) in Great Britain. Even though the article talks about (Royal Navy Admiral) Jacky Fisher. Who, famously, spent a fair hunk of his career managing such facilities for the RN. And was famous/notorious for squeezing both the RN's and private yards to produce more ships, faster, better, and cheaper.

For anyone interested in the topic, highly recommend the What's Going on With Shipping? channel:

* https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping/videos

AIUI, the problem is that the US lacks a policy. This is what China's strength is: making a decision and getting it done.

The article mentions the SHIPS Act which the channel talks about:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iksNr3s2WVs

As well as five suggestions for Trump:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CoOXdpxvIo

The IRA/CHIPS acts helped bring plants to the US soil. Industrial policy can work. China subsidized many industries that they thought would be strategically important, and they're now important players in those industries.

As Noah Smith recently wrote:

> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.

> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

> The IRA/CHIPS acts helped bring plants to the US soil. Industrial policy can work.

I see a lot of people say the CHIPS act is a success that should be duplicated but is there any evidence of this yet or is it merely because money was committed and promises were made? How much industrial output vs the amount of subsidies etc. It will probably take a decade before we know if it worked.

> A new report by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and the Boston Consulting Group on the semiconductor supply chain forecasts significant improvements in the resilience of the supply chain in both the U.S. and globally in coming years. The study shows that investments from the industry, facilitated by incentives under the CHIPS Act, are making progress in growing domestic semiconductor manufacturing and strengthening the U.S. economy. Among other things, the report finds:

* https://www.semiconductors.org/emerging-resilience-in-the-se...

?

Are ships really going to be a 'thing' in any next war anyway, in an age of missiles and drones (both above and below water)? It really pisses me off my dumbass govt spent hundreds of billions of dollars on what I believe will be irrelevant tech, and we may not even get the tech, hows that lol!!! "Here guys, have some money our taxpayers payed us, you don't even need to give us the goods". You'd think the pollies had been bought or something...

Yes, most wars aren’t between countries with similar military capabilities.

Even in a hypothetical war between US and China being limited to moving fuel, food, bullets etc by aircraft alone is a major logistical issue. Military conflict is potentially millions of people and within an order of magnitude that many vehicles.

Guarding such slow moving cargo vessels by air alone is again impractical, thus surface ships and subs. Every minute a drone or jet is in the air has an associated cost, an aircraft carrier a few 100’s of miles offshore is still a lot closer than mainland USA.

Piling on

* Navies guard shipping/supply lines. This is true for war time, but it is also true for peace time.

* Navies can disrupt enemy supply lines. Supply lines are critical in any prolonged conflict.

* Air superiority remains an important aspect of war. We need places near the theater of war to operate aircraft from. An aircraft carrier essentially means we can place an airbase anywhere in the world. This is a more dynamic than limiting ourself to just allies that give us land to build bases.

* Armies often use their navy to secure critical resources needed for the war effort, and guard supply lines extracting those resources. Oil, minerals, food, etc. If we increase our industrial capacity during a war we will need to increase our raw material input, at a time when former trading partners might stop selling to us.

Somehow you have to get the drones and missiles around. Or are cargo planes a thing? In age of missiles and drones...

I think it looks like those would need quite extreme ranges. Well intercontinental ballistic missiles are a real solution.

If you worry about missiles and drones taking out the cargo planes, don't you worry about missiles and drones taking out cargo ships as well?

Ships can easily mount a CWIS or similar to help with a wide range of threats. Not so easy to do the same on a cargo aircraft.

Will CWIS be able to handle drone boats that are submerged except for their cameras and satellite dishes? They are primarily used for cruise missiles.

Watching the Russian fleet "deal with" Ukranian drone boats (aka sink to the bottom of the Ocean) made me realize that most war ships aren't prepared for these encounters.

Suicide attack boats aren't a wholey new threat (see USS Cole) the US has been thinking about defending from small surface craft too. It's really hard to guess how effective any attack and countermeasure will be until you see it in the field and given the shabby state of a lot of Russia's military I'm dubious that the results will be directly comparable especially since the planners on the US side are getting to see and evaluate both sides.

CWIS have an extremely low radar horizon - most contemporary AShM weapons fly extremely close to the water, sometimes even lower than the bow of a suicide vessel. It's very feasible for such a weapon to neutralize a USV in terminal attack.

> Watching the Russian fleet "deal with" Ukranian drone boats

Most of the successes I've seen with Ukraine's drones are against unarmed targets. They had great success using USVs to attack oil rigs in Crimea and Mi-8s with very weak countermeasures.

This isn't to say that USVs are useless against the Russian Navy proper, but even Russia has weapons intended to pick off surface combatants at a standoff range. I suspect we don't hear more success stories because they're at least partially capable of defending against them.

Is there an ocean between you and your adversary?

This feels like somebody telling Bob Vila, "This house needs a kitchen renovation."

It might actually need a kitchen renovation but you can't actually do it until you repair the foundation under the kitchen. The bathrooms might be a higher priority, you don't have any tools, you just kick out all the contractors, and the next meeting with your parts suppliers is in the courthouse.

What exactly would be the cost increase for a ship built in the USA? Is it a 50% increase? 200%? 500%?

And what would the dollar amounts be?

Consider this as very much back-of-napkin math, a Chinese 055 destroyer is about a third of the cost of an Arleigh Burke. So you’d be looking at roughly 300%.

So more envelope-math; a containership seems to run $100-200m, so it'd be $300-600m.

That's not so insanely expensive as to be completely undoable.

Canada as well. We have the longest coastline in the world but buy all or most of our ferries from other countries. It's silly.

> longest coastline

Always makes me think of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

:)

We don't need ships to go fight the next war. The next war is going to be right here.

Unfortunately, before that war you expect to happen right in the US - current and future administrations will most likely sneak in anohter two, three, ten, fifty other wars, elsewhere.

You can't fit that many wars in during the next year.

I dread to ask this, but - which war is starting next year in the US? :-(

Or....we could've been on the cusp of one of those Foundation/Asimov moments where our economy evolved beyond a manufacturing economy, with enough financial clout to...not actually need to be able to build our own ships?

Tariffs are necessary to protect our manufacturing and build ships.

We voted to pass laws that give massive protections to workers, now we need to vote to protect the businesses that employ those workers or it all for naught.

Ain't gonna happen.

US businesses are incapable of thinking long term.

If the US wants to build a ship industry they must invite Chinese shipbuilders to kickstart it just as they invited TSMC to build a factory here.

But that doesn't seem likely does it?

South Korea is an ally and big in shipbuilding too.

I thought so too, but the Chinese are much bigger in this space.

> The Navy needs to recapitalize the shipbuilding industry to produce > the new capabilities and warships required to win the next war.

Ah, one mustn't forget to prepare for the next war one is likely going to start...

Well, I'd say the US needs potable running water, health care for its population, and shelter - all three of which are not enjoyed by many of its residents and citizens. And if we're talking about war, perhaps a "recapitalization" of firefighting and disaster relief would be a thing to invest in before warship construction.

This article is ignorant to the political reality that America's sole-hegemon era is ending and China will be allowed to capture Taiwan.

Why would they need to when they get contracts anyway due to tariffs and the Jones act?

The American cost of living is too high to reindustrialize on a large scale. Medical costs are high, rent is high, transportation costs are high, personal debt is high. Industrial capitalists can’t shoulder all those costs for their workers and remain internationally competitive.

Then the industry needs to be nationalized and subsidized.

The US needs to pull back from great overextension.

Oh yay that annual anti Jones Act thread.

I'm sure the market will solve it.

The military industrial complex making overtures the incoming administration.

> All said, there are reasons to be optimistic: Consensus on the threat from China has taken hold, galvanizing tentative steps to more forceful and effective actions

lol, i like the tone here

usually i'll question abt what the threat is exactly

but now i only say, wish you have a good luck, little magas

This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago, but now Chinese shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than ours because of their success in civilian shipbuilding. The proposed measures in this aricle are too little too late.

The only logical course of action at this stage would be to seek an alternative that leverages the US's existing strengths. Naval vessels are largely outdated technology and meanwhile the US is the world leader in aerospace manufacturing. If we were to revive the 747 Cruise Missile Carrier concept, or else an equivalent program, it could deliver the same range and operational payload as a guided missile destroyer, but at dramatically lower cost and higher operational tempo. With the ability to rapidly ferry munitions thousands of miles to a conflict zone, one 747 CMC aircraft could replace multiple guided missile destroyers despite costing one fifth the price. This is possible because the 747 CMC is based on a reliable and proven aircraft with existing economies of scale.

Thank you for reading my shameless sales pitch.

> This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago

The US used to subsidize the salaries of US merchant marines on ships (US salaries are higher than Filipino ones) so that there would be a trained population, but that was stopped in the 1980s because subsidies are bad, so there are hardly any US merchant marines any more.

The US government used to own transport boats and lease them to US shipping companies, but they've not bothered to build news ones in decades, and so most transport ships are foreign owned. If there's a war, and you need ship matériel to the war zone, do you think commercial ships will enter it? Perhaps the US government should eschew the Free Market™ a bit and own the means of transportation.

The point of the Jones Act—or at least that one particular section that a lot of folks tend to talk about—is to have US citizens and US ships available in case of war. But given US prices relative to the prices for other countries, it costs more, and the US has not been willing to pay the premium to support that readiness.

Edit: The channel What's Going on with Shipping? has a number of videos on the topic of the what people call "the Jones Act", but more specifically about Section 27, the cabotage rules. See perhaps these to get a good overview of the topic:

* "The pros and cons of The Jones Act", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOIx-OAvxqQ

* "The Jones Act Makes Shipping More Expensive?", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95om9PGI758

* "Jones Act Debate | Center for Maritime Strategy & Heritage Foundation", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWKz3psejb0

* "The Passage of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920: The Jones Act", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O_EhPbmr74

* Optional more: https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping/search?query=jones%20a...

It seems an unintended side effect of the Jones act was to insulate the US shipbuilding industry from international competition, leading to them resting on their laurels while the rest of the industry worked hard to improve productivity (see Japan, South Korea, and lately China). Which makes it even harder to repeal, since with a repeal of the Jones act the wildly noncompetitive (civilian) US shipbuilding industry would fold in an instant.

So a repeal of the Jones act would need to be coupled to an extended investment program into the shipbuilding sector. Say, something like how the SEA economic miracle worked, by requiring, as a condition for various subsidies, the yards to export a certain % of the production in order to ensure prices are competitive.

Even so, given US wage levels it's a fantasy to believe that US shipyards could compete with, say, China. But there are shipyards in other high-income countries e.g. in Europe that manage to survive through a combination of various subsidies and focusing on high-end specialized vessels such as cruise ships, icebreakers etc.

This is a false narrative. US shipbuilding did not rest on its laurels because of the jones act. The Jones Act was passed in the 1920s; US shipbuilding rose to a dominant position while it was in place. The US lost that position only after the 1980s cessation of subsidies to domestic shipbuilders. Ironically this was a move to stop foreign nations from subsidizing their shipbuilding industries, but it was never reciprocated and the subsidies were not returned after it proved to be ineffective.

The jones act does not particularly protect US shipbuilding, the issue is it destroyed the customer base for US shipbuilding by making domestic marine transport uneconomical. It is a protection for the auto industry by making road transport of goods more cost competitive. Modify the jones act, start shipping things domestically by ship, suddenly there's a big market for ships.

> US shipbuilding rose to a dominant position while it was in place.

You seem to be omitting the fact that the US sank pretty much every non-allied boat in the ocean during WWII and bombed every shipyard outside of England. That created a MASSIVE advantage.

Which would be relevant if the US wasn't dominant before WW2. But it was.

Ironically, the end of WW2 actually hurt US shipbuilding because there was a huge glut of surplus ships on the market and for a brief time a massive drop in trade. British ship builders actually took the title of world's largest shipbuilder back after WW2, producing nearly half of all tonnage in the next decade as Europe rebuilt its merchant fleets.

The countries that had their shipyards destroyed in the war built new shipyards with better technology. They took the lead after that, Japan obviously being the biggest winner in the late 20th century.

US shipbuilding was last competitive in the 19th century when building wooden ships. US yards were not capable of matching UK yards (the market leader at the time) on price, due to higher steel and labor costs. What the US WAS capable of and the UK wasn't, was to quickly scale up production and produce huge numbers of standard ships during the world wars (well, the vast majority of the WWI ships missed the war). Yes, this was an astounding achievement, and the Liberty ships were crucial to Allied victory in WWII. But competitive on price with UK yards they were not.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships

Good point about the Jones Act acting to make domestic road (and rail) more attractive. Then again, aren't domestic road and rail freight also protected by similar cabotage laws?

"The US lost that position only after the 1980s cessation of subsidies to domestic shipbuilders."

Not really: https://www.cato.org/blog/subsidies-misplaced-shipbuilding-n...

Also: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UJwLSBXvXcNTMfApNGgJHJTSCD0...

The US should go back to subsidizing its shipbuilding industry.

We are all ignoring the obvious solution to this. One of the benefits of being a global hegemon is having close allies who are good at things we are not.

Intel fell behind on semiconductors and now Phoenix is turning into an outlying suburb of Taipei while the children of TSMC engineers are making the local school district look like magicians.

All the US has to do is subsidize one of the Korean heavy conglomerates, probably Hyundai, and get them to start pumping out cargo boats out of say Louisiana or Georgia with the promise of a government buyer. This problem goes away by 2032.

That's not enough.

What happens if a long conflict breaks out between China and the US can't rebuild capacity lost in the initial phase of the war because China takes out that Korean ship building capacity?

With a capacity 260x times that of America the Chinese will be able to rebuild an overwhelming naval capacity, especially if the war technology turns to cheap, mass produced (semi)autonomous machines as seems to be happening in Ukraine?

Ships are one thing but really matters is the industrial capacity to build missiles that will be the immediate bottleneck. Many American missiles have a lead time measured in months to years and wargames scenarios for a conflict over Taiwan show the US exhausting most of their antiship missiles within weeks.

Once that happens the US will need to retreat from the area and the Chinese will be able to mass produce ships and probably missiles to hunt down any lingering American ships.

America will effectively lose their dominance of the seas and certainly the region.

> What happens if a long conflict breaks out between China and the US can't rebuild capacity lost in the initial phase of the war because China takes out that Korean ship building capacity?

We launch ballistic missiles at each other. Probably kill 500-800M Chinese and 100-175M Americans.

China hawks love fantasizing about this stuff. Reality is the as Ukraine demonstrates, direct conflict between reasonably advanced states is a tarpit. A hot war between the top tier states is armageddon.

Even the question assumes that because the answer is "a few billion people die" it's not possible, and because of that (false) assumption, the first thing isn't possible.

If China starts sinking US ships half the people reading this thread will die before ever hearing about it. That doesn't mean China would never sink a US ship.

We remain alive today after decades of nuclear brinksmanship, because in general, people don’t want to die.

The longer term strategic outlook for the US is… not great. Why would China poke the bear when the bear has teeth? Wait for America’s internal instability to escalate, then roll into Taipei without a shot fired.

Why aren't we trying to come up with something simpler, cheaper, and quicker to manufacture? We had this problem with bombs back before the JDAM was developed, and basically they just stuck an off-the-shelf guidance system onto a dumb bomb.

For that matter, why aren't we spinning up a few factories to build artillery shells?

> For that matter, why aren't we spinning up a few factories to build artillery shells?

As with most problems in the US today - short term thinking and seemingly lack of any sort of long-term strategic planning whatsoever.

I was a teenager when they were shutting down the (mostly mothballed, but still kept in enough working order to spin back up) ammunition factories in my state. I thought even then it was a stupid short-sighted move, and it's only proven worse since then.

Not only do we not have any production capacity to speak of - we also are now completely reliant on a handful of plants that are vulnerable to two or three well-executed attacks to take them completely offline. We entirely lack geographic diversity when before our arms manufacturing was spread throughout the country and fairly resilient.

As a nation we completely forgot the lessons learned in WWII. Production capacity is almost all that matters so long as you can hold the front long enough to spin it up. China is quite obviously orders of magnitude better positioned for this in the modern era. Perhaps even moreso than the US was in the 1940's given the types of arms that are expected to win future wars.

>"Intel fell behind on semiconductors and now Phoenix is turning into an outlying suburb of Taipei while the children of TSMC engineers are making the local school district look like magicians."

So after a while Taiwan is no longer needed and China can just take it. I am curious if Taiwan's government cares about this potential course of events?

>"All the US has to do is subsidize one of the Korean heavy conglomerates, probably Hyundai, and get them to start pumping out cargo boats out of say Louisiana or Georgia with the promise of a government buyer."

Again you think that Korea would not care about moving their strategic industries somewhere else?

They wouldn't be moving, they would be expanding into the US market. Its a win-win. Hyundai get's access to a previously closed off market due to cabotage regulation. And we get modern ship building. The only loser here are established ship builders who would be forced to modernize and compete. But long term that's a good thing for them too.

As an analog, I believe South Korean terrestrial armaments companies are doing the same thing with Poland, in order to gain access to European buyers. (Granted, Poland also has a labor cost advantage in Europe)

Taiwan’s strategic value has less to do with semiconductors and more to do with geography. It is the keystone of the First Island Chain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain

why does everyone just assume that Taiwan and China, which both consider themselves to be "one china" would not simply find some kind of peaceful resolution once the US backs off?

most likely, without a U.S. backer, they would just more closely integrate their economies and this would eventually result in a political solution

Due to the "p" word.

Probably few people here realize that China settled the majority of its land border disputes (12 of 14) through negotiation.

China, by and large, gave up much more territory than it acquired for each border settlement.

>after a while Taiwan is no longer needed and China can just take it

lol, as if amphibious assault against a country that has been preparing invasion for 70 years, as well as a country that is at the forefront of electronics, is that easy.

yes, China is building tons of ships. but each ship, which cost a few hundred million each, can be sunk by Taiwan's advanced missile systems, for a few million per missile. Each ship needs to be fueled properly, which is also extremely hard logistical task, just ask Russia. And these ships move slowly across a region that is heavily monitored, making them easily sank. And once enough ships sink near the landing area, it would be even harder for other ships to make it to the landing beaches.

> as if amphibious assault against a country that has been preparing invasion for 70 years

You might want to update your understanding of the balance of forces in Asia.

For example: "China’s military has the capability to land ground forces on Taiwan within as little as one week after imposing a naval blockade on the island, according to a Japanese government analysis of Chinese military exercises conducted last year." [1]

Only the United States military could challenge the PRC in the western Pacific. But even that is not a certainty: "Indeed, the overall balance of conventional military power along China’s borders has shifted dramatically in China’s favor." [2]

It's not the 1900s anymore. The PLA isnt a peasant army. It's every bit as modern, and in some cases more so than even the US military.

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/defense-security/20...

https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Articl...

> China’s military has the capability to land ground forces on Taiwan within as little as one week after imposing a naval blockade on the island

you're using this one little quote to signify that China can take Taiwan? get real. that just means some boots will be on the ground, doesn't mean that these boots will make it past the beach. and naval blockade has very little chance of succeeding past a few days, when China will immediately be sanctioned by all the countries, leading to its collapse

Boots on the ground is basically the end game. Taiwan has no ability to overcome boots on the ground. They don't even take their defense seriously -- they haven't updated their defense doctrine (e.g., annual Han Kuang) for decades now.

> get real.

Hmm, who is more credible, the literal government of Japan or some rando.

This shift in the balance of power has been on-going for well over 10 years now. I've been following this for many years, so it's jarring to read very un-informed opinions on the balance of power in WESPAC, especially as it relates to PRC and Taiwan.

Read the many warnings from the various heads of INDOPACOM: China’s Sea Control Is a Done Deal, ‘Short of War With the U.S.’ [1]

OR

"Indeed, the overall balance of conventional military power along China’s borders has shifted dramatically in China’s favor." [2]

By the way, this is against the USA, not just Taiwan, which has a joke of a military.

> China will immediately be sanctioned by all the countries, leading to its collapse

LOL at this absurdly ignorant take.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/world/asia/south-china-se...

[2] - https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Articl...

> But there are shipyards in other high-income countries e.g. in Europe […]

China is #1, but Korea is #2, and Japan is #3:

* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...

Is Japan a low-wage country?

Given that the US shipyards are 'full' with US Navy work, ordering a bunch of merchant marine ships from our allies would boost them and give us trust-worthy vessels.

While civilian-like designs are built there, encourage those same allies to build US-stationed shipyards and order a number of military-oriented designs to help boost domestic knowledge:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Sealift_Command

Note: building one of a design is not good, and two is probably just as bad. If you're going to order ships, putting in an order of >6 is the only way to get economies of scale.

Another option would be to order civilian-like designs with a 'basic' shell, and then do retrofitting for military needs domestically.

> Given that the US shipyards are 'full' with US Navy work, ordering a bunch of merchant marine ships from our allies would boost them and give us trust-worthy vessels.

Both Canada and Mexico would be obvious allies for this, and it would be a win/win solution for less sensitive ships / ship components (e.g. finish shell, then fit in US shipyards).

> Another option would be to order civilian-like designs with a 'basic' shell, and then do retrofitting for military needs domestically.

This has historically been the biggest problem with the US Navy -- they're really dumb / bad at specifications.

Imho, the US would be well-served by taking ultimate control of ship design out of the Navy's sole hands, and infusing someone with a cost-focused incentive into the process.

It's a terrible joke at this point that the USN starts with "We'll pick an off the shelf foreign design" and then customizes it so much it's no longer mass producible.

>the US would be well-served by taking ultimate control of ship design out of the Navy's sole hands, and infusing someone with a cost-focused incentive into the process.

The highest concern for the Navy isn't cost, it is will the ship survive in war. You can make a navy ship a lot cheaper by sacrificing armor and reliability. But those are thing the navy doesn't want to sacrifice. Cost is important, but it is at most #3 on the list of concerns.

Since I have family in the Navy, and want those ships to protect me if there is a war I agree with the navy. Cost is important, but it is not the most important thing.

There is a finite amount of money.

Given that the Navy claims it needs more ships, and god knows extended and double-pump deployments bear that out, it might be better served by having 2 less capable ships than 1 more capable ship.

In the same way that the M3 and M4 beat Germany, despite being individually inferior to mid and late war German tanks.

Furthermore, the clusterfuck that is the Constellation-class frigate procurement program proves that the Navy is objectively bad at understanding how shifting requirements interacts with build time and cost.

PS: You're not the only person with family in the Navy.

> Both Canada and Mexico would be obvious allies for this

Yeah…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_trade_war_w...

> and it would be a win/win solution for less sensitive ships / ship components (e.g. finish shell, then fit in US shipyards).

Canadian shipyards are actually relatively busy nowadays:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Shipbuilding_Strategy

To the point that some things will not be built locally:

* https://news.usni.org/2024/11/08/canadian-officials-pricing-...

* https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...

Not sure if some more civilian-leaning building capacity could perhaps be available.

My theory is that Trump is playing the Nixon madman strategy w/ regards to trade. If everyone thinks he's crazy, he thinks he'll get better deals without having to do anything painful.

And for optics purposes, all he needs is "some win", not something that materially matters.

But as with all Trumpisms, we'll see. :\

I bring up Canada and Mexico because using their shipyard capacity (especially Mexico) would be a win-win: forex investment in heavy industry for them, competitive labor costs for the US, and the US Navy gets recapitalized.

> My theory is that Trump is playing the Nixon madman strategy w/ regards to trade. If everyone thinks he's crazy, he thinks he'll get better deals without having to do anything painful.

Have you tried listening to his speeches at rallies? Not the clips or extracts, and not transcripts, but the full speeches from start to finish.

Dude is all over the place. It's often hard to tell what planet he's on.

During one of the presidential debates he went on about immigrants eating cats and dogs.

I have and watched that full debate. It's weird though, because "he's crazy" seems overly reductionist.

Or at least, he's crazy in the same way George W Bush was dumb.

Which is to say, it's a facade they play because they find it works with their base and to their advantage.

> Which is to say, it's a facade they play because they find it works with their base and to their advantage.

I do not believe it is a façade in either case (Bush, Trump).

Bush W is one of only ~10 US presidents to have an advanced degree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Un...

It's a mistake to ignore facts because they're inconvenient to what we want to believe.

And thinking Trump only won 2 elections because of other people is an difficult fit with reality.

Just because you or I dislike someone doesn't mean we should discount them.

Having worked in Japan; Yes most certainly it is a low wage country.

>The average salary in Japan is 6,200,000 Japanese Yen (JPY) or 39818 USD per year in 2024 (as per the exchange rate in May 2024). https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/average-salary-in-japan

The low wages and overtime culture that exists there is the greatest contributor to their lack of marriage and low birthrate in my opinion.

Korea has the same issue from my understanding.

> China is #1, but Korea is #2, and Japan is #3

Yes, I know.

> Is Japan a low-wage country?

I never claimed that in my post. E.g. means "exempli gratia", or "for example". Thus the statement "shipyards in other high-income countries e.g. in Europe" meaning "shipyards in other high-income countries for example in Europe". Which does not preclude other high-income countries existing outside Europe.

"insulate the US shipbuilding industry from international competition, leading to them resting on their laurels"

This is what I don't get.

The Jones Act is about keeping ship building at home, in the US. So protective. By locking out foreign competition. It's a 'protective' law, to isolate and protect US industry.

How will opening the US to buy and operate foreign ships, somehow make the US build more US ships?

Look at other Industries that have been outsourced.

Once markets are open, the manufacturing "leaves" the US.

So how will repealing the Jones Act somehow reverse what is seen in every other industry.

If you are protected from facing competition, then you don’t need to actually compete. Therefore, you don’t develop the competitive advantages. You remain at a competitive disadvantage, but it doesn’t matter since you don’t actually have to face the competition… until someday when the protection is removed and you are left to face the more advantaged competition.

> If you are protected from facing competition, then you don’t need to actually compete. Therefore, you don’t develop the competitive advantages. You remain at a competitive disadvantage, but it doesn’t matter since you don’t actually have to face the competition… until someday when the protection is removed and you are left to face the more advantaged competition.

However, it's not uncommon for a company or industry to fail to develop a competitive advantage, and then go bankrupt and disappear.

Without the Jones Act, it's quite possible that the US shipbuilding industry may have ended up even more moribund than it is now, decades ago.

It is already moribund to the point of uselessness, yet it is still imposing enormous economic costs on the entire country. If it's goal was to maintain the ability of the US to build and staff ships, then it has utterly and completely failed, and yet it's costs remain. I have never heard a compelling argument why we should keep it.

Without it, we probably wouldn't have a thriving US shipbuilding industry, but we would have significantly (probably orders of magnitude more) intra-state shipping, which would require more ships that would most likely come from close allies which would boost _their_ shipping industry.

For strategic purposes, obviously having our own shipping industry would be better, but that's apparently not on the table. I'll take, as a close second best option, an improved shipbuilding industry of our allies, with a heaping side helping of massive economic benefit.

At the very list ships built in Italy, (NATO partner), Japan, South Korea (close allies with a ship building industry) should be allowed. Probably we should allow countries like Kenya, Vietnam, Chile (random non-nato countries that don't have ship building but could and seem like places that we want to encourage to become closer to us).

Yes Jones act is failure.

But, not seeing how allowing foreign built ships, with foreign crews, owned by foreign companies, somehow leads to a stronger US shipping industry.

The argument I provided in the message starting this subthread that you answered, was to repeal the Jones Act COMBINED with enacting other subsidies and investment to revitalize US domestic shipbuilding and the maritime sector. Merely repealing the Jones Act without any of the other measures would indeed lead to a quick collapse of what little is left of the US civilian maritime sector.

(Nuclear option: US Navy ensures Freedom of the Seas only for US flagged vessels. Your Liberia-flagged ship gets attacked by pirates, or even some state actor? Ask the Liberian navy to come to your help. And no, this isn't really a serious suggestion that would be in the US interest.)

Ok. I agree with that. And your original comments.

Guess this thread overall had devolved into 'just repeal' and let the 'free market' toughen up the Americans that have gotten weak. Free market will sort it out.

Subsidies and Investments are correct, but deemed 'bad' by the people wanting to cut government.

> If you are protected from facing competition, then you don’t need to actually compete.

You mean like all the (e.g.) garment and other factories competed against foreign manufacturers… and the companies decided to close up shop and move overseas?

The main garments that are still made in the US are those for the military due to domestic production regulations in procurement rules.

Clothing seems different: the amount of labor needed to make a single low-value item is very high. While fabric production is quite automated, assembly into clothing is done by low-paid skilled people using equipment that is not substantially different from what someone might use at home to make clothing. The US, understandably, can’t really compete, and this doesn’t seem to bad for the US. I expect that the US can make fabric just fine, and we produce plenty of cotton.

Steel making and ship building are done with heavy machinery, at least to a sufficient extent that I would expect wages to matter less.

Sure, but 'competition' by itself doesn't mean those industries would win and stay in the US. Look at all the industries where there was competition and left the US.

There are industries the US should support for defense, you don't want to be buying your weapons from your enemies. See the drive to bring Chips back to the US.

Allowing wonton outsourcing is finally being seen as maybe not a forgone good.

I would imagine that the Chinese are good at wonton, though wanton outsourcing of wontons may not be in the best interests of local "pork" spending. Maybe if we had more details on how that whole Bronze Age Collapse went down we might have better ideas of what to avoid, but learning from history isn't very popular.

Fresh wontons travel poorly, and excellent fresh wantons are available at reasonable prices, locally made, even in high cost of living areas like the Bay Area.

When the Industrial Age collapses, and no computers work anymore, we should be sure to write down the reasons on something more durable,,,, this time around.

When you protect industries you get Boeing, you don't get productive markets, you get zombie companies who can fail all day without consequences and still get contracts because they are the mandatory only choice.

Airbus benefits from plenty of protectionist French/EU policies but don't seem to have the same issues that Boeing does

You mean you haven't observed the same issues Boeing has yet.

Why not? Boeing had domestic competition in the airliner industry until the 90s. They still have competition in the military contracting side of their business for most classes of product. Whatever went wrong with Boeing due to protectionism preventing competition must have happened quite fast.

Airbus's other European competition disappeared at around the same time Boeing's US competition did. Further, the time is not how long it took for the problems to manifest but how long they took to be recognized. Boeing was not put under the microscope until long after the rot had taken hold. Airbus has yet to be put under the microscope.

I think the unfortunate end state from that line of thinking, is that the US as a country is a 'zombie', a hollowed out shell, where there are no industries left. The US can't compete purely on cost. We don't have the numbers of people, or education to keep up with the world. We'll end up being just a few financial and IT companies that only have corporate headquarters here, and the bulk of the work is off shore.

Of course. I don't have any answers. Because I agree, protectionism creates "Boeing's". It's almost like global unfettered capitalism is un-stoppable and leading us to a dystopia of lowest bidder, cheapest labor possible.

> I think the unfortunate end state from that line of thinking, is that the US as a country is a 'zombie', a hollowed out shell, where there are no industries left.

An article from 2016, "Think nothing is made in America? Output has doubled in three decades":

* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outp...

Manufacturing share of GDP has declined, the number of jobs has declined (due to automation), but output is up. The US the second biggest country (16%) after China (32%):

* https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing#List_of_countrie...

Wait, is that analysis lumping energy / oil / petroleum refining in with manufacturing?

You can't compete on cost when you demand things be regulated.

Take for example: Medicine, we mandate doctors go through ~11 years of education before they are qualified and then complain about the cost and say that we can get the procedure done in MX for cheaper. Of course, Med school starting at 17 and practicing at 25 is cheaper than what we do. https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/1ddxrt2/considering...

Steel: We want to carbon neutral steel production vs China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy63PEgmm8w

I am not against regulation and safety, I think we should all have clean air and water safe medicine and good food. The only way for us in the west to get that however is to pay the cost.

If we aren't willing to pay the cost then what we are doing is robbing our children, not only of a future with a clean safe earth but also of their economic future as while their peers in lax countries will have to deal with the pollution they will also have work and knowledge.

There are lots of industries left, and the US is in general quite competitive. Yes wages are higher here, but we have the technology and capital to use advanced manufacturing techniques which reduce the amount of labor required to make things, so we don't need to rely on huge numbers of underpaid workers to make things economically. American wages are high because American workers are ridiculously productive.

Part of the problem may be the US dollar being the reserve currency. This increases the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, and makes our cost of production higher. The dollar itself crowds out exports, similar how with Dutch disease fossil fuels crowd out other exports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Economics is far from an exact science though, there's many other possible factors.

The US has been competing on Quality and Safety. I assure you anyone working at the US factory is happy they are no longer at risk of nicknames like "lefty" or "stubby" - referring to the missing limbs that used to be common in some positions. If you don't work in manufacturing you may not care, but a lot of people still do.

Let’s turn it around. How does keeping the Jones Act ensure a competitive shipbuilding industry in the US? We could easily subsidize the shipbuilders, pay for training programs, and so on. But blocking competition just keeps the market uncompetitive. We have no problem with subsidizing farmers and roads so why not shipbuilders if it keeps our navy competitive?

> Let’s turn it around. How does keeping the Jones Act ensure a competitive shipbuilding industry in the US? We could easily subsidize the shipbuilders, pay for training programs, and so on. But blocking competition just keeps the market uncompetitive.

Because the US can't "easily subsidize the shipbuilders, pay for training programs, and so on." It has an ideological dysfunction that prevents that. Even if you could manage to get a program like that passed, there's a large chance it'd get cut in 10 years by some libertarian to pay for yet another tax cut.

> We have no problem with subsidizing farmers and roads so why not shipbuilders if it keeps our navy competitive?

That's only because of how the Constitution apportions senators and the electoral college. Farmers are spread out in a way that gives them disproportionate political power.

>Because the US can't "easily subsidize the shipbuilders, pay for training programs, and so on." It has an ideological dysfunction that prevents that. Even if you could manage to get a program like that passed, there's a large chance it'd get cut in 10 years by some libertarian to pay for yet another tax cut.

I need to weigh in on this, I think. I don't know of many libertarians that would refuse to make an exception for strategic industries... you can't buy your ammunition from the enemy, even if their price is half of the domestic cost. And you can't even really be sure who your enemies will be when you find yourself desperately needing it.

If there was ever any objection to these subsidies and programs, I suggest that we might look at the neocons and neoliberals instead of the libertarians.

>That's only because of how the Constitution apportions senators and the electoral college. Farmers are spread out in a way that gives them disproportionate political power.

Well, about that... I sort of think maybe our food supply is also one of those strategic industries. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

> Well, about that... I sort of think maybe our food supply is also one of those strategic industries. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

It is, but our political system isn't wise enough to care. It's pissed away a lot of other strategic industries for stupid reasons in the mean time. And with the nationalization of politics, I'm not sure farm state senators will continue to have the ability to focus on serving their constituents' interests in the future like they have.

But these days, isn't it similarly the case that security cameras, routers, phones, and similar products could have security-related concerns just like ammunition? I can't imagine cold-war-era US would have been happy buying their telephone networking equipment and fax machines from the USSR, even if they could have somehow offered a better price and performance.

>But these days, isn't it similarly the case that security cameras, routers, phones, and similar products could have security-related concerns just like ammunition? I

Possibly. If I were in Congress, I would try to do something about it, but I'm not and pretty impotent in this regard.

>I can't imagine cold-war-era US would have been happy buying their telephone networking equipment and fax machines from the USSR

But we have to pretend that China is our friend. We have to pretend that even if they have some internal problems, that they're on track to becoming this reasonable democracy. We have to pretend that the Han are a people who are willing to coexist as equals on this planet with non-Han, and that though they've always historically been concerned only with their traditionally held geography, that they won't have [cough]Tibet[cough] expansionist ambitions on that continent or others.

I don't know what could be done about all of this. If, for instance, there were another president who wanted to do something about it, and tried to spur redevelopment of our industry and economy, even ignoring all the political bullshit he'd have to navigate... what happens when the secret talks somehow leak to the Chinese intelligence servies (as they inevitably would), and they start interfering before he could even start? Not that I like the idea of a president taking such power, but the idea that 535 Congressmen should instead do it openly (or could do it secretly) when the Chinese would sabotage such efforts is sort of absurd. Painted into a corner, and the people who painted us here are all senile or dead of old age.

> It has an ideological dysfunction that prevents that.

Just slap a "national security" label on it. semi-/s

Don't look at just the ship builders. Look at the shipping industry where ships are basically non-existent and the old shipping lanes are dead.

It won't.

The only way to solve American manufacturing woes is to start punishing people who are willing to sell out their country for shareholder profit.

Should have done it 60 years ago, but better late than never.

The US can't build a Supermax cargo ships for $0 profit at a price lower than Chinese shipyards can build one while making a profit.

The US could if the US Supermax had US-superpowers.

Like it avoids certain dock taxes/tariffs. Tuned correctly, the US Supermax over time could eke out enough profit that some would be tenable.

Unfortunately the best middle step is probably going to be convincing the naval yards to make some civilian ships, first.

Exactly.

Which is why you stop exclusively using market forces to determine how industry should be spread out around the globe.

Are wages the principal component of “commodity” ship building? I’d have imagined equipment costs vastly exceed wages for building a relatively standard cargo ship.

> Are wages the principal component of “commodity” ship building?

Wages and steel.

China is the world's largest steel producer (US makes ~4% of global output). Reminder that Nippon Steel wanted to buy US Steel and (AIUI) keep US plants open, but that was killed by both Biden and Trump:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_acquisition_of_U.S._S...

If US management/ownership cannot keep a company alive, perhaps let non-US folks give it a try if they're willing keep US plants open. The world learned lots of lessons from Toyota (who learned from Denning), perhaps Nippon Steel can teach a few things.

Don't we have a suppressed shipping industry? Open it up and get the ships moving between the midwest and east and south and build demand. The old shipping lanes are basically non-existent.

> Even so, given US wage levels it's a fantasy to believe that US shipyards could compete with, say, China.

And material costs

Part of the problem with American companies competing with the rest of the world on supposedly equal footing is American companies have to pay their sailors and abide by workplace regulations that Chinese/etc shipping can ignore. In other words it's not equal footing, it can't be equal footing, and America should stop pretending that competing on equal footing with shipping companies that use slave labor would even be a good thing. Subsidies are necessary, the libertarians who hate that can get bent.

> The point of the Jones Act—or at least that one particular section that a lot of folks tend to talk about—is to have US citizens and US ships available in case of war. But given US prices relative to the prices for other countries, it costs more, and the US has not been willing to pay the premium to support that readiness.

While we didn't get the ships, we did get a 100 foot railway in Canada: https://maritime-executive.com/article/judge-rules-that-cana...

> If there's a war, and you need ship matériel to the war zone, do you think commercial ships will enter it?

Yes, I think so. In wartime, a government can order them to do so. For example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Mauretania_(1906)#First_Wo...):

“Mauretania was planned to replace the Lusitania on the Transatlantic run after the Lusitania was sunk, but she was ordered by the British government to serve as a troop ship to carry British soldiers during the Gallipoli campaign.”

People think ships for war are all warships, but the most important are transport, and those ships exist in large numbers.

In case of war, those ships get commandeered and taken by whoever thinks they can get away with it.

Ships are also not nearly as prevalent as they were in WW2 (as international capable jet transport didn't really exist then). Vietnam used troop transports, but I don't think Desert Storm used much beyond airplanes.

Bulk goods and supplies are another matter.

>Ships are also not nearly as prevalent as they were in WW2 (as international capable jet transport didn't really exist then). Vietnam used troop transports, but I don't think Desert Storm used much beyond airplanes.

As someone who supported loading a whole division's worth of vehicles onto ships during the Iraq war, I would like to know what you're basing that on. Sure, the people go by plane, but the people represent an overwhelming minority of the total tonnage moved to deploy a unit.

That’s the problem with resilience - you have to pay for it. That premium looks like a terrible waste right up until it looks like an incredible bargain.

US shipbuilding died because the industry died. Modern shipping is a fundamentally different industry.

It wasn’t killed by foreigners, it was killed, just like the railroads, by the interstate highway system and trucks. We don’t need 150 piers and train freight/ferry terminals in NYC because we can stage trucks from a limitless number of truck terminals. Less capital cost, less labor, less wasted inventory, less chokepoints (key infrastructure, unions, etc). The guys who operate the Staten Island ferry make as much as 5-7 bus drivers.

You need a smaller number of large players with multimodal integration. Containers, tankers and special purpose for oceangoing and tugs/barges for near water.

The Navy is at risk because our defense procurement infrastructure is tied to the nostalgia of old admirals with dreams of fighting WW2, and struggle to identify the next thing. The main viable warships afloat are submarines and the capacity to grow that is in such a sorry state we basically keep the yard running.

> Less capital cost, less labor, less wasted inventory, less chokepoints

I don't think this is a fair comparison without considering the subsidies that go to trucking, which are substantial: the interstate highway system, manufacturer and consumer auto subsidies, municipal tax codes and development that favors single family homes (further bolstering auto and road industries).

Consider that most of the damage done to roads is done by heavy trucks, but the cost is spread across everyone. That is effectively a huge subsidy.

I agree, but shipping is cutthroat. They care about out of pocket cost.

In the case of NYC and other cities, it shows the edges/limits of your argument. The entire waterfront and west side was dedicated to rail, industry and shipping to support the city and the port. The meat packing district was… a bunch of slaughterhouses. We traded that infrastructure for highways. There’s good and bad aspects to that.

> the 747 CMC is based on a reliable and proven aircraft with existing economies of scale.

This is no longer true, unfortunately. The assembly line tooling has been decommissioned and scrapped, the supply chain is shut down, essential personnel has retired. If you want to restart the line, you would have to fund the entire 747-8 program over again from the ground up.

The CMC concept has been replaced by Rapid Dragon.

I think when it comes to Naval Power the US's grand strategy throughout the modern era has mostly been based on the fact that the continental US is, de facto, a (very) big island when it comes to the connections with the rest of the world.

So, in the event of a new world war they would have two options: one, maintain naval power superiority and thus ensure that the things that the US needs to come from over-seas still come through, or two, return to autarky and economic isolationism (which, up to a point, they could sustain based on their home resources) and hope for the best. It's interesting that the current US administration is doing a combination of the two, see the debacle for the Panama Canal when it comes to my first point, and the return to economic isolationism and even hints of wanting to incorporate Canada when it comes to my second point.

On the other hand Air Power has never ever won a big war all by itself. The only war that let's say was won via said Air Power alone was the 1999 war against Milosevic's Yugoslavia, and, possibly, the First Gulf War. But the US won't be able to win a conventional war against China or/and Russia based on Air Power alone, never.

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> This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market.

This is what politicians just don’t seem to realise about industry and engineering.

People get good at things by doing them repeatedly and optimising. That’s the only proven way. So of course if we build a couple of naval ships every decade, maybe a giant train line every 30 years or similar, it will be done terribly.

Then there’s lots of hand wringing about how we can’t do this any more.

We are so, so far behind China in industrial capacity now. If we ever did get in a war with them they’d outbuild us 10 to 1. Technical advantages would be pretty much irrelevant at that level.

>This is what politicians just don’t seem to realise about industry and engineering.

Who gives these idiots power? Oh, that's right, we do.

Every two-bit is happy to screech about economics of scale out of one side of their mouth but you turn around and pick some other issue that they feel differently about and they want it regulated in whatever way they fancy, economics and long term feedback loops be damned.

The real problem is that western cultural norms (because let's be real here, this isn't just a US problem) don't sufficiently punish and dissuade people from being like this. It's not even lightly taboo unless you're a public figure and do it flagrantly, and even then nobody "cares", it's just an angle by which the people who don't like you get to fling rhetorical poo at you. And the problem runs bottom to top. It's not just the politicians, it's all of us.

Worse if someone does care, the other side see this and reflexively opposed it. So often good things one side starts are stopped by the other the next election and so progress could not be made.

Not just politicians in general, but people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option.

They are conditioned to worship at the altar of small businesses and good ol' craftsmanship. (And plot after plot they blindly erect yet another replica of the standard American Dream with the compulsory backyard where they truly can be free, and conduct HOA approved activities, and complain about the neighbor making a noise with their fucking weedwhacker, and complain about the other neighbor that has a problem with the smoke from the occasional backyard cooking.) Otherwise it's gentrification, more traffic and oh, ew, maybe even affordable-unit-dwellers.

> Not just politicians in general, but people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option.

You can build a tract of homes in 90 days (or less) using stick frame. They won't be fancy, but they'll be up to code (and with a little extra cost (<10%) and effort, they can be made much more efficient than just code).

A crew of 4-5 guys (plus some subs) can build a custon home in 80 days:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYd73YP57Ik&list=PL8XEQ1XKYN...

If you pipeline that and use a standardized, cookie-cutter plan an entire row can be build out in a similar time frame. Production builders do it all the time:

* https://www.newhomesource.com/learn/custom-or-production-bui...

There are of course mass-manufactured elements that can speed things up, like using trusses. There are also now services for pre-cut framing that saves on-site effor of measuring and such:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2FdAdxjSpw&list=PLDYh81z-Rh...

The building of the structure is not the bottleneck, it is the approval process and NIMBY road blocks that can add 2(+) years to a project.

It's not just the cost of building the house. Utilities and infrastructure (and the taxes to pay for it all) add up. Now, if you were to build smaller, densely, and close enough to amenities that residents could walk or bike to their daily activities, or to public transit that can take you farther away, you save a significant amount on initial AND recurring costs. And what's better, people WANT that! Or, a least, they're willing to eat the downsides in order to benefit from the upsides, including lower costs. But there lies the rub: when these types of places get built, they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs. So people say, "Why spend the same for less?" and move to a traditional suburb (or, more likely, put off home-buying altogether).

The problem with housing in America always comes down to the way it was financialized and securitized: too much relies on "line go up, forever". There's no room for new blood/capacity (read:competition), there's no room for "investments" to lose value.

One of the problems is that the people who need housing aren't buying new houses.

Nobody is going to spend $x on a brand new house without having some say in it, and so those houses tend more and more toward "high end/luxury". After all, why go through the hassle of all the paperwork and building and NOT sell for the highest price you can get?

Same thing happens with cars; the market for car buyers is much larger than the market for new car buyers, but only new cars ever get made. Nobody is making used cars, or even the absolutely cheapest possible, which affects the whole supply.

Most new houses are only slightly custom. You generally start with a floor plan from the builder, and then choose the color of the walls or other minor details. Sometimes a new house is cheaper than a used one because you can move into a used house much quicker, while a with new house you have to wait for them to finish. Usually a new house is more expensive than a comparable used house, but not by much. Even a fully custom home is generally not much more expensive because your builder will tell you what costs a lot of money (if you ask for 8.5 foot ceilings the builder will talk you into 9 foot because those are much cheaper since precut parts are available), and what is insignificant. Generally walls can go anywhere and are cheap to move around.

Market prices is not the problem. The problem is getting these bigger projects through permitting is. The cost savings are lost in litigation.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/market-rate-housing-will-make-...

Charitably, that's a very flawed blog post. Studies of housing affordability in Finland should not be used to make points about America. Finland has a number of legal protections that shield its citizens from the rampant price-fixing, collusion, investor-oriented building, and other predations of the American market.

That's not to say housing construction regulation isn't a problem. It is, but two things can be problems at the same time.

Without reading your link: this is a problem across new and existing builds, so it can't be an issue wih permitting. Housing cost growth has outpaced wage growth for decades. We are reaching an inflection point of unaffordability (unequally distributed geographically, of course). The problem is that market rates must support a number of (often unnecessary or inflated) concerns, including but not limited to permitting and litigation. Profit for a rotating cast of securitized mortgage holders is another major one. Insolvent municipalities that can't see property taxes fall is another.

> they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs

Well, duh!

Yep, speed is pretty good, though there's still a long way to go.

As mentioned in this comment[0] land and labor are still the dominant part of the costs. So if municipalities would allow and prefer denser housing cost would be lower.

And of course if we are already talking about quasi-standardized (cookie-cutter) units, then there's even more reason to scale up projects so prefab components could be shipped in. (Though of course we again run into the tragedy of small scale. Metro areas are made up of too small suburban cities, they don't want a big project, they don't have the infrastructure for it, they don't want the extra traffic, and so on.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932445

In my experience pre-built framing just moves the error down into the foundation.

> In my experience pre-built framing just moves the error down into the foundation.

There are ± tolerances at every interface, so if you're off a bit on the foundation, you can balance things out in the rough frame, so by the time you get to finish framing things are pretty square/plumb/level.

But if the pre-built stuff is ±0, then there's no wiggle room in that part of the build, so the rest of it has to be that much tighter as you've not nowhere to adjust things.

It's true that small businesses and craftsmanship are not efficient, but that's not usually the main reason why houses are expensive. They are usually expensive because of planning controls. Look at the price of land: in places where houses are expensive, land with planning permission is by far the largest component of the cost of a house. Building work being expensive is usually a consequence of this.

Having said that, I've no idea where you live so it could be completely different in your area

The standard tract built house erected in 100 days by DR Horton/Lennar/etc is the streamlined, mass manufactured option.

Any more streamline than that is apparently more costly or otherwise unappealing to people. It isn’t not small businesses building most homes in the US, they are large, and sometimes publicly traded businesses.

Every once in a while someone will bulid a house in a day. However it is more costly to do this. you either need expensive really fast cure concrete or a low quality wood foundation. You need to carefully plan who is where and when so plumbers and electritions are no standing in the same spot (think sink with an outlet nearby). You need to specify where everything is to a pipe and wire are not in the same place with enough slack that the pipe can be put in. You pay your crews to arrive early so as soon as the last crew is done with a section next con start.

your 100 day house has slack built in so if one crew is running late the next isn't affected. This means you can tightly schedule the labor a month in advance.

Tract home builders are building hundreds of homes in quick succession. 1 house in 100 days, but also 500 houses within 2 years.

There is no slack, because each team has to be operating in lockstep so work never stops, otherwise margins tank and a profitable project becomes a loss.

The expertise of managing and executing this non trivial task is why those businesses succeed, and why landowners outsource development to them.

There is slack - but the slack is in the house schedule not the human. A house can sit for several work hours with nothing going on and not care. The humans working on the house do not like being idle - they are working for money and when they have no work they get no pay and in turn that makes it hard for them to pay their own bills. The bank cares a bit about idle time, but the interest charges from a few hours here and there of idle time isn't that much and so that is where builders put the slack in. Of course those interest charges still add up and so there is effort to reduce them but the costs of scheduling a crew and then not being ready for them adds up even more than interest.

They are still too small to innovate (to take risks, to invest in better technology), the jobs are also small for better tooling, everything requires too much on-site labor, etc.

SFH is itself a waste of money. And land, which is especially expensive where housing costs are high. For every small house different crews need to go there, prepare the site, do the foundation, etc.

Half of the hard costs is labor. (Which is, again, usually high in areas with high housing costs.)

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so...

And of course the opportunity cost due to lost density effect is substantial, blablabla.

The tragedy is that there's a huge discontinuity here, and overcoming that would require a lot of capital (social, political, financial).

And in general construction productivity is extremely meh, to phrase it politely.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insight...

>people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option.

It's a pretty specific type of person who rejects the construction of streamlined social housing - somebody who definitely doesnt pay rent and someone who probably receives it.

No it is people who have no idea how mass produced a conventional house is. They think there is something for a factory to do. Then they go elsewhere and complain how houses all look the same these days.

People do a lot of inconsistent things, a pretty bad one among these is complaining that housing is expensive, and then paying ~40% of the cost just for land every time someone wants to live somewhere, and when folks recommend putting homes on top of each other a plurality opposes this. (insert surprised pikachu image)

Of course there's a lot of things to automate. As I mentioned in this comment half of hard costs is labor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932445

Yeah a competent framing crew can bang together a 2-story 4000 square foot home from sticks in 2 weeks.

Transportation costs are so high that it's often cheaper to stick-build a house than to bring in a manufactured one.

The manufactured ones only win when it's very tiny (think: trailer) or when you do an entire development with them, and even then you often need a rail line or something to make it work.

Even the "put together on site" kit ones run into problems that the stick-built basically avoid, like things not lining up exactly right.

We're building houses, maybe not enough, and almost certainly not exactly where some people want to live, at the price they want. But they're being built.

Note that stick built most of the wood is cut to size at a factory. If the wall is 8 foot, then you just grad the precut stack of 92-5/8" studs (after adding the top and bottom plates that works out to 8 foot with some needed slop for the ceiling and flooring), likewise you will get 104-5/8" for 9 foot walls. No other wall size is common in the US because then you have to cut all the boards on site for higher costs. Likewise the windows and doors are standard sizes from a factory. No plumber is making pipes on site, they just use a factory made pipe, valve, sink... A modern house really is a kit, there are just enough different size options and styles that there are many factory options and it seems each is custom even though most of the parts are standard.

Yeah, when people think "modular home" they think pre-assembled wall panels, etc, but those have other problems (like it's hard to wrap the insulation around the walls when you have to connect them).

Real expensive custom homes are where you change dimensions so that non-standard parts are needed (not even things like wider doors, but non-standard widenesses).

The input cost prohibit economies of scale. The US cannot produce ships at scale without drastically lowering labor and material costs.

This is a features of deindustrialization, offshoring, specialization, etc. The so-called uncultured rubes decrying globalization have a point on this one.

> If we ever did get in a war with them

is that normal to think like this?

do most americans think like this?

The general advice with respect to conflict strategies is to base your plans on what your (current or potential) adversary is capable of, not what you believe their intentions are.

In an article about naval shipbuilding I would say thats a normal thought.

Well if you look at history it is a story of almost continuous war so it would be very optimistic indeed not to consider it.

The returns to warfare changed significantly with the Industrial Revolution. Greater economic growth is now possible in times of peace rather than war.

The Paradox game Victoria 2 does a good job simulating this dynamic. Highest score is possible by sitting out ww2. https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-v... Is a nice write up.

But that doesn't stop various dictators from making war.

most wars after ww2 were made by…?

Terrorists in africa from what I can tell. But againts a dictator who I also would not support.

you don't hear of them though.

american history

Their role in the Punic wars was fairly small.

looking at this from the other side of the world, it feels like americans are so insecure, as if they are constantly frightened

And who would ever even attack the US? Massive military spending and they are isolated from all the potential enemies behind two huge oceans. Average american should worry about civil war or maybe nukes. Nothing else will ever reach them.

They may not attack the US directly like the Japanese did, but China may want to take over its neighbours to expand. Just like Russia could.

FWIW, Japan attacked a military base in am American territory, not then a state, and never had serious plans to invade America proper. They thought they could knock America out of the fight before America realized it was even in a fight with a decisive demoralizing victory that would leave Americans feeling that ceding control of the Pacific to Japan was rational and practical.

Obviously that theory didn't work for Japan then, but there's nothing to say nobody else couldn't make the same mistake again. The mentality of the American public may have changed considerably since WWII, maybe Americans are already demoralized and no longer certain of their own righteousness. Maybe the would-be attacker has some reason to believe they can influence the mentality of the American public using control of mass media popular with Americans. Or maybe they're just so certain of themselves and their advantages they think America will back down when push comes to shove because if the positions were reversed, they would back down and they project that onto America.

I think that the events that played out after September 11th show that Americans still have the same reaction.

Sarah Paine makes this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eebSpobsPmM

There are reasons they might think this would be different. That would be (probably) 30+ years in the past, in that case American civilians were targeted, on American soil, using flights full of American civilians as the weapons.

I do think that America would probably go to war if US military bases or carrier groups were attacked by the Chinese, but I think it's plausible that China might come to believe otherwise.

I appreciate the worry for everyone else. Truly it makes a huge difference in global politics. Like parent I am still surprised how paranoid the US seems. It’s almost like growing up overprotected you become extremely fearful. There is almost no practical cost to US with going into war so the result is that US is constantly fighting and makes it the core focus of the society (along with innovation and more positive sides of US culture)

Pearl Harbor was devastating and Hawaiians probably have plenty of reason to worry about the defense going forward. Then again I looked up where it is and I am shocked how remote the islands are. I think it was first and foremost symbolic attack. Not a real threat to west coast.

The rest of the world should be very scared if the US isn't ready to go to peer-state war.

- Europe has under-invested in its military for 30 years.

- Japan by constitutional decree.

- South Korea is rapidly building out an armaments industry, but they're also still at war.

- The UK is gutted and unable to afford much of anything.

- India and Pakistan are laser focused on each other.

If China or Russia feel in an expansionist mood, who other than the US has the capability to stop them?

Historical echoes of the above dynamic are why Americans bristle at criticism of their military spending.

Sure, everyone's a pacifist until someone invades...

Russia has basically burned up their entire ex-Soviet equipment + munitions stocks blundering around in Ukraine. They're not really in a position to open another front with any substantial state.

I'd still be a bit worried if I was Georgia, possibly Moldova, maybe the Baltics if European defense commitments start looking even weaker, but to a large degree they're safer right now than they'd been with how badly depleted Russia is, not more at risk.

Poland's spending heavily right now (2025 projection is 4.7% of GDP) and rapidly up-arming itself. In terms of conventional conflict they're going to be in a pretty decent position.

I don't really see much in ways for Russia to be particularly "expansionist" beyond the places they're already an ongoing problem in. (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova).

Yes and:

Pax Americana protects the global maritime order.

I believe, but cannot prove, that hegemony and "forever war" are inextricable. a la "if you want peace, prepare for war".

--

I'm not justifying or defending Pax Americana or American exceptualism. IMHO, there is no justice, fairness, ethical, or moral defence. Statecraft, world affairs, empire, hegemony are amoral. And while the status quo sucks, for some a lot more than others, I think we'll miss it when it's gone.

India is much more concerned with China these days.

> I was struck on this trip by how clearly India’s chosen rival is no longer Pakistan, but China. It does not matter if we are talking in military, technological, economic, or even cultural terms. The default comparison Indians make is with China.

https://scholars-stage.org/observations-from-india/

China and Russia are already expanding as we speak, being allied in the invasion of Ukraine

Symbolic? The point of the attack was to eliminate the US as a threat to Japan by taking out its carrier fleet.

Regardless of whether or not Japan was a threat to the West coast, do you seriously expect a nation to stand by and simply shrug off something like that?

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Fear of invasion creates massive military spending

Massive military spending creates peaceful times

Peaceful times create low military spending

Low military spending creates fear of invasion

Also the Canadians are the only ones who ever burned down DC.

It doesn't always work this way, and very much hasn't in the USA. It's been more akin to:

Fear of invasion creates massive military spending

Massive military spending creates a need for justification, and ability to invade

The need for justification, and ability to invade create wars abroad

Wars abroad create enemies and fear of invasion

Has there ever been a period in history where the dominant military power said "okay, no one can challenge us, let's roll back our military spending" and the peace remained?

I can think of a lot of previous hegemons who got complacent and lost everything.

I can't think of a period in history where most nations were democracies either, where most women could vote, or where most people had access to public education.

But alas, here we are.

And I can't think of a period in history where I can use a tiny device in my pocket to order a coat with same day delivery, but somehow invading Russia in winter still seems like a bad idea.

I see no reason to believe that democracies with women's suffrage and public education are immune to military competition. I certainly wouldn't want to risk massive upheaval of the world order which jeopardizes the existence of all those things to find out.

9-11 is a counter example. Asymmetric warfare is a constant threat.

A one-off terrorist attack (one that required years of planning) isn't a war, and cannot scale to a war.

It was enough for us to work with, invade a few countries and spend a few trillion.

That’s a funny statement because the other side of the world from the US includes places like Ukraine and central Africa (which is currently gearing up for a Third Congo War).

Enjoy the Pax Americana while it lasts. You won’t like what comes next.

There’s a pretty realistic China/US war scenario. China invades Taiwan and then the US responds militarily. I’m not saying that this is a particularly likely scenario, but it’s far from impossible.

The nature and number of the naval assets that China is building suggests that China invading Taiwan is actually very likely. Westerners who don't understand why China would want to do that get hung up on their lack of understanding, think it an irrational act (bad for trade, etc) and therefore unlikely for China to do. What they're missing is the concrete evidence of China preparing to do it.

Those amphibious landing ships have one purpose; they're as clear a signal as Russia building field hospitals near the border stocked with blood.

A bit off topic, but Russian field hospitals and blood supply was only the last, most obvious indicator.

The build up of troops could have been written off as sabre rattling, they did the same a year or two earlier. Sending a bunch of naval assets the long way around Europe was a much more clear sign, at least for me that's when I knew they were actually going to invade (again).

Bingo.

The terrifying thing about China's shipbuilding and armament focusing is "Why would they be building these specific things if they weren't planning on invading Taiwan?"

The focus on amphibious capability doesn't have a lot of dual purpose use...

"31 Amphibious Ships are 'Not Enough,' Expert Says" [0]

I guess the US is about to invade Cuba.

[0] https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/4/5/31...

> Why would they be building these specific things if they weren't planning on invading Taiwan?

It's basic, obvious, and rational defense policy. Everyone does it.

Why does the US have thousands and thousands of nukes? It's to ensure the destruction of any adversary in case of nuclear war.

The US isnt the only country that's entitled to an arms stockpile.

There's a difference between building nukes vs. building amphibious assault ships and transports.

The former aren't much use if you want to invade an island. The latter are.

https://asiatimes.com/2025/01/china-building-monster-barges-...

Pretending like Chinese needs to stockpile amphibious assault capabilities for defensive purposes is sticking your head in the sand.

> There's a difference between building nukes vs. building amphibious assault ships and transports.

Nukes have essentially zero "defense" purposes. Yet all the great powers have them. It's called "good defense policy." All great powers do this.

> Pretending like Chinese needs to stockpile amphibious assault capabilities for defensive purposes is sticking your head in the sand.

Pretending that building out a military = instant invasion is paranoia.

Take a look at the USA military posture, including in Asia. See what forces are available.

So this means the USA is prepared to invade China any minute now? Plus nuke China, Russia because of the nukes?

Yes and: I vaguely recall that reunification was part of Xi's ideology, necessary for maintaining his domestic grip on power.

At this point in time, USA's isolationists may succeed in withdrawing from its foreign commitments. In which case, per your comment elsethread, realizing they no longer have USA's protection, Taiwan may capitulate.

Does anyone else not live off of propaganda here?

The Chinese civil war started in the 1900s, many many decades ago, not yesterday.

Every single last PRC leader has had a goal for reunification of China, including Mao, Deng, Xi, Hu, etc, etc.

Every last one of them.

The civil war didnt start yesterday.

Nope.

Thanks for the clarification. Next time I'll write "Xi, like every CCP leader before him, is wholly committed to retaking Taiwan."

It's important to understand what "reunification" means. The PRC is seeking "peaceful development" [1] towards the goal of reunification. To this end, the mainland encourages exchange, including investments and workers from Taiwan -- something like 1 to 2 million Taiwanese work or live in the mainland [2].

"Reunification" DOES NOT mean the absolutely idiotic policy that US "think tankers" imagine of the PRC scheming to invade the island as soon as military might exists. We have idiots in year 2000 writing drivel like "Jiang Zemin’s desire to make reunification his legacy indicate that Taiwan will be attacked soon" [3]. Hint: no such attack took place because this mindset exists nowhere but in the minds of the retarded think-tankers.

Secession of Taiwan is absolutely a red line, but outside of a move towards secession, the peaceful development will continue.

1: "actively promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations" - http://eng.chinamil.com.cn/SpecialReports/2024/Celebratingth...

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/opinion/international-wor...

3: https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2000/03/how-china-will-t...

China reunifies Taiwan: 100%

US responds militarily: not likely but possible

The only way the US will not respond militarily is if Taiwan chooses unification. By all accounts, Taiwan will not choose that. The US military has not been strategically shifting to the Indo-Pacific for more than 10 years now for no reason.

If China acted quickly in disabling American military assets in the region, it is conceivably possible that Taiwanese people could be demoralized and surrender to the PRC before America has a chance to muster more forces to the region. Even if this definitely wouldn't be possible, it's still possible that the PRC thinks otherwise and will try it, as Japan once did.

The counter to this is that it might make more sense for China to _not_ attack the United States with the anticipation that they sit it out. China attacking US forces/ naval bases makes it much harder for a president to sit back and say not our problem/ focus on economic sanctions.

Imagine if Russia started the invasion of Ukraine by bombing polish railways, so that the Ukrainians would not be able to get supplies/resources from the EU. I would think that the EU/Nato response to that would be much more severe than what happened in reality.

While Guam might be considered different, as most Americans cannot place it on a map and it is on the other side of the world, seeing caskets of all the US troops dying makes it pretty hard to politically shrug off as not our problem.

The game theoretic problem with this scenario (and thus why a Pacific escalation scenario is so dangerous) is that China has essentially all of its forces in the area around China, whereas the US and its treaty allies have their forces scattered around the world. Thus even if the US has a bigger military most of it won't be in theater on day 1 of a conflict, leading China to have every incentive to move as fast as possible and present a fait accompli to the West. If they choose to just do nothing to the US and hope America sits it out, it just gives the US time to redress this force imbalance in the region by moving in assets from around the world. That leads China to be strongly incentivized to strike US forces on day 1, in much the same way the IJN was incentivized to strike early and strike hard 85 years ago.

A naval invasion of Taiwan would be among the largest military operations in history, requiring immense preparation both to produce the necessary equipment and to move it into position, to say nothing of moving and training all the participating forces. In the era of satellite surveillance, the US would know months if not years in advance. They would almost certainly preposition forces in proximity both as a deterrent and as a potential response force. There's no comparing today's circumstances to a time when a carrier strike group could sneak up and launch a surprise attack on a US base.

Chinese naval assets, most particularly their large transports and landing craft, would be extremely vulnerable to antiship missiles. They're building those anyway, which suggests they have some sort of plan to use them after the antiship missile threat has been eliminated in the region. The most plausible way to accomplish that is to paralyze the American response by having Taiwan capitulate very fast, before the invasion actually takes place. Starting and finishing the war with the rapid destruction of key American military bases and surface assets (almost certainly using missiles, not a "sneaky carrier group") could shock Taiwan into a rapid capitulation, which in turn could neutralize (politically) the American fast attack subs that could otherwise decimate the vulnerable invasion fleet (which they are building, regardless of how little sense it makes to us.)

> They're building those anyway, which suggests they have some sort of plan to use them after the antiship missile threat has been eliminated in the region. The most plausible way to accomplish that is to paralyze the American response by having Taiwan capitulate very fast, before the invasion actually takes place.

There are a lot of very dumb assumptions baked into this. First, building something vulnerable to antiship missiles does not mean the plan is to use them under circumstances where anti-ship missiles aren't a threat. War necessarily involves casualties, and it is a perfectly rational strategy to endure some level of attrition. Next, wiping out american bases in close proximity does not eliminate the antimissile threat. Taiwan would be the ones firing anti-ship missiles, and after American forces are attacked they would have a nigh unlimited supply. Third, shocking Taiwan into a rapid capitulation is not a realistic strategy. Taiwan is a nearly unassailable fortress - with sufficient time and resources it could concievably be overwhelmed but the optimal strategy for Taiwan is to draw out the conflict as long as possible. Finally, if America is attacked, Taiwan's capitulation doesn't end the war. We have in the past fought to liberate allies who were capitulated by our enemies even when we ourselves were not attacked (see Kuwait in 1991), attack the US and the war goal changes to preventing an attack from every happening again.

Again, the reason you know they are building the invasion fleet is because we can see it from space. This isn't even something limited to the worlds' most elite intelligence agencies, anyone with a few hundred bucks can buy sattelite images of chinese shipyards. Before China is in a position to launch an invasion the US attack subs will already be in the strait of taiwan, there will be three carrier groups on permanent assignment to the pacific, and Taiwan will be sitting on top of an arsenal that could sink thousands of transport ships. America doesn't have to wait for war to break out to put these defenses in place. A chinese missile barage is not some new threat, every base in the region has been preparing for this scenario for decades now, and they still have several more years to make further preparations. Would America take losses if China launched a strike? Of course. Would we be caught with our pants down and have our military capability completely wiped out, unable to recover before the war was over? Not a chance.

The thing is that an amphibious invasion will likely not be the first move in the war. China will almost certainly strike hard to try and neuter US air and seapower close to the First Island Chain, and then impose a blockade to starve Taiwan into submission. The war would then center around the US and its allies trying to penetrate China's A2AD complex and keep food and supplies coming to Taiwan, while China builds up an invasion fleet after extensive use of airpower against Taiwanese ground installations that could threaten a beachhead.

That would be really hard considering that the Ryukyus reach almost adjacent to Taiwan.

Yeah taking some of the Ryukyus to build airbases and host anti ship missile forces would probably be an early objective to support the blockade. Depending on how bad the US is hit in the initial stages it wouldn’t even be out of the question to see an amphibious operation against Okinawa.

China would basically need to invade Japan to cut off Taiwan, ensuring that the USA and Japan are involved very early, so that makes an up front amphibious operation more likely.

I don't think you are getting the idea. ANY military operation of this scale, be it a massive blockade, an invasion, a coordinated strike on multiple US bases, they all are impossible to hide. Such large scale conventional strikes are exactly what these forces and the systems that support them are designed to deal with. There isn't going to be a point where China has knocked out the ability of Taiwan and its allies to defend the island and give China the opportunity to prepare for a minimally contested invasion. On day one they are going to be fighting a well prepared force that knew the attack was coming.

You can strike US air and seapower close to the first island chain, but the airpower will be replenished in hours and the seapower in days. Blockades require a massive naval advantage, otherwise the attacking navy can concentrate its forces and defeat the blockading navy in detail. That's before we just consider the anti-ship missile threat which would make operating near an unfriendly Taiwan extremely costly even with no naval opposition. Taiwan already has supplies to last for months in the event of a blockade, and would certainly stockpile more on the eve of a major conflict. That's going to be a lot of attrition.

The major reason China is concerned about the first island chain is because it is actually quite vulnerable to the gaps in the chain being closed off and itself blockaded. The islands of the chain have much more direct access to the pacific, meaning they are much more resistant to blockade. The US and its allies can shut off the lifeblood of China's economy and industrial power without sailing anywhere near Chinese defenses. Either China will have to sail out to dislodge them on their terms, or the Chinese people will have to endure a long period of high attrition and economic hardship with little demonstrable gain. That's not to say it would be impossible for China to win, but they're going to have to go up against an extremely powerful military alliance that has a lot of positional advantage in a protracted war and win a fair fight.

Rushing Taiwan, despite being a bad idea, is probably the best strategy they could have. Its odds of success are low, for the reasons already discussed, but if they are the right combination of clever and lucky they might be able to exploit some unrecognized weakness. If they can get control of the island, a lot of things flip in their favor. The island's natural resistance to invasion would make them nigh impossible to dislodge (for comparison during WW2, the US judged an attack on Formosa to be impossible despite the Japanese only having about 170,000 troops there and the local population being hostile to Japan). Access to the pacific would make it more difficult to effectively blockade China; they still could, but it would take more resources and more would slip through. Finally, having won something, the Chinese people would be more tolerant of the war's costs. I think this is a losing gamble, and believe the Chinese invasion ships are best used as bargaining chips for negotiation (as in 'we'll sink $10 billion worth of ships to avoid tariffs which would cost us $100 billion'), but perhaps someone high up in the Chinese leadership has a different opinion.

> Thus even if the US has a bigger military most of it won't be in theater on day 1 of a conflict, leading China to have every incentive to move as fast as possible and present a fait accompli to the West.

I disagree. I've think we've seen and will continue to see China acting slowly on this, because their primarily incentivized to not attack. This, on three fronts:

- China is not looking for a vassal state. It's looking for national reunification. War is a terrible way to incorporate people into your nation. Effective perhaps, but very much a last resort.

- Time isn't on Taiwan side— TSMC is losing is edge. The technological gap between TSMC and Chinese silicon companies is shortening with each year that passes by, and this is meaningful not only because TSMC is 25% of Taiwan's GDP [1], but also because it's the most strategic export they have geopolitically. World leaders care more about any disruption to the supply of cutting-edge chips than they care about the name of the island on a map. This is specially true for the USA, and the reason why they want TSMC to manufacture in Arizona.

- Time is very much on China's side. In the past couple of decades China has consistently become more competitive with the USA in most strategic aspects, and bettered it's strategic standing overall. If your chances of winning are increasing every year, you don't want to attack today; you want to wait until you think your chances of winning have peaked.

If anything, I'd argue the USA is in a tough spot. If a war is going to happen, it would be in the USA's interest that it happens soon, albeit after they can secure advanced-chip production outside of Taiwan.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#:~:text=Taiwan's%20export...

A very quick war against American forces in the region followed by Taiwanese capitulation could leave the Taiwanese public largely untouched by the war, which would serve the CCP's goal of national reunification. This hinges on the US dropping out of the war and licking their wounds after Taiwan gives up on the first or second day, rather than continuing the war even though the Taiwanese government has now 'consented' to the invasion. China's perception of the social circumstance of America is therefore, arguably, the most important consideration for the timing of this war. The best time to do this is when Americans are demoralized and doubting their own righteousness in world affairs, doubting the competence and merit of their military leadership, with their own problems to worry about at home, with isolationist-inclined leaders.

10 years, plus or minus a few. That's my guess.

> The best time to do this is when Americans are demoralized and doubting their own righteousness in world affairs, doubting the competence and merit of their military leadership, with their own problems to worry about at home, with isolationist-inclined leaders.

I personally disagree with this read for two reasons:

1. I think this underestimates the USA's capacity to sway public opinion. Especially if it's helping on a war of defense (vs a war of attack) the USA government could IMO very much ease opposition. We saw this when Russia invaded Ukraine; a quick media and public response in support, various angles explaining why the USA/NATO should be involved (from fear to righteousness), Russophobia/Putin-phobia, etc. To this day, the main argument against the support of Ukraine I see widely and in public discourse isn't so much "is it the right thing to do", but rather just about the cost.

2. I think the USA can very much wage a war in spite of strong popular opposition too. We've seen this during the invasion of Iraq and the middle east. Most damningly perhaps we saw this during the Vietnam War. The war lasted 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, in spite of huge protests especially starting in the mid-sixties.

> A very quick war against American forces in the region followed by Taiwanese capitulation could leave the Taiwanese public largely untouched by the war [...]. This hinges on the US dropping out of the war and licking their wounds after Taiwan gives up on the first or second day, rather than continuing the war even though the Taiwanese government has now 'consented' to the invasion.

This personally sounds like a bad wager for China. They're betting a lot on "the best case". Would Taiwan quickly capitulate? Would the USA drop out of the war quickly too? Would the general population actually be largely untouched? How hurtful would it be to China if Taiwan and the USA don't act this way, or if the war on the ground actually causes major damage? Since IMO China is not in a hurry, I think it'd be smarter to simply wait; for it's own power to grow, for Taiwan's to diminish, and for the USA to lose interest and/or the capacity to fight in this possible war.

10 years doesn't sound too short a time for me haha. I'll avoid guessing time frames here, but if I had to make a prediction, I'd say it's quite possible we see reunification without an international war happening here at all.

Any Chinese move on Taiwan starts with plastering Guam. :(

I wouldn't be surprised if the response to an invasion of Taiwan looked very similar to the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The world did nothing for about a week and it seemed as though leaders were willing to sit on their hands for a week to see if it ended quickly. When it didn't they moved from vague, hand wavy statements to economic sanctions.

If China tries to invade we very well could see a weak, hollow political response from world leaders unless China falters and is stopped initially.

I don't think the world will accept a blockade of Taiwan in the event of an invasion.

If there's a Chinese fleet or aircraft to the east of the island, there will be a naval battle.

Very different circumstances.

Ukraine was (and is) a very small economy literally right up against russia that had long been in Russia's sphere of influence if not under its direct control. Ukraine's fall would have had little meaningful impact on western powers other than losing some face in countering Russian aggression. Specifically to avoid losing that face, western leaders made it very clear from the get go that they would not step in to defend Ukraine, specifically so that they could conserve their strength in case they needed it against China. The universal assumption was that Russia, which was believed to have one of the most capable armies in the world would steamroll the Ukrainians and the country would fall in days if not hours. Only when the Russian advance stalled and it became clear that Ukraine with moderate support could hold out did the west start providing that support, and only after Ukraine made some impressive gains that demonstrated it could not only hold out but potentially drive the russians back did the west start sending serious aid.

Conversely, Taiwan is extremely integrated into the global economy and is a key part of America's pacific power. We have been backing Taiwan for decades. Taiwan is an island, and one with very few appropriate landing sites, making its invasion extremely technically challenging for any power, even one with a strong navy. China, despite its recent shipbuilding spree, still lacks naval and amphibious combat experience, and it does not have anywhere near the fleet size necessary to fully leverage its army's main strengths. We are all freshly aware of lessons learned from Ukraine's invasion: that the strength on paper of countries like Russia and China do not correspond to force projection capability, that providing substantial aid early on is critical, and that modern military equipment is not so powerful as to collapse an otherwise functional country in hours. The amount of aid Taiwan needs is less, and the willingness to give it is greater. Only a major shift in US behavior would cause it to not support Taiwan.

Trump is now in charge of the US and admires Xi and his dictatorship. He’ll find an excuse not to intervene or even better will pay peacemaker and trumpet how his intervention saved millions of lives and stopped a war by capitulating to China and refusing Taiwan aid. As he is doing in Ukraine.

Since Trump is in I’d expect invasion later this year or next. After invasion the people of Taiwan won’t be choosing anything.

I get that it is easy to say that Trump admires dictators, he is such great friends with them, they have compromising information on him and he will allow them to do whatever they want, however, he was president before and during that time China did not invade Taiwan. Also during that time; Russia did not invade Ukraine.

They did take Hong Kong during that time. It would've been pretty easy to point out that they were violating their agreements there, but he kept his mouth shut so they would sign his trade agreement. It's pretty clear who is wearing the pants in that relationship.

It is a fact that he admires dictators, not sure why you feel the need to reframe it as ‘easy to say’?

He has been useful to Putin already (‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” ) and will be again by pausing the disastrous invasion and refusing Ukraine aid. I can see him being similarly useful to Xi for similar reasons.

China was not ready last decade they have been clearly preparing the last few years and now is the time to do so.

Russia invaded Crimea the year before Trump took office, and he didn't do anything about it during his first term.

*Almost 3 years before Trump took office.

Crimea was early 2014, inauguration was Jan 2017

That's if we had a democratic president. We most certainly won't respond in the next 4 years to anything China or Russia does. The only thing they have to do for that benefit is not attack us directly.

Why do you think the party allegiance will make a difference?

I generally consider the republicans to be more likely to reach for military action, though the democrats have seemed pretty war hungry in the last decade or two as well.

Because one of them has a public bribe deposit box.

China didn't buy all that $TRUMP coin by accident.

Trump is by far the first president with questionable foreign ties.

>Why do you think the party allegiance will make a difference?

I think I could replace "democratic president" with specifically Biden or Harris and would still believe the chance of military confrontation with them is "unlikely" unless directly attacked, but with Trump it is zero

I agree that Trump makes a US military response less likely. But it’s still far from impossible.

China reunifies Taiwan: 20%

1.) too much corruption within the military. also no real war experience for 40 years

2.) not enough oil to supply all the ships needed for invasion. look at how Russia's column of tanks failed in the early invasion of Ukraine.

3.) China is broke and you need money for a war against US and Japan.

4.) China imports most of its food and oil

5.) Taiwan has very advanced anti-ship missile systems, homegrown and from US. and once a ship is sunk near the landing, that then prevents other ship from landing, basically piling up ship corpses.

US responds militarily: 70%

1.) Marco Rubio's first day on the job was to meet with AUKUS, which shows how important Asia and first island chain is

2.) Trump has said he would bomb China if China had occupied Taiwan under his presidency

Sorry, but most of this is uninformed gibberish. The PRC and its army (the PLA) have experienced nothing short of a breathtaking modernization for both the country and military.

Most of the points raise are simply wrong.

> 1.) too much corruption within the military. also no real war experience for 40 years

China has corruption, yet is able to modernize and build up the military at a pace exceeding the USA's, which spends at least 2x more.

> 2.) not enough oil to supply all the ships needed for invasion. look at how Russia's column of tanks failed in the early invasion of Ukraine.

China is one of the largest oil producers in its own right. It extracts around 4 million barrels a day. The rest is imported, but primarily used for cars -- China's industry and rail networks do not rely primarily on oil. Due to China's transition to electric vehicles, they may have hit peak imports of oil.

During the US Gulf War, even with the tyranny of distance, the DoD used about 400k barrels a day: "Even during the peak of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and “normal” training activities and force movements, the Defense Department’s daily average fuel use was nearly four hundred thousand barrels per day—an amount equal to slightly more than 10 percent of China’s domestic crude-oil output.38" [1]

China produces about 4 MILLION barrels a day, which is 10x 400k barrels. Also, China would be fighting on the front door step.

3.) China is broke and you need money for a war against US and Japan.

China has MULTIPLE TRILLION dollar funds. Did I say MULTIPLE? [2]

Plus, there's the annual TRILLION dollar trade surplus.

4.) China imports most of its food and oil

China imports a lot, but they are self-sufficiency on a caloric basis. The oil imports are primarily for cars. The country doesn't rely on oil for industry.

5.) Taiwan has very advanced anti-ship missile systems, homegrown and from US. and once a ship is sunk near the landing, that then prevents other ship from landing, basically piling up ship corpses.

Read the Japanese government's assessment: "China’s military has the capability to land ground forces on Taiwan within as little as one week after imposing a naval blockade on the island, according to a Japanese government analysis of Chinese military exercises conducted last year." [3]

[1] - https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Funds-Communist-Finances-Am...

[3] - https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/defense-security/20...

> China has corruption, yet is able to modernize and build up the military at a pace exceeding the USA's, which spends at least 2x more.

There's no evidence that China can wage a real war against Taiwan, much less near peer, despite having the units on paper, due to the corruptions. Russia has shown that because of military corruption, it's a paper tiger, much like China. There's a reason Xi Jing Ping is trying desperately to purge military leaders right now, but the military complex is fighting back.

> China produces about 4 MILLION barrels a day

which is for its own economy to function. A large naval plus army force would need significantly more oil to supply all the diesel ships, which each diesel ship require several thousand gallons of fuel per day. Unless you're saying China is willing to let its economy collapse in order to attack Taiwan, which is hilarious.

> China has MULTIPLE TRILLION dollar funds

This shows exactly that you have no idea what you're talking about. Everyone knows right now that China is dead broke and its local government is dead broke. The economy is suffering from deflation because its people have no money to spend.

> China imports a lot, but they are self-sufficiency on a caloric basis

Also you have no idea what you're talking about. When a country imports 80% of its food, it is NOT self sufficient

china's "broke" because it owes money to itself, specifically to its own central bank. that's not as big a problem as privately owned debt because it means there are potential political solutions if the will is there. the problem is flexible.

also, china is not suffering from deflation. re-read the articles talking about it. they're talking about "deflationary risk", as in, there isn't deflation but there are concerns of potential deflation in the future. there is actually very small (positive) inflation in china

thirdly, china does not import 80% of its food. it imports 80% of its soybeans and some other specific items, but not food as a whole. there is a national policy to rely in domestically produces food for what are seen as the staples like rice and vegetables. imports are mostly in "luxury" food items such as soybeans for livestock feed and stuff like milk, with the idea being that in some sort of extreme situation people would have to cut back on meat and such, which would be survivable

Carefully re-read my comments. AND read the links I provided. It will be a good educational experience.

That's because we're constantly frightened. They work pretty hard to keep us that way.

Defense planners think like this.

We have a saying, "speak softly and carry a big stick"

Americans can speak softly?

Only by comparison to Italians.

The Chinese certainly think like this. The North Koreans are certainly on a constant war footing. The world is an extremely hostile place.

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> not a single chinese have a single thought about going war with the US

Odd. Then who in China feels the need to outcompete US military technology? Why is China developing missiles like DF-27 that are difficult to counter and take out aircraft carriers? Who is coming up with these ideas and for what purposes?

This misconception is common among US official/think tanks especially related to DOD because the way Chinese government operated is so counter-intuitive from US perspective (probably many other governments). It's actually same as how China makes economics policy: First assess the "inevitable" future, than make a plan to better adapt to that future (e.g. Battery, EV, Solar...actually a lot more examples before those). This means China is constantly making policies considered "ineffective" because in many cases they don't have a clear goal (build the capbility for the sake of the build). On contrast US sets a clear goal first and build the capbility accordingly, which means you build the capbility for a purpose.

For some reason people can't translate the same process when talking about military capbility. The current assessment from China probably is some version of "China will be regard as superpower. to be regarded as a credible superpower, credible superpower level army is required". While most US officials think China builds this military power for a concrete goal (why spend money if you don't plan to use it?).

This misconception at least has been communicated by some US intellectuals many times though I think it's not very effective under current geopolitical climate.

I think China is building military capability because they think they need it. We don’t know why. If you think about the game theoretic aspects of this, then it makes sense for the US to preemptively mass forces nearby even if they believe China’s ambitions are peaceful. You can’t just assume that because your opponent is telling you that. And vice-versa if you’re China and you see the US massing forces.

The fact that Chinese fishing ships invade other territorial waters to steal fish and damage habitat and the fact that the premier wants to bring Taiwan back suggests a will to be the aggressor.

China didn’t increase defense budget accordingly and for now still sticking to the same gdp percentage (around 1.5%) so the spiral hasn’t started yet (surprisingly).

Also China is always aggressive to DPP which isn’t something new and US government well understood the reason and used to assure China they will deter DPP’s independence agenda (if you’re familiar with that history. also https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-china-true-sour...). Unfortunately there isn’t much political room now in US for that kind of assurance.

that's the refelection you'll have if your neighbor is a psycho whose first thought every morning is to decide whether he should go around to shoot something, especially after the psycho neighbor has shooted to many ones already

You understand of course that you can replace psycho in your sentence with either party and it just describes the others beliefs.

There are living citizens of both countries that have shot at each other in a hot war. It’s not unreasonable in that case yo think it will happen again.

China is actively annexing their neighbors in the ASEAN sea and constantly frustrated the US intervenes.

Their entire military deployment around there is based on fighting the US intervening in their military expansion, eg, against the Philippines.

> even the most hawks Americans can only think about how to defend and A2/AD if the Chinese intervene in taiwan

Works both ways.

i don't know which one is more crazier

you don't know where taiwan is

or

you know it well but still think it's totally normal and reasonable to do that

Perhaps Xi Jinping and his henchmen should also look at a map? In case they have trouble understanding, here's a hint: Taiwan belongs to that large part of the globe which is "not China".

Just like Panama and Greenland?

Yes. Or sort-of, at least. China is making serious military investments that seem targeted at achieving a capability to invade Taiwan while fending off US efforts to foil such an invasion. In contrast, I've seen no indication that the US is seriously considering taking Panama or Greenland by force except for the bluster from the chief blowhard. Still, that mark of shame will take a long time to wash off.

The nine dash line is objectively and hilariously bad.

If China wants to seize territory internationally recognized as part of other countries... why lie about it so poorly?

This kind of strategic, war is always possible, thinking is deeply embedded into US institutional-governmental culture and in US education. It's part of the quasi-fascistic thinking that was assimilated by the entire population - independent of political leaning - during the Cold War.

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> get good at things by doing them repeatedly and optimising

In an environment where information is shared freely and widely.

> So of course if we build a couple of naval ships every decade, maybe a giant train line every 30 years or similar, it will be done terribly.

That's a reasonable explanation but it's not exclusive. You can still face these challenges and not do a terrible job. There is plenty of evidence this is the case.

> Then there’s lots of hand wringing about how we can’t do this any more.

Of course we can.

> so far behind China in industrial capacity now.

We just don't want to pay first world wages for the work. The arbitrage has been beneficial for a few decades as long as you're not concerned about high quality capacity. Which is what you'd want for a war.

> > get good at things by doing them repeatedly and optimising

> In an environment where information is shared freely and widely.

The whole reason you need to do it yourself is because information does not get shared freely and widely. You practice, you learn, you know for the future.

> > So of course if we build a couple of naval ships every decade, maybe a giant train line every 30 years or similar, it will be done terribly.

> That's a reasonable explanation but it's not exclusive. You can still face these challenges and not do a terrible job. There is plenty of evidence this is the case.

No, there is no way to avoid doing a terrible job when you are out of practice. Maybe you can mitigate some of the worst issues and outperform expectations for someone out of practice, but you'll never be able to compete with those who do it regularly.

> > so far behind China in industrial capacity now.

> We just don't want to pay first world wages for the work.

No, even if the chinese were paid the exact same wages as americans they'ed be able to outperform because, having done this work for decades, they've gotten good at it. They've found new and innovative methods to make things more efficiently, they've invested in machinery and infrastructure to be more productive, and they've cultivated an industrial culture which makes it easier to learn and apply such lessons going forward.

In the 1970s the Netherlands tried to save it's shipyards (from Japan and Korea at the time China was nothing).

There's just no point to it your oil tankers end up more expensive so nobody will want to buy them.

There is the real problem. World demand doesn't need enough oil tankers to support the level of automation needed to be competetive.

navy is different in that it is worth building your own and having that automation just in case.

> In the 1970s the Netherlands tried to save it's shipyards

They have several successful ship building companies today. Is your point that it didn't work? That doesn't seem born out by the reality of today.

> There's just no point to it your oil tankers end up more expensive so nobody will want to buy them.

So the quality is equivalent? And there are no buyers who require high quality in their ships?

The Netherlands still has very successful shipyards but they focus on government contracts (navy, coastguard, ferries) and (super) yachts.

The giant container ships and mammoth tankers are all built in Asia.

>In an environment where information is shared freely and widely.

Umm, no.

Ever heard of loose lips sinking anyhing?

You're going with war propaganda to make a point about commerce?

Well I would have to figure it's quite common for people not to have a clue who Lorne Greene was, and probably don't attend that many big old international ships in the average year for very many decades either.

Another alternative would be adopting South Korea and Japan into closer orbits the way we unconditionally support Israel. South Korea and Japan have strong commercial shipbuilding industries, which are just in the past few years going idle because China is subsidizing theirs more aggressively.

The US alliances with SK and JP are much closer than the alliance with Israel. For instance we have American military forces permanently forward deployed to both of those countries, but none in Israel. We also have mutual defense treaties with Japan and SK, but not Israel.

The problem is that Korean and Japanese shipyards are far more vulnerable to Chinese attack than shipyards in North America would be. But Korean shipbuilding companies have been interested in buying and building shipyards in the US, which is helpful.

Not sure about SK, but headwinds in Japan are showing a political both-siding after all the backstabbing and increasing Chinese population throughout all prefectures in Japan. Rightfully so, I would say.

Biden considered Nippon Steel a national security threat so the Japanese are going to raise an eyebrow when the US Navy begs them to work on actual military ships

They considered foreign ownership of U.S. Steel a national security threat. Rightfully so. It is a key industry and has to be fostered internally.

The question is how to get U.S. Steel to invest in modern equipment and processes. U.S. steel is one of the companies that invested in more efficiency in their core processes and failed to be ready when new processes went from expensive to cheaper and better.

Still not following why Japan needs to own it in order for that to occur. If we have a foreign dependency problem, the solution is not to add a different foreign dependency.

Japan has the expertise needed. Managers, engineers and the like. There is nothing here that cannot be done by local management, but it will take time and effort to develop all the people.

If local management had any interest in improving they would have started years ago... So they all need to be kicked out (presumably anyone who did care was forced out over the years) and start over.

Cool. Japan will then not work on US Navy ships because it's a national security threat. Good luck.

It should be obvious that alliances shift and you can't be dependent on your former world war rivals for war production, especially when you're supposed to be a world superpower.

Good luck with that after Nippon Steel controversy

That was with regards to Nippon buying US Steel? Why is it necessary they own US steel production?

In what universe are naval vessels an outdated technology?

This is making the classic mistake of assuming that a platform being vulnerable means it is not useful - which couldn't be further from the truth.

The US and NATO are heavily missile based militaries these days, and a ship is an efficient way to move a large amount of heavy ordnance to current theatres of operation. The endurance of a warship with stand off munitions in supporting land forces it's much higher than any air borne assets and a lot cheaper to run and that's very much the key: money at these scales is far from unlimited, and just because an aircraft could do any particular job doesn't mean you can sustain aircraft doing every job in a conflict (ala there's a reason special forces aren't just regular forces).

Destroyers are a lot bigger than aircraft. Big enough to carry equipment that can be used to defend themselves like SAMs and CIWS. You can also park a destroyer offshore and sit there, menacingly, without exposing the ship to AWACS and long range fighter patrols. Anti-ship missiles exist but Aegis is a lot more durable to that.

I think Russia still has most of its fleet because the US wasn't initially comfortable giving Ukraine the range that is typical?

Afaik, the US hasn't given Ukraine any latest-generation anti-ship missiles (cruise or ballistic).

Ukraine has sunk Russian shipping at dock with ALCM or at sea with their homegrown ASCM.

Huh? The Jones Act was supposed to help American shipbuilding. It's a requirement that vessels which operate between US ports must be made in the US, crewed by the US, and flagged to the US. It didn't help much, but that was the plan.

China's shipbuilding industry is so big that their aircraft carriers are being constructed by shipyards that make large cargo ships. Aerial photos show shipyards with drydocks full of cargo ships, with an warship or two mixed in. US warships are mostly built by Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, and the Bath Iron Works, which don't make civilian ships. There's little economy of scale in US warship construction. Some years ago, the head of Newport News told Congress that if they'd order two carriers at the same time, the company would throw in a third one for free. Congress declined the offer.

The PLAN now has more warships than the US Navy. Fewer carriers, but that's being fixed. China's carriers are getting better. The type 001 carrier was a refurbished Russian carrier. The type 002 was a smaller ski-jump carrier. The type 003 was comparable to the US Kitty Hawk class. Whether the next carrier will be nuclear powered hasn't been announced.

> It's a requirement that vessels which operate between US ports must be made in the US, crewed by the US, and flagged to the US.

The everything-bagel approach. One of those requirements incentivises US shipbuilding, the other two incentivise other things. Seems like the net effect was less US shipbuilding and a smaller US-flagged fleet. Given those effects, it doesn't seem likely to have increased the number of US merchant seamen either.

I don't see much reason to believe that any ship built because of the Jones Act would've been built in the US in absence of the Jones Act. So, you really need to show that without the Jones Act that more ships would've been built in the US as opposed to showing that shipbuilding in the US has decreased.

It's like betting on Black for a roulette wheel versus betting on a specific number. You're still going to lose money but you lose the money slower by betting on black than a specific number. You need to show that betting on black loses money faster than a specific number to demonstrate that the Jones Act isn't furthering it's goal.

> I don't see much reason to believe that any ship built because of the Jones Act would've been built in the US in absence of the Jones Act.

No ships were built because of the jones act, that's the problem. The jones act required people to do B if they wanted to do A, so they stopped doing A. A is intercoastal shipping. Nothing in the jones act encouraged B besides the opportunity to do A.

In your roulette example, the example isn't between a specific number and black. It's the jones act is playing roulette versus the non-jones act where you don't. Are you guaranteed to not have lost money by some other means if you never played roulette? No. But roulette is a game that provably loses over the long run, and so we should stop playing it.

Fair enough, I'm not able to evaluate counterfactuals in American maritime law. But on the roulette analogy, I reckon the everything-bagel approach gives you a healthy edge against the house and is well worth betting against.

There is a group of people who are convinced that the Jones Act is bad, either they have been mislead or another reason.

From that, there is a shortcut to the reasoning that occurs: Intercostal shipping is expensive : Jones Act's fault Can't build ships fast enough : Jones Act's fault Ships are expensive ; Jones Act's fault

The things that the Jones Act mandates are that: Shipping between American ports must be done on American built, owned and crewed.

For example, they will claim that foreign ships can't deliver to Hawaii or Porto Rico and that is why things are expensive there. However: ...although ships can offload cargo and proceed to the contiguous U.S. without picking up any additional cargo intended for delivery to another U.S. location... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Ef...

So it is possible for a ship from say China to deliver to Hawaii or Porto Rico, they are just not allowed to pick up cargo to deliver to the US from there.

They will claim with one breath, American labor is too expensive and then turn around and say that we would have a ship building boom if only we didn't mandate that we build ships.

I would agree that American labor is expensive, it is easy to lower costs when you have a LCOL area, don't care about worker protections and don't care about environmental effects.

My impression was that most opposition to the jones act was that it has not really worked, and as a side effect drastically reduced the intra-us shipping industry.

Without the jones act, we would not have a ship building boom, but we probably would have more intra-US shipping via ship/rivers/etc.

I agree, without the Jones Act we would have much more inter-coastal shipping but that was not what the grandparent was claiming:

>This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without >dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have >pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago,

From another discussion on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33263176

>>The Jones Act, and the reduction in demand that it triggered, hasn’t prevented

>>and in fact probably caused—the closure of 300 domestic shipyards since the >>early 1980s.

and from comments: >The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well.

>According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US >built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful.

So there is this narrative that if we just get rid of the restrictions, suddenly we will become competitive.

In another thread, someone mentioned that we just had an election between a TV personality and the other a fake persona : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931904 and how we need to stop electing elites.

That in a nutshell is why Trump was able to win, he is not viewed as an elite and everything he sets out to do, the elites are screaming "THAT WON"T WORK!!!". 3 years ago, the same establishment types were saying "No inflation", "Well...transitory inflation" to "Well, the rate of inflation is back to where we set our targets" and "GDP is at the highest levels ever!" while everyone is asking if we are stepping into a recession.

I don't agree with a lot of what he is doing, however I do agree that we need to do something different. Our previous leaders and policy makers set us on a path where labor is not valued, unions are despised and greed is good. You can't run a society without labor and protections(both for workers and environmental) and a strict focus on wealth alone leads you to a desolate place.

The Jones Act is bad because it's a bandaid on a more serious wound. Repeal the Jones Act, let what remains of American shipbuilding die, and maybe then someone will try to fix it. Right now the Jones Act just lets people point at the remaining American shipbuilders and say "see? They're viable with our current strategy! We just need to do more!" The only reason the current strategy has any life in it at all is because of the Jones Act; otherwise, it's not viable at all.

> The Jones Act was supposed to help American shipbuilding

Yes

And this is what happens. Naive protectionism 101

chuckling to myself in my bed while reading this comment after working 12 hours on my oil tanker today. I am an OS in the SIU and i spend every night reading a little HN to motivate me to finish my software hobby projects so i can escape this hell

More power to you mate. I knew nothing when I first came here, now I've been a working SWE for 5 years.

Good luck! My brother is a Merchant Mariner, I think he is a First Mate now...he gets way better pay than I do but the working hours sound terrible. The shit that you guys went through with COVID with the extended rotations was hell.

The fact that the elephant in the room, the Jones Act, is never mentioned in the parent article, is pretty telling.

> Naval vessels are largely outdated technology

Depends on the purpose. For patrolling, shipping, and disaster relief, it's a lot cheaper and more flexible (in terms of utility et al) than airplanes.

Add in airplanes being extremely fragile, never all-weather, needing a nearby base to do even a vague approximation of station-keeping, having vastly lower payloads, ...

Or anti-submarine warfare, or visit-board-search-and-seizure, or persistent and powerful sensors, or ballistic missile defense...

I think Rapid Dragon, plus recent talk of using the B21 for air combat/to replace NGAD are pointing in this direction: use large, numerous, and cavernous planes for Pacific firepower.

Rapid Dragon cannibalizes our existing military transport capacity and can't achieve the same kind of economies of scale and high operational tempo that would be possible with a commercial airliner platform. Commercial airliners are designed to land, swap passengers, refuel, and take off with very little down time. Meanwhile, military aircraft are notoriously high maintenance.

I'm not understanding the connection you are making with commercial aircraft.

Do you mean rapid dragon should have been developed to work with our commercial airliner fleet rather than our military transport aircraft?

How would that work? I don't see rear cargo ramps on commercial aircraft (there may be some, but I don't know of them).

He's arguing that the military should (when possible) use modified commercial airliners as transport (like the old 747 Cargos) because then they benefit from the economies of commercial scale. Sure, the plane would be customized, but some 50?80? percent of it would be the same as the commercial birds.

And the 747 at least could open the front and rear.

You seem to misunderstand what the Jones Act does and does not do. Our current predicament is not caused by the Jones Act.

Naval vessels aren’t outdated tech. It allows longer term force projection you can’t get without ground-based. I can stick a destroyer off the coast and leave it there as long as I want. It’s a lot harder to build an airbase. Submarines can stay on station almost indefinitely.

Transporting tanks, artillery, vehicles, is difficult by air when done at scale. Air extraction of a SEAL team is done by helicopters. And those helicopters need to land somewhere. They need fuel and crews and supplies. Forward deployed ground bases are logistically more difficult than having a carrier group off the coast.

As a missile platform, there are certainly alternatives such as the 747 or even space based weaponry, but naval vessels are more than simply weapons platforms.

Also air-based missile platforms depend on a guarantee of air superiority —- it would be naïve to suggest that the U.S. would have that air superiority in all theaters of battle.

All kinds of people from all kinds of places read HN, so maybe better to use more general language - referring to “Chinese shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than _ours_”

>maybe better to use more general language

Unless a visitor is unaware that this is a US website, then it would actually help be more informative than otherwise.

And if a visitor is already aware, what difference does it make?

I had no issue understanding it and didn't even realize.

Not because this website happens to be operated by a US company, but because of US defaultism. If on the internet somebody forgets that other countries exist or that people from other nationalities might be involved, they are American. Occasionally somebody complains how non-inclusive it is, but for the most part we all ignore it

Clearly he's from the US. He's simply speaking from his perspective.

" referring to “Chinese shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than _ours_”"

Is it not?

Why do we need to be careful not to offend the Chinese? Unless we are worried they are tracking HN accounts?

Or maybe you are saying, it should be more specific, and say "US" instead of "_ours_".

tone policing lost the 2024 US presidential election. I wouldn't recommend continuing it. Have a great day.

Use the allies. South Korea is good at building large ships. They built so many recently there's an oversupply. I bet they'd love some contracts.

747 CMC

I have to think there is some weakness around re-fueling. Even if there is non-stop re-fueling planes.

The 747 seems more 'exposed' than a ship.

? genuinely curious.

My tinfoil hat seeing Trump Admin wrecking havoc in the American continent is that they (or Trump specifically) believed that contesting American hegemony in Pacific within 1st island chain or even 2nd island chain is herculean task and it will be harder and harder as time goes due to the tyranny of distance and PLA modernization . So now the policy is American redoubt where US assert unanimous influence in the American continent while slowly recognize other great power's sphere of influence. Even hawkish Rubio already wrote about multipolarity.

Retreat to Fortress America is also a response to nuclear proliferation, which will occur as the US retreats from its role as world policeman.

Another factor is the desire to retire federal government debt by dollar devaluation. Onshoring of manufacturing by high tariffs would be preparatory for this.

The primary purpose of guided missile destroyers is missile defense.

Modern destroyers are capable of staying on station almost indefinitely and defending themselves and allied vessels from nearly any existing airborne threat.

Such a platform needs to be on station and close to assets at risk so it can interdict. You would need to orbit these platforms continuously to provide protection, and would need more than one of them at all times.

Missile defense has been one of the biggest topics in international security over the last year, and is Trump's biggest defense priority.

This is not a good sales pitch.

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The Jones Act has nothing to do with shipbuilding. Repealing it would make it cheaper to send goods to Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. It would not make domestic shipyards more competitive.

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H I Sutton's recent video on China's new invasion barges was very interesting so not really HN material, but there he talked about how all of Chinas ferries are designed to also move tanks if they have to - https://youtu.be/Klkpk_hO4FQ?t=268

You go to South Korea or Taiwan and all their subways are also bomb shelters, but something like The Boring Company, environmentally amazing, strategically amazing and everyone thinks it's funny to put it down.

There's a massive problem with attitude and IQ in the internet population.

Sutton's content is highly informative.

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TL;DR: The US Empire needs a shipbuilding revolution for war-purposes to defeat non-allied Republics.

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