81–90 of 190 posts
Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea. I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.
The article was about getting new ice breakers for the Coast Guard, a branch of the US military.
Everybody likes to dump on Russia here but their nuclear icebreakers are something to behold: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/worlds-m... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY
Maybe in an alternate, more peaceful world, Russia would be happily selling icebreakers to the US for profit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? That would depend on one's strategic goals and priorities. Personally, I do not believe the US should be the world police so I don't think it is necessary.
OK, the who would you suggest should be the world's police? The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate. It is obvious that all nations do not agree to this. E.g.: China on Tibet, Taiwan, 9-dashed line, etc., Russia in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. Those authoritarian states think it is perfectly fine to…
> The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.
If that was true, it would be inconsistent with any one nation or narrow relatively fixed set of nations being the world’s police, as that would indicate that the age of imperialism was not over and that the world had a single imperial power or small group of such powers.
The central institution in the aspirational design of the order you describe had a solution to the problem: the UN would itself be the world’s policeman, via a centralized military command to which all member nations would subordinate command of designated units of their armed forces for the purpose.
This…did not work out in practice, and is one of the very many pieces of information suggesting that your accurate description of the aspirations which people at the end of WWII had for the postwar international order were never realized.
> Anarchy, or unpoliced random aggression would be a very bad option.
It would be, but its mostly what we have between the major powers, with the major powers (alone or in combination) policing everything else, with…issues where the policing desires of the major powers conflict.
Just like in past ages of imperialism.
The main difference is that the fact that the major powers are also nuclear powers exerts constraints on the form of their direct conflicts mostly to forms that are at least partially deniable to prevent pressure of uncontrolled escalation which could lead to nuclear annihilation.
Everybody likes to dump on Russia here but their nuclear icebreakers are something to behold: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/worlds-m... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY
Makes me wonder how much manufacturing knowledge has been lost in the west, and how long it might take to rediscover it all. Does anyone know of any good sources on this?
The two biggest wind turbine manufacturers in the world, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Gamesa, are located here in Denmark. It is definitely possible to do manufacturing in high income developed countries.
Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website where countries and companies who own icebreakers can operate them for the benefit of other countries and companies who want to use them. They just walk to the shore in the Canadian north, click the "Call Icebreaker" button on the app and wait for an icebreaker someone else owns to arrive.
Fun times when our Space Shuttle program shutdown we had to rely on Russian Soyuz to get astronauts to and from ISS. Well, whenever Russia didn't like something the US was doing, guess what the bargaining chip was?
Surprise, this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic or at least have everything documented and regularly (i.e. once every ten years) check if the documentation is accurate and workers can understand it to build a product that meets specifications.
I disagree, or at least think it's a lot harder than that.
1. It's not like we closed down Metal Cutting Inc. and just bought everything from China. There's no single company to have saved; there was Icebreakers and co. and Reactor Vessels Ltd. and ValvegearForgingCo. Any one of them might have been able to adapt but none of them were save-able and a lot of them were obviously obsolete.
2. Even when there is a Metal Cutting Inc., that's almost as bad. The supply chain was more efficient when it was integrated, not when its contracted out to a third party... or we would just buy from the places that still make things.
3. In this specific instance, but also in many others, market forces are not really the real problem. Look at Alcoa- hugely successful because small mills were cheaper to operate than large mills, but now we don't have huge mills everywhere. Can't fix that- even we had seen it coming and kept large mills alive, what would they make? What about harder problems,where you need a varied set of things to make to keep knowledge from dying out?
4. How do you do this without picking specific winners, and lobbying for who will live and who will die? If industries can survive the decline without losing their experts, how do you decide how much money to give them? How do you incentivize them to actually keep that knowledge, instead of getting into a more profitable industry?
5. In the end, the problem isn't about the companies or documentation or people. If you continued to employ all the people who operated the great presses, they'd just be mostly dead by now. It's not like people need much more than a wage, but I do think that an industry that depends on government subsidies, cannot possibly grow, does not build truly useful things, and could disappear because a new appointee dislikes it is not a line of work most people would be drawn towards.
My take is: Academia is the right place for some fraction of the people who are made redundant by outsourcing or technological change. They don't have to be lecturers, but they are already teachers. They pass on their knowledge to new employees. Document, research, experiment, and prove manufacturing and industrial techniques. Preserve that knowledge for when it is needed. Humanity doesn't invest nearly enough into education, much less the preservation of knowledge.
> designers, engineers and welders grapple with something the U.S. hasn’t done in decades: reliably shape hardened steel that is more than an inch thick into a curved, reinforced ship’s hull I don't understand. Aren't modern military ships armoured anymore?
Wire up a cheap boat with explosives and it can sink an expensive naval vessel. The Ukrainians are using this to massively great effect right now against the Russians.
What if instead of building one new aircraft carrier, you build an autonomous submersible capable of launching drones with variable payloads?
Or instead of a destroyer, build a drone ship that can launch missiles?
Or an entirely new class of ship that simply swarms enemy defenses and is laden with explosives? Mass-produced autonomous jet skis with explosive payloads. But faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the skills that are lost. The knowledge is safe in print.
There's a lot of practical/contextual knowledge that isn't documented, and what's documented isn't guaranteed to be correct or can be misleading (terminology changes, standards change, some things are implied because they are obvious at the time, etc.)