151–160 of 328 posts
We can, but we just won't invest the funds, meanwhile Russia and China will dominate as the ice melts. This is a lack of will and not lack of ability, I hate it when people act like the USA is a POS in blog articles.
The author never suggested "the USA is a POS" - they gave a very nuanced breakdown of the factors at play.
> ... allowing the Coast Guard to buy icebreakers from Finland would likely save over a billion dollars per ship, as well as years of construction time How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money. There is no [edit: economic] logic to economi…
> ... allowing the Coast Guard to buy icebreakers from Finland would likely save over a billion dollars per ship, as well as years of construction time How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money. There is no [edit: economic] logic to economi…
I've always heard people say nationalism is a good thing and globalism is the solution, yet they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
The issue with China is that they don't need the US as much as the US needs them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine). you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected t…
> Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up. We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods. But can the US depend on Europe's, S…
Or perhaps "revanchist", meaning that they want to conquer some territory they believe (or at least pretend) used to be theirs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example? You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game". China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally chan…
Possibly George W. Bush. His disastrous illegal invasion of Iraq marks the point, I think, where America really started going down the tubes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only kee…
The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
[1] https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-for...
We can, but we just won't invest the funds, meanwhile Russia and China will dominate as the ice melts. This is a lack of will and not lack of ability, I hate it when people act like the USA is a POS in blog articles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only kee…
The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artille…
So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).