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The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
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Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, p…
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 b…
> 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.
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/re…
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 po…
> 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...
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#376Repeal 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 tric…
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...
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#378A 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…
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.
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#379Are 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…
Is there an ocean between you and your adversary?
Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 wou…
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.