Here’s another article I wanted to highlight. At The War Zone Joseph Trevithick writes:
A U.S. Navy briefing slide is calling new attention to the worrisome disparity between Chinese and U.S. capacity to build new naval vessels and total naval force sizes. The data compiled by the Office of Naval Intelligence says that a growing gap in fleet sizes is being helped by China’s shipbuilders being more than 200 times more capable of producing surface warships and submarines. This underscores longstanding concerns about the U.S. Navy’s ability to challenge Chinese fleets, as well as sustain its forces afloat, in any future high-end conflict.
Read the whole thing.
What’s missing from the article is that shipbuilding doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Not only can’t you add more shipbuilding overnight, as the author points out:
Shipbuilding is also a complex and costly affair that requires large amounts of skilled labor and resources, which can take significant time to source. Delays or other hiccups in shipbuilding, as well as repair and overhaul work that requires shipyard capacity, can easily cascade. This reality has manifested itself to an especially extreme degree for the U.S. Navy when it comes to submarine maintenance.
but we need to produce more steel and the thousands of other materials used in modern navies, mine more iron and coal and thousands of other commodities, and create entire supply chains nearly from scratch.
We used to produce more of all of those than anybody else but over the last half century have steadily deindustrialized. It was a stupid, risky, and expensive mistake.
But there’s still M.A.D.
We’re a bedroom community.
With nukes.
Michael Hudson over at GlobalSouth.co argues that the US cannot reindustrialize, because the financial class, having broken the industrial unions, will not allow new industrial unions to form. And no union workers means no industry.
I think the site is in Hong Kong, and I can’t get it to load reliably on my DSL. But here’s a link:
https://globalsouth.co/2023/07/10/michael-hudson-why-the-u-s-economy-cannot-re-industrialize/
One of the real problems in reindustrialization is skilled labor. Real skills are taught orally face-to-face. They’re not in books.
Two examples. NASA was asked why it didn’t simply rebuild the Saturn F1 engines rather than design new ones. It turned out that while NASA had blueprints (probably real blueprints) of the F1, it actually didn’t have the in-house knowledge of how to put them together. There was a lot of tinkering with the engines not shown on the blueprints.
More recently, Raytheon has called back long-retired workers to build new Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The assembly line had been shut down for several years, and no current employee had any idea of how to build them.
Each year, China makes 35 to 40% of all the commercial ships launched in the whole world. Their only competitor is South Korea, which also makes 35 to 40% of all commercial ships. In fact, it has been suggested that the US Navy contract with the South Korea shipyards to build its ships. The security issues seem to be an overriding concern with that proposal.
It should be noted that Russia also has a much larger ship building capacity than we do. They can and do build in the plus 100,000 tonne range.
Both Russia and China are continuing to build their stealth aircraft, the SU 57 and J 20. The SU 57 has been used in both Ukraine and Syria. China now has more J 20’s than we have F 22’s, and they are re-engining the J 20 with a power plant equivalent to the F 22’s.
Here’s a link regarding Chinese economic growth:
https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-one-chart-that-explains-everything-2/
Read and weep.