The U.S. Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China

the U.S. industrial base being in China does seem like an obstacle yeah

During the first COVID supply crisis after China shut down, I remember:

A door factory shutting down because they couldn't domestically source the parts for doors
Freight truck factories shutting down production because they couldn't domestically source some small metal part
Every utilities company facing critical shortages for repairs and maintenance, warning they were one natural disaster away from the electrical grid collapsing

Every utilities company facing critical shortages for repairs and maintenance
Still an issue, I work for a utility and lead times for things like high voltage transformers are still ~18 months or so from what I've been told
Coincidentally, I also processed a shipment of smaller transformers that came thru from South Korea (which for us was unheard of)
It's not ideal
- so what youre telling me is that if a group of organized people wanted, they could take out the entire us electrical grid by blowing up a bunch of transformers?
  HUH
- Lead times on those have been that bad for at least 10 years
-Ammunition becoming more scarce and expensive because guess who makes almost every primer in almost every shell
We truly missed a potential cool zone. Donald Trump is made of goddamn teflon.

I have said it before and I will say it again: people still pretend like American imperialism is still rooted in industrial prowess. That era is long gone.

No, America is a landlord/rentier capitalist and as such will always behave like a landlord.

A landlord does not have to work. I repeat, a landlord does not work. A landlord extracts what other people have worked hard on.

American tech giants like Microsoft and Google aren’t dominating the market because they are the most competent at making the best products out there. No, they dominate because they were able to leverage on various legal and financial means to bully their competitors out of the business, and they are able to do so precisely because the sector works just like a rentier economy. Every time you use their product, you (or your employer) pays a rent to those companies.

America is never going to re-industrialize because industrialization raises the price of labor, and thus confers labor with leverages against capital. America didn’t de-industrialize itself in the first place for nothing. It de-industrializes itself precisely to defeat the trade unions and working class movements that had been gaining momentum by the 1970s.

This is how US imperialism functions. Nobody is ever going to invade America so long as it has nukes at its disposal. And as long as the dollar reigns supreme, it will continue to behave like a landlord that extracts concessions from all over the world.

Incidentally, this is a fantastic read on the subject https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-nothing-capital-versus-growth/
- That was a great read. I’m working my way through vol 2 of Capital. In it, Marx talks about how it’s in the sphere of production only where value is created. Distribution, beyond what is technically necessary, does not add value. I think this is particularly relevant for the non-financial sector of the US economy - Apple, Nike, Gap, even Amazon and Walmart to an extent. For the most part, these firms are not creating surplus value, they are extracting surplus value from, for example, contracting factories in the global south. That strikes me as inherently unstable: all it takes for much of the surplus value in the non-financial sector to just evaporate is for imperialism to be severed.
American tech giants like Microsoft and Google aren’t dominating the market because they are the most competent at making the best products out there. No, they dominate because they were able to leverage on various legal and financial means to bully their competitors out of the business, and they are able to do so precisely because the sector works just like a rentier economy. Every time you use their product, you (or your employer) pays a rent to those companies.
This is why they're so fucking scared of Huawei and Bytedance
It's even more involved than just the renting. US imperialism demands large consolidation in order to exert control over the markets. Tech giants are supremely important to consolidate because they offer all of the intelligence any empire could want, thus it is in the interest of the empire to ensure that a handful of giants rise, and those giants run uncontested.
tbf losing a hot war w/ china would def help the dedollarization process one way or another, main problem is dedollarizing via nuclear winter is less than ideal

Capitalism builds industry for war.

Socialism builds industry for human needs.

Simple as.

Except not even - if that was the case then ukraine would be winning instead of getting rinsed.
- "Industry for profiting from wars" probably fits better?

The idea that the US could even hope to “resolve key challenges” here is laughable. China is too far ahead in manufacturing and companies aren’t willing to spend the massive amounts of money required to expand manufacturing in the US.

they might have to hire people, and then train them
gross
- Or even spend money on factories instead of stock buybacks.
Yeah, this is delusional beyond belief. Most people don't realize just how dependent on China US is today. For example:
https://edconway.substack.com/p/globalisation-is-a-far-far-bigger
- Love when my grand interconnected system is really a single point of failure
- Posting numbers from 2018 is an insufficient insight into the situation though as there has been reported increased decoupling following covid.
- holy shit
You’d need to build new facilities and train people up to run lathes and whatnot. On top of that weapons aren’t made with steel and wood anymore so you’ll need to teach them some light programming too in order to mill your M4 receivers. In short America is fucked because free training in a high skill job is sacrilege here.
- weapons aren't made with steel and wood anymore

lol, what is the U.S. industrial base prepared for?

the US industrial base
You mean prison labor?
bitcoin farming
FunkoPops
- https://support.funko.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048044733-Where-are-your-products-made
  Where are your products made?
  Collectibles are manufactured primarily in Vietnam and China.
Cheese that cannot legally be labelled cheese outside of the US, likely in a can
FEMA death camps? Best i can come up with, bc the us hasn't had an industrial base in decades.
Making toys, cheap clothes and piñatas in Downtown LA

To deter a potential conflict with China, the United States must act quickly to resolve key challenges in its industrial base.

to deter conflict we have to resolve the things that would make it difficult for us to have a conflict?

also, cute animation, is that the only way to explain things to congressmen these days?

50.000 missiles won't be enough, billions must die Mr. Congressman, watch this cocomelon short

I can't over emphasize how true this is. We would be in total ruin in a matter of months.

Electrical shit in industrial manufacturing blows up all the time and stuff from 5 years ago is already obsolete.

When something blows up that's obsolete you have 3 options. Adapt current generation parts at huge cost. Buy 1 of 3 used units left on the planet or repair your broken unit. Repairing your broken unit requires basic electronic parts that are likely manufactured in China and even rushed it can take weeks to get something repaired. Meanwhile your money printing machine sits idle.

And so many more items made in China are essential to US manufacturering and are not easily replaced.

Oh yeah, supply chains are so incredibly complex nowadays. The only way you find out what you're missing is when you can't get it anymore. And given that China now accounts for something like 30% of global manufacturing, it's pretty much guaranteed that a lot of essential stuff will be gone if US ever decides to start a war with China.
- I do think the crises of overproduction that Marx predicted have been mitigated in part by Just In Time production and lean inventories. However, that all comes at a cost - it makes the whole system much more fragile and if we ever see something like another world war or pandemic that shuts down global supply chains, the economic magnitude of that will be far beyond any simple crises of overproduction. The capitalists can mitigate it temporarily but it just means they’re kicking the can down the road.
cyber attacks alone would probably do in our electrical grids

That would be hilarious if the US declared war, China's hardest battles will probably be the first few weeks of heavy bombing, then the US collapses instantly from a mysterious chicken shaped hole in their supply chain.

Oh damn, always wild seeing a post about China on reddit before the feds started pushing all the anti-China stuff there. They actually treat it like a real country instead of the Evil Bad Place.
Ok that was epic, especially that it was Chinese who domesticated chickens and the wild ancestor of chicken still lives there.

The reality of a modern major war with China, an ocean away, with no logistical supply chain, is that it will be fought and over within weeks, culminating with the launch of nuclear weapons.

That is the most probable outcome by a wide margin.
- Right? After the US carrier fleet gets totally smoked by DF21s in the middle of the pacific. As they say, kiss your ass goodbye.
- MAD world
And if it doesn't result in exchange of nukes/ICBMs then it will quickly reach a stalemate where both sides' navies are either sunk via missiles/drones or pulled back to their own territory. From there it will descend into a proxy hybrid war, with asymmetrical cold war shit escalating all over the globe
- How would China's ships pull back? They are already in their own territory. Who would the proxy war involve?

good, maybe we won't be stupid enough to provoke one then.

- Historically it's chickened out of direct confrontation with the USSR and Iran
What? Of course USA will do everything it can to provoke China to go to war. Just look at what's happening in the Philippines. When Duerte was president everything was fine and there was peace in the area. Now that US puppet Marcos Jr is there, suddenly they need to build 4 MORE US military bases there. Now suddenly there's all sorts of collisions and arguments. Hmm...
- Duterte literally sponsored militias and death squads that murdered people for using recreational drugs. I don’t think we should say everything was “fine” under him…
- Well then it's better for the USA to provoke a war that it will quickly lose than one where it might win

Weird how US has to sail half way across the world to China's shore to deter China...

Deterrence by Punishment did not work with Russia. These people are so dumb.,

Just forsake Taiwan, shift your detente to Korea and Japan. What is the fucking point of potentially killing billions of people over an island the size of Maryland. You stupid fucks.

better yet, withdraw entirely from the Eurasian continent and let Japan and South Korea sort themselves out with the neighbors.
If Maryland produced 60% of the worlds’ semiconductors and was the only place that could make 3 nm chips, then more countries might be willing to risk global catastrophe over Maryland. Taiwan is a golden goose for most of the US economy that positively contributes to the line going up, and semiconductor manufacturing is one of the last technological edges the “West” has. The Department of Defense and its corporate halo are perpetually in a contrived state of disarray when it comes to talking about things that need money, from their supply chains to research. While it’s true that price gouging and rent seeking probably don’t lead to good weapon systems, I think the people writing this article are assuming the average policymaker already is onboard with the necessity of Taiwan, and they are emphasizing a shopping list of things that need evermore endless funding. If we ever actually went to war with China, then all these weapons companies would need to start making more weapons and less money.
- The US will blow a trillion dollars on a failed F-35 program, but won't even build up its own semiconductor manufacturing industry. The US truly is fucked.

America, the arsenal of democracy, will simply ramp up production like it did in WW2

-Reddit

America won WWII through recycling model Ts and other crap we had laying around in landfills and turning it into ships planes and tanks. We shipp all our scrap to other countries these days, there is no reserve to quickly ramp up new production lines. In fact, China built some of their infrastructure on the bones of American waste, even including the scrap we sent over from the world trade center and the solar panels that Carter put on the white house. America is so fucked in any conflict with China. America couldn't even beat Illiterate Afghani with busted-up AK-47s who never even heard of 9-11.
- America won WWII
  they didn't have that much to do with it, honestly

U.S. bombers smirking as they blow up factories in China just before realizing those factories were making American goods.

WWIII is when no iPhone

In some cases, there are also single sources for key components and sub-components.

The Javelin, for instance, relies on a rocket motor—the Aerojet Rocketdyne’s advance solid-propellant rocket motor—without a second source at the moment. There is one company, Williams International, that builds turbofan engines for most cruise missiles, such as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile. There is one main company, PacSci EMC, that produces the energetics for most missiles. There is also one foundry that can produce the large titanium castings for some important weapons systems.

ACCELERATIONIST HOT TAKE: Let the united states get into a war and then sabotage whatever moribund industrial base still exists. In the most epic demonstration of revolutionary defeatism.

This is why I'm pro-Biden unironically
steady attrition is better than unpredictable change
- This is literally Putin's position lmao

What industrial base lol.

We make more than you think. But way way less than we used to
- Prision labor go brrr

This will somehow cause 4th generation Japanese Americans to be rounded up in internment camps. Again.

I feel like the American project for a long time has been to third world and enshittificate its own country so it can have cheap labor at home

This is also an article for getting more fundings

gives Military Industrial Complex more money
they do stock buybacks
yeah that's always the angle

Why are they (or we) pretending that nukes don't exist? There is no direct traditional conflict that will happen, it'll either be proxy wars or nukes.

Get ready for the "China's nukes probably don't work!" articles in 2 years.
- so America's nukes don't work, got it
After Ukraine, it should be pretty clear that these people are utterly unhinged and completely divorced from reality. Neocons live in their own fantasy world where if they wish for something hard enough then it'll come true.
- Having read the article now, its just a run of the mill fearmongering piece for more funding. I don't think we should take them as true believers, obviously some are dumb enough to be but this article in particular doesn't seem to be doing that.
The only experience with war that most westerners have is 30 years of low level conflict against militias in the middle east. They spent 30 years fighting people who barely had anything more than an AK and a dream, which allowed them to become convinced of their own invincibility
Not a single person in the west has ever been confronted with a peer level conflict. They truly cannot even comprehend that their tanks, ships, and planes might be vulnerable. On the rare times they got spanked, like with the Nighthawk shoot down during the Serbian war, they chalk it up to pure luck
- convinced of their own invincibility
  Reminds me of an interview with a couple of chuds that went over to Ukkkraine to fight against Russia and they were so terrified they just about shat themselves and then hurried back home. Like wow Russia actually has like artillery and an air force and shit, who would have thought?

Rebuild manufacturing and recreate the conditions that were favourable to the revolutionary left, or don't rebuild manufacturing and lose to an inability to project violent power.

They have a decision between losing to the left internationally, or losing to the left nationally through revolution.

Or at least, that's how the capitalists are interpreting it.

if domestic manufacturing is rebuilt, US will just go full fascist and start hunting down communists and supporting milquetoast labor unionists. not saying its impossible, but socialism has never come from the imperial core. imo US has to suffer a massive humiliation and multipolarity must dominate before the conditions are right (less labor aristocrats and generally lower standard of living)
- I am not convinced the US has all the resources it needs to do domestic manufacturing and compete. The economics do not work out. The only people it will be selling its manufactured products to will be domestic citizens and in order to get them to buy them it will have to shut out cheaper foreign products by taxing them to the hilt or banning them.
  For a war it will need to massively scale up ship building somehow. And planes. And bombs.
  For all of these, it will need to massively scale up steel, parts, and electronics.
  For all of these it will need to first create basic consumer industries.
  To do all of this the standard of living for US citizens will have to completely collapse. If they go through with it, they will need something to blame that does not look like it was the plan all along.

COOL ZONE COOL ZONE

The Need for Predictable Orders

Defense companies are generally unwilling to take financial risks without contracts—including multiyear contracts—in place.

It is not a sound business decision to build more munitions or weapons systems without a clear demand signal and financial commitments. This risk aversion is compounded if companies make additional capital investments—especially investments for facilities, infrastructure, and tooling.

As one DoD study concluded:

“Producers benefited from steady or predictable orders, so the DoD’s inconsistent procurement and concurrent production ramps (both increases and decreases) exacerbate the challenges suppliers face across the [defense industrial base].”

I guess, we'll really have to worry when the DoD starts putting in 5-year contracts in place.

Edit:

Consequently, it is important to buy munitions smarter to take advantage of scale and market power. Examples include advanced procurement, multiyear procurement, and economic order quantity processes.

Capitalism is so efficient it even creates just-in-time manufacturing for its armies! What could go wrong?

The animated bar chart graphics in that article that show how long 1 or 2 years are truly something

It's fucking disgusting they're even considering a nuclear war with China. Fascists are just evil

its also stupid. China's nukes are much faster than US so their second strike could hit before US's first strike if they are detected soon enough. also, China has nuclear weapon capability to deliver second and third strikes. Donfeng gang
- Don Feng please!
  
  You shoot nukes at me on the day of my daughter's wedding?

I think America could address basically all the deficiencies in the article, create peacetime supply chain to make 1000 air launched cruise missiles a month and 10 Fast Attack Submarines a year at only a modest annual increase to the military budget, and then it's in a winning position over China.

It couldn't and here is why https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-nothing-capital-versus-growth/
- Thanks for that read, it was hysterically funny. I feel the same way about overblown stock market valuations as I do about crypto currencies: I can't wait for it all to blow up, and even if that day never comes, I know that it should, and I think it's funny that it comes at the expense of de-industrialisation and destroying the planet. CEOs are morons and the political class are idiots and I am dying to see them face the consequences of their actions.
- They build cruise missiles and submarines today, but it's impossible for them to build more with their vastly greater capital and technology advantage? they seem to have excess capacity for atrociously complicated projects like the Zumwalt. There are also plenty of articles where someone takes a metric of the Chinese economy and says it means China is doomed also.

Am I ignorant? Like is China really just gonna start a war over Taiwan? It just feels like the a West is projecting.

I think China has red lines that could force them to start a war the same as happened with Russia and Ukraine. For example, if US starts putting missiles in Taiwan that can hit major cities in China, that would likely be one such red line. That said, China has no interest in starting a war because they know that the power balance is shifting in their favor in the long run.
It is mostly projecting. If we put a nato base there China might put up a fight to keep us from doing that. It is unclear if that would come in thr form of a mysterious fire that burns down the tragic resources, trade sanctions thst would actually cripple the us economy
China will reunify with Taiwan, that will probably require an invasion. Don't make the same mistake many people made with respect to Ukraine. It could be decades away, but it will happen.
- Tbh, I don't follow this particular issue closely enough to have an informed opinion. But thank you for the answer.