That's easy: because the US is a nuclear armed power, the pacific aircraft carrier called "Japan" is friendly, and there hasn't been a Pearl Harbor. Everything follows from there.
While there is peace, US domestic shipbuilding fundamentally doesn't "matter" all that much politically, not compared to all the thousands of other daily issues or the big issue, tax. The article makes clear that all previous efforts at onshoring shipbuilding, including the hugely successful war efforts, involved spending a lot of public money.
If you ask the average taxpayer, how much do they want to spend on subsidies for US shipyard workers, what answer are you going to get?
(I also think the Jones Act, like other protectionism, keeps the industry intact but inefficient, another uncomfortable choice)
>> high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel
Well, yes. A side effect of being a rich country is expensive labour because workers have other options.
> But it now faces a potential naval adversary, in the form of China, with dramatically higher shipbuilding capacity
The US has something like 5,000 live nuclear warheads, use of which might significantly reduce Chinese shipping if it comes to that.
Nuclear warheads do not allow you to project power, engage in gunboat diplomacy, and cannot serve as logistics hubs for military operations or evactuions from natural disasters.
> While there is peace, US domestic shipbuilding fundamentally doesn't "matter" all that much politically.
You don’t think that without a warships and a nuclear aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean that Iran wouldn’t have invaded Israel? And that the entire region would have completely come apart?
Or that without carriers in the South China Sea China wouldn’t have taken Taiwan?
The US naval fleet is the #1 most powerful geopolitical tool ever invented in the history of the world. And those ships are equipped with plenty of nukes, ICBM interception, electronic warfare, etc.
You might benefit from looking at a map of Iran at some point. You’ll be surprised to learn that it’s not actually bordering Israel. A ground invasion isn’t possible without going through other countries and a water invasion would take forever and and be impractical.
This would not be an issue if major wars were not popping up everywhere or if China has not been building a naval fleet to challenge the U.S.
If China and the U.S. get into a conflict, like every war it will be a question of war production. It takes a long time to build a modern ship. It takes even longer to build a shipyard capable of producing modern ships.
Any great power war will be long and drawn out unless nukes are used.
In a defense of Taiwan or anywhere else in the South China Sea, the defenders advantage will play a role. China with it's numerous shipyards and hypersonic weapons could easily keep the U.S. Navy out and then even more easily out produce it to replace lost ships.
It's also a questionable strategy to outsource your ship building to the two countries closest to your only potential naval rival. Usually countries fighting protracted long wars do not put their primary means of production next to enemy forces.
Hopefully things remain peaceful and this never matters.
> If China and the U.S. get into a conflict, like every war it will be a question of war production
This describes attritional war [1]. Not all wars are attritional. American war planning has, since the Cold War, extracted a peace dividend in not maintaining its warmaking industry, relying, instead, on stockpiles and quick victories.
In China, for the first time since the Soviet Union, we have an adversary who could draw down our stockpiles and force us into attritional war.
China can't win. If there was any lesson nations of the world should have learned from WW2 is you need resources. Oil in particular for ships. China is an net importer of oil. The US is a net exporter and the largest oil producer in the world. Second there is no defender advantage at sea. Defender advantage comes from built up defenses. The only thing you can do at sea is mine. That will be a problem for both sides. China also doesn't have the air power to win. Now the biggest problem for China is a population of around 1.4 billion people. This comes back to a resource issue. China is also a net importer of food. Ships aren't going to help. The Ukraine war has shown they are very vulnerable to cheap drones. I suspect the US doesn't see an investment in ships to be a high priority. Air power is what matters and they are behind.
PRC is a continental sized power like US, they produce 4m barrels, not as much as US but enough domestic oil to sustain military multiple times current size on war economy with rationing (for reference US military uses ~250k barrles per day). Meanwhile other 10m barrels used energy and transportation is rapidly being electrified. They're also calorically self sufficient. Plenty of domestic coal for other energy use and to gassify into fertilizer.
PRC's correlation of forces in region > US airpower, which likely won't be operational (both land and carrier) because PRC has magnitude more firepower bandwith that US posture in region simply not survivable. It's USN who has no defender advantage vs PRC's entire land based A2D2. Hence IMO correctly surmise US DoD lackidasical about fixing ship building - they see large surface combatants have little future. Also why DoD NGAD is a shit show, they see theatre aviation have little future (against PRC). Only thing US doing right and not fucking up procurement wise is B21s because they realize only survivable edge has to be based in CONUS or far outside of 1/2IC. PRC answer to that is long range strike via missiles/hypersonics, aka doesn't matter US can produce all the oil if CONUS refineries and LNG plants go boom.
Air power is just a means, the ends is degrading adversary war fighting capability / surviving attrition in sustained total peer war. Current trend is US has increasingly little ability to degrade PRC mainland, while PRC's ability to degrade CONUS is increasing. US biggest problem is fortress America is over, and they're trying to match up against a adversary more productive than US ever was during the peak of US industrial output, which was only possible because prior tech made disrupting CONUS at scale impossible. Reality is, IndoPac war will turn 1IC and pacific into no mans land and boths sides will be flinging long range conventional strikes at each others critical homeland infra until someone has had enough.
Corporate and Wall Street in the pursuit of profit chose to offshore a lot of manufacturing. It's not going to be easy or quick to rebuild these. To win a war you have to have the capacity to quickly build replacements and hold onto resources you need. The answer is not to play the game.
I would venture the implied discussion is about more than shipbuilding. Resources, labor, regulation, and other factors raised in the article are endemic across lots of areas and seems symptomatic of market forces and government policy. As a counter argument, I have to ask why the U.S. needs to build ships faster, larger, cheaper than other countries? The U.S. certainly seems to be able to build infrastructure and housing reasonably competitively.
Everything has become a race to the bottom. It is few and far between to find any product which still exhibits high quality or attention to detail. Formerly good brands continue to hollow out their product for cheaper components.
There is no immediate existential concern, so everyone is skimming their own cut anywhere they can.
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While there is peace, US domestic shipbuilding fundamentally doesn't "matter" all that much politically, not compared to all the thousands of other daily issues or the big issue, tax. The article makes clear that all previous efforts at onshoring shipbuilding, including the hugely successful war efforts, involved spending a lot of public money.
If you ask the average taxpayer, how much do they want to spend on subsidies for US shipyard workers, what answer are you going to get?
(I also think the Jones Act, like other protectionism, keeps the industry intact but inefficient, another uncomfortable choice)
>> high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel
Well, yes. A side effect of being a rich country is expensive labour because workers have other options.
> But it now faces a potential naval adversary, in the form of China, with dramatically higher shipbuilding capacity
The US has something like 5,000 live nuclear warheads, use of which might significantly reduce Chinese shipping if it comes to that.
We’d also need to count on Japan and Korea for their shipbyards [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_shipbuil...
You don’t think that without a warships and a nuclear aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean that Iran wouldn’t have invaded Israel? And that the entire region would have completely come apart?
Or that without carriers in the South China Sea China wouldn’t have taken Taiwan?
The US naval fleet is the #1 most powerful geopolitical tool ever invented in the history of the world. And those ships are equipped with plenty of nukes, ICBM interception, electronic warfare, etc.
Israel is able to nuke Iranian cities (without the help of US warships) and Iran knows that.
If China and the U.S. get into a conflict, like every war it will be a question of war production. It takes a long time to build a modern ship. It takes even longer to build a shipyard capable of producing modern ships.
Any great power war will be long and drawn out unless nukes are used.
In a defense of Taiwan or anywhere else in the South China Sea, the defenders advantage will play a role. China with it's numerous shipyards and hypersonic weapons could easily keep the U.S. Navy out and then even more easily out produce it to replace lost ships.
It's also a questionable strategy to outsource your ship building to the two countries closest to your only potential naval rival. Usually countries fighting protracted long wars do not put their primary means of production next to enemy forces.
Hopefully things remain peaceful and this never matters.
This describes attritional war [1]. Not all wars are attritional. American war planning has, since the Cold War, extracted a peace dividend in not maintaining its warmaking industry, relying, instead, on stockpiles and quick victories.
In China, for the first time since the Soviet Union, we have an adversary who could draw down our stockpiles and force us into attritional war.
[1] https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-and-deterrence-in...
Of course, if one side wins quickly, it would be questionable if it was ever really a great power conflict to begin with.
PRC's correlation of forces in region > US airpower, which likely won't be operational (both land and carrier) because PRC has magnitude more firepower bandwith that US posture in region simply not survivable. It's USN who has no defender advantage vs PRC's entire land based A2D2. Hence IMO correctly surmise US DoD lackidasical about fixing ship building - they see large surface combatants have little future. Also why DoD NGAD is a shit show, they see theatre aviation have little future (against PRC). Only thing US doing right and not fucking up procurement wise is B21s because they realize only survivable edge has to be based in CONUS or far outside of 1/2IC. PRC answer to that is long range strike via missiles/hypersonics, aka doesn't matter US can produce all the oil if CONUS refineries and LNG plants go boom.
Air power is just a means, the ends is degrading adversary war fighting capability / surviving attrition in sustained total peer war. Current trend is US has increasingly little ability to degrade PRC mainland, while PRC's ability to degrade CONUS is increasing. US biggest problem is fortress America is over, and they're trying to match up against a adversary more productive than US ever was during the peak of US industrial output, which was only possible because prior tech made disrupting CONUS at scale impossible. Reality is, IndoPac war will turn 1IC and pacific into no mans land and boths sides will be flinging long range conventional strikes at each others critical homeland infra until someone has had enough.
China is investing heavily in nuclear in part to counter this weakness.
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There is no immediate existential concern, so everyone is skimming their own cut anywhere they can.
You can’t steal IP. IP is nothing more than imperialism. It will go down in history as one of the great stupidities the rich use to control the poor.
I honor copyright. But not because it’s right. Simply because I can use it now to make bank on software. And I honor the social contract for others.
But we are all better off without it.
Thanks to it, we reinvent the wheel 50 times making new OSes and stuff such a massive waste of life.
Dead Comment