More War Economics

“I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare.” – Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World

France has, however, done more executions than the United States, but they had a head start.

Earlier this month I had a post about the Economics of War.  This is not exactly a follow up, more of an additional exploration on the topic from a slightly different perspective.  And at one time I used to worry that one of my hairs are out of place, but now, with greater perspective, I don’t care if all six are out of place.  So, perspective matters.

War is about stuff.  In order to fight a war, there needs to be stuff to fight with and the stuff (and men) need to be in the right place at the right time, and General Nathan B. Forrest described his winning strategy for one battle, “I just got there first with the most men.”

Of course, that wins a battle, but not a war.  Unless you’re fighting against France, in which case all you have to win is the one battle if you have sufficient supplies of cigarettes, baguettes, suffragettes, and raclettes.  And a recent Rand® analysis says that’s probably all the United States can win, is a battle.  To quote the study, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of a great power conflict.”

Great power conflict means Russia, and it means China, and if we continue on this path, might even include France and Tahiti.

Why does the river Thames run through London?  If it walked, it would get stabbed.

Let’s talk first about industrial production.  At the beginning of World War II, the United States had a massive untapped labor market thanks to Democratic policies.  We also had the knowhow to build factories capable of mass producing, well, anything, thanks to Henry Ford.  We also had amazing resources, including more oil than Geraldo Rivera’s hair.  Although car production isn’t tank production, you can see it from there.  And airplanes?  They’re just cars with wings, like racoons are pandas that eat trash, right?

Yeah, we can make those.  And with that, the American weapons manufacturing industry was ramped up in 1939 and 1940 or so in order to sell (first) lots of stuff to the British.  It worked.  By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war started, the industrial machine of the United States was just warming up, and soon enough farm girls from the Midwest would be welding on Liberty Ships in Alameda.  In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the United States had 9 aircraft carriers of all types.  At the end of 1945, the United States had 99 aircraft carriers.  That’s not a misprint.

99.

(Hint:  It’s been in overhaul since 2017 and the crew was reassigned to the Russian army)

(CC 4.0, RU.MIL)

In 2024, however, the United States, as far as I can see, is primarily engaged in the production of accounting irregularities, debt, corn syrup, and pizza rolls.  Oh, and worthless university degrees.  Can’t have enough of those.

But is it really important in the time of missiles and drones to have aircraft carriers?  Perhaps not, perhaps they’re as antiquated as bombers and useful mainly against adversaries that can’t “reach out and touch someone” like the Taliban or Iraq?  Perhaps not.  Maybe we should look at other components of weapons.

Let’s take just one technology that’s in everything now:  LED displays.  They’re in phones, but also in jet fighters, tanks, headsets, and any technology meant to share information across a battlespace.  A cursory examination shows that no significant production of LED displays takes place in the United States, and the two companies that I could find that were listed as “American” that produce LEDs have been bought by China.

I guess LED Zepplin was really technologically ahead of Incandescent Zepplin.

Sure, the Taiwanese and Japanese and Koreans make this tech, but those countries are (checks map) nowhere near the United States.  If there was a protracted war, I’ll leave it as a class exercise to estimate the chances that shipping between those locations and the United States might be impacted.  The extended supply chains required to make our most sophisticated weapons systems are long, complex, and vulnerable.

The F-35, for instance, requires parts manufactured all around the world, and even then, there have only been 1,000 made.  Is 1,000 a lot?  In billions of dollars, yes.  In fighter planes, no.  Yet, China claims to have created an automated factory that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day.  Is that a lot?  Well, every day, yes, since the last data I have says that the United States has an inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles.  If correct, China can produce the entire inventory of United States cruise missiles in less than a week.

Are they crappier than ours?  Probably.  But we’d still have to shoot down every single one if we didn’t want to get hit.  How many days until we ran out of SAMs to take them down?

If our production of SAMs is like our production of artillery, not long, and then it would be slingshots.

Thankfully, we have never had to deploy the Tom Cruise missile.

Okay, those are technologically complex systems.  Surely on the old-style weapons we’re doing great, right?

No.  Russia is, by itself, producing three times the artillery munitions that can be produced by the United States.  And by Europe.  Combined.  And that’s today after we’ve been attempting to ramp up production for three years.

So, there’s economic warfare, right?

Many have argued in the past that China needs the markets of the United States, or they would collapse.  That was a good argument, in the past.  China now sells more to developing markets than to the West.  When people keeping talking about China being a paper economic tiger that will soon collapse, I just have to point to that same phrase being trotted out every year for the last 30 years.  China’s economy isn’t like that of the United States, and they’ve taken full advantage of the willingness of the United States to self-immolate its own manufacturing capacity.

China’s ship military ship production capacity exceeds that of the United States.  Oh, strike that.  Just a single Chinese shipyard exceeds the military ship production capacity of the United States.  When we shipped the factories overseas, we not only lost the know-how to make many things.  This is the stuff that the instruction manual doesn’t cover, the figuring out how to make the production line work, the solving of the myriad of glitches that come with a start-up.

It’s almost like this unilateral deindustrialization was encouraged.  Hmmm.

At least the robot will be charged with something.

This isn’t to say that we’ve been defeated – far from it.  But this is no longer 1990 when the United States could, with impunity, exercise military might anywhere around the world and be essentially as unchallenged as Kamala at a vodka-chugging contest.  I like to think (and hope) that at least some military planners have realized the amazing hole that we’re in, and understand that the era of unilateral American military dominance somewhere between “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the formation of the 183^rd Transexual Human Resources Division.

This, however, is not the end.  It just means that the Russia/Ukraine war is a foreshadowing of what’s to come as Pax Americana fades into memory.  We will see many more regional wars, and most of those wars will be wars we can’t impact in any meaningful way.  This, of course, assumes that we don’t have a stockpile of wunderwaffe sitting around that can allow immediate battlefield dominance and intelligence.  Hmmm.  Not seeing that, but, again, I’m not on the list of folks that get those memos.

Would Peter Sellers drive a pink panzer?

We can also use this time to ask ourselves what, exactly, we get out of having military bases all around the world when the single biggest threat is the open border at the south.  Abraham Lincoln, more than 25 years before he was a theater enjoyer, said this at the age of 28:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Yes.  Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could ever take this country by force, but yet we’re bringing in millions of military age men into the country so they can eat all the ducks that swim in the Ohio.

I wonder if we’ll regret letting the illegals get there first, with the most men?