Industrial policy has been a frequent subject on Smith's blog, for those who don't follow it. (He's for it, and thinks that Biden's industrial policy was mostly good - it's worth following the links in this post.) This post focuses on defense-related geopolitical industrial policy goals and pros and cons of anticipated changes under the incoming Trump administration and Chinese responses. Particularly, he highlights two major things China can do: Restrict exports of raw materials (recently announced) and use their own industrial policy to hamper the West's peacetime industrial policy (de facto policy of the last 30 years). These are not extraordinary insights, but it's a good primer on the current state of affairs and policies to pay attention to in the near-future.
Noah Smith: Manufacturing is a war now
noahpinion.blog
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Notes -
My own view is that if the US and China go to war, and the conflict isn't resolved in the first couple of days, then the US will lose, largely due to the factors mentioned here. While I support Noah Smith's vision of the reindustrialisation of America, I think it will face a significant uphill battle. The share of the US population working in manufacturing has fallen from 30% in 1950 to around 8% today. While some of this reflects more capital-intensive manufacturing processes, there's no way for the US to compete with China without considerably increasing the number of people employed in the secondary sector; note that China has more manufacturing robots per worker than the US and still has around 30% of its population in industry.
This leads to the core problem, namely that white-collar labour is higher status than blue-collar labour, even controlling for salaries, and as a consequence of deindustrialisation, a larger share of the US population now thinks of itself as being entitled to a white-collar job (a form of Turchin's elite overproduction). The kids of accountants, teachers, doctors, and business professionals generally won't want to become welders or machine lathe operators, even if these careers offer a better salary. Consequently, price signals alone won't drive reindustrialisation; some social engineering will be required to boost the status of manufacturing labour, and I'm doubtful of the cultural feasibility of this.
I think drones are plenty scary, but Noah's analysis [more drones = winner] kinda misses that the DJI drones are much more relevant in a land war. At sea they have a lot of value as a day-zero strike weapon but after that are close to being useless because of their limited range.
The way I see it is that longer the war goes, the more important submarines get. Submarines are extremely good at killing ships, but they're not particularly fast. The US probably still has a decent qualitative edge in submarines. If the conflict isn't decided quickly (it will almost certainly take longer than a couple of days for it to resolve, but in theory a decisive blow against e.g. Taiwan could be struck practically in a single day) than it probably means that China has failed to take Taiwan in a timely manner and the US is methodologically sinking every Chinese ship on Earth.
And yes, China's greater production capability doesn't necessarily help them out of this hole. If China can't sink our nuclear submarines reliably, and can't find a way to stop our stealth bombers strike from CONUS, then we merely have to build more missiles, mines and torpedoes than China can build ships. Guess which is considerably less manufacturing-intensive to build? And yet, if China wants to meaningfully strike at the US, it has no options besides that fleet or ICBMs (I don't think its own strategic bomber force is up to the task).
I definitely think we're silly behind in manufacturing and it's actually an open question as to whether or not we'll have said missiles, mines and torpedoes that we need, but China's problem if they go to war against the United States is much, much harder than "print infinite drones, win." It's more like "the United States has just sortied 25 aircraft from airbases you can't strike to launch 1000 stealth anti-ship cruise missiles at you in a single strike. You have 800 interceptor missiles in your VLS cells. Good luck! Oh, and by the way, this missile strike that's going to sink both of your carriers? It's launched from cargo aircraft, and they're going to sortie again tomorrow."
You can't solve that sort of problem with all the FPV suicide drones in Ukraine (unless you manage to stage them outside of US airbases and blow up all our aircraft on day zero of the conflict, which I will admit I find extremely concerning a possibility.)
But China has an answer to US Submarines: the underwater great wall. It's a massive network of underwater surveilliance platforms that they've been methodically building up for many years now. Will it work? Who knows, this is all untested and highly classified. But we shouldn't dismiss offhand the idea that they're able to build a defense, when they have unlimited time and money to do it. (I also think it's blase to think they wouldn't be able to defend against stealth bombers or cruise missiles for that reason). And more specifically, in the Taiwan Strait, the water is quite shallow- only about 100 meters deep on average. It's a horrible environment for submarines.
China doesn't have to cruise in open water to win, it just has to defend its coastline. The US and its allies have the much more difficult job.
Well, this assumes a far blockade doesn't cause them problems – the best use of US submarines might not be near the Chinese coastline, but in interdicting shipping escorts thousands of miles away. I think cooperation with Russia would help alleviate a lot of the concerns China has to have with a far blockade, but that doesn't mean it is a non-issue.
It also assumes a purely defensive war. But pure coastal defense probably won't be sufficient to conduct a blockade of Taiwan, which is what doglatine suggests. A blockade will require, almost certainly, getting ships onto the far side of Taiwan, where submarines will be considerably more lethal and Chinese ships will be outside of their ground-based air-defense net. There's a reason China is building aircraft carriers!
China doesn't have unlimited time and money to do any of these things, any more than we do. I don't think they will be incapable of defending against stealth bombers or cruise missiles. In fact, if you look at Russia's track record against stealthy cruise missiles (and Russia has very good air defense) it appears they can shoot them down! We should presume the Chinese can too. But they don't have a 100% track record, and that's very concerning when the target is a ship that might go to the bottom or be combat-incapable for months based on a single hit instead of a bridge (which can be repaired in a matter of days).
My point is that China's problem isn't a problem you can solve with mass-produced FPV drones.
I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this article: https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2022/11/submarines-and-asw-in-china-war.html
He agrees with you that subs and ASW are the most decisive weapon, but he thinks that the balance is relatively even thanks to China's numbers and sensor arrays.
I do agree with you on that. I think the linked article is way off base to think we can somehow "bring back manufacturing" and then mass produce drones like they're WW2 liberty ships and have it be effective.
I thought it was fairly sensible. I have a quibble and a comment or two:
He writes off the LCS as an anti-submarine platform. But as I understand it, a lot of ASW warfare is done by helicopters. The LCS is relatively small and, uh, "attritable." It might actually make a relatively good platform to patrol off of Taiwan's eastern side. It's not going to be great in a situation where it's facing the Chinese fleet or air threats, but if we keep the Chinese fleet bottled up it might make a decent makeshift escort simply by virtue of the helipad. This isn't praise of the LCS, just noting that it is probably not entirely useless.
He writes off our airborne ASW capability. While it's probably true the P-8 and MQ-4 should avoid close encounters with the Chinese air-defense net, they will probably have utility operating out of Japan and the Philippines to bottle up Chinese SSKs. (Here's another area where we see that naval capabilities compound: if China can operate a carrier battle group in the SCS a bit aggressively, they might be able to open gaps in our air ASW coverage and slip submarines through to Taiwan's eastern seaboard.) Of course, I have no idea how reliably the P-8 is at catching transiting submarines anyway, but I assume it will have an edge against non-nuclear submarines in open water.
Furthermore, the US has a number of stealth reconnaissance assets, of which we don't know much. Might the RQ-170's speculated AESA radar have snorkel-detection capability? How well will it hold up to China's anti-stealth radar capabilities? I don't know the answer to that. But it wouldn't surprise me if those assets were tapped in an SCS fight, even in a makeshift fashion.
I think it would be good to "bring back manufacturing," but imho the key isn't to print drones or ships, but rather munitions. If you look at the war in Ukraine, it's good that Russia has a robust manufacturing system, but being able to make munitions. And of course suicide FPV drones are munitions in that war. In a war with China, that's going to be anti-ship missiles, mines, etc. I think that ideally the US needs to be able to make a lot of anti-ship missiles, quickly, because if they are utilized correctly there will be relatively little attrition to the launch platforms, in theory.
Obviously it's ideal to be able to make ships, planes, and missiles overnight. But in terms of manufacturing, I think the first focus should be on munitions. And that's something that the US is aware of and working to mitigate. I really think people are sometimes unaware of just how many air-to-ground munitions the US manufactures (e.g. Wikipedia says 7,500 JASSM stealth cruise missiles and more than half a million JDAM bomb kits produced). I think the US is behind where it needs to be in terms of anti-ship weapons specifically but if China gives it two or three years to manufacture weapons like the LRASM the Navy/USAF will have thousands of them.
I find that blog quite fascinating. He seems like the sort of obsessive weird nerd who can produce great insights, since he's been obsessively writing his google blog on the navy for well over a decade now. And he makes a lot of sensible points. On the other hand he's also quite iconoclastic, and not afraid to go on rants about how the entire navy is stupid and only he can see the truth, so sometimes he's totally inaccurate. He has an obsessive hatred for the LCS and most other modern naval technologies, and wants to bring back the battleships, or at least something with heavy armor and gunfire. He usually advocates for single-purpose ships, so he'd probably say that a ship won't be good at ASW unless it focuses completely on that mission with it's equipment and training.
On munitions manufacturing, I agree that it's critical. But the Ukraine war has given me a dim view of US/NATO manufacturing capacity. We're getting massively outproduced by Russia and North Korea. All the money in the world doesn't seem to translate into much of an actual production improvement.
that seems to disqualify him, that is just absurd
I think it's possible to have some good ideas and some bad ideas at the same time, but I am very, very skeptical of his assessments of armor. However, it's worth noting that naval warfare hasn't changed much since the Iowas were reactivated. When they were, though, they were filled to the brim with Tomahawk cruise missiles.
In principle a long-range naval gun is actually pretty swell, because bullets are cheap and naval support gunfire is good. I think it's too bad we haven't made more progress on railguns.
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The four ports responsible for >95% of shipping are all on the west side. The east side of Taiwan is obnoxiously mountainous.
Taiwan's largest trading partner is China – which presumably would no longer be the case in the event of a blockade – so of course most of the trade is from western ports. Taiwan has multiple ports on the eastern side of the island, which is presumably where it would accept incoming traffic from the United States and Australia in the event of a blockade.
Obviously, being blockaded is far from ideal for Taiwan. But I haven't seen convincing evidence that the ports on the eastern side of the island are physically incapable of handling the necessary sealift.
Now, I grant that China has options besides sending a fleet to the eastern side of the islands:
But at the end of the day, I suspect that failing to place surface ships east of Taiwan will complicate any attempt to blockade it. (Keep in mind, too, that in at least some versions of the China blockade scenario doglatine proposed it is framed as a police action rather than a military one, which makes it likely that China would try to enforce the blockade with Coast Guard vessels.)
Ports require lots of heavy machinery to do their job, you can't 10x their capacity in a few days. LNG terminals (Taiwan imports 98% of energy) also cannot be easily migrated.
The routes between west and east are highly mountainous. One was closed for 13 years due to typhoon damage. They could all be shut down with well placed missiles, crippling resupply.
This is all ignoring submarine warfare/anti ship ballistic missiles.
Sure – but Taiwan has at least some of that machinery on their eastern side. The question is whether or not they can receive sufficient emergency supplies from eastern ports, not whether or not they can do business as usual from eastern ports.
This does seem like a serious weakness, although it looks only around 40% of Taiwan's imported energy comes from LNG specifically.
Allow me to register some skepticism that this would amount to anything more than a temporary inconvenience.
I specifically mentioned submarine warfare and ballistic missiles in my prior post as options China had outside of a surface blockade. Happy to discuss:
Antiship ballistic missiles are useless without a way to cue them. This would traditionally be satellites, recon aircraft, or surface ships. In the event of a war going hot, satellites are likely to be a prime target, and it's hard for them to hide, particularly in the face of superior American surface-to-orbit throw weight. If China's plan is to sit and defend their territorial waters, satellites or recon aircraft won't be effective either. One possibility is using long wave radar to detect surface ships at long distances and use that to cue, but I don't know how effective that would be, so I am agnostic on this front. Obviously, ballistic missiles are also vulnerable to interception, and while China has a lot of them they probably also have a lot of places they will want to put them.
Submarines – in many ways I find these scarier than ASBMS. I am inclined to believe that flooding the zone for them would be dangerous, and China could plausibly surge 40ish of their 66 submarines in the field. (I'm assuming they won't send their boomers and won't be able to field every single ship for maintenance reasons). And once subs get to Taiwan's eastern side, they will be in deeper water and be able to lie in wait around Taiwan's ports.
However, if China's plan is to keep its surface fleet back in coastal waters, it deprives the submarines of air cover, which gives Japanese, Taiwanese and American helicopter and air anti-submarine assets a lot of leeway to operate. China only has about nine nuclear attack submarines, and the rest might be fairly vulnerable while snorkeling (I haven't done a deep-dive on the specifics of their diesel fleet). Submarines are also slower than ships, torpedoes have relatively short ranges, and submarine-launched anti-ship missiles (which China also has) suffer the same guidance problems ASBMs do.
This raises the possibility that simply running the blockade at high speeds escorted by anti-submarine aircraft could pose a serious complication to Chinese submarines, as if they weren't lucky enough to be in the correct position, they'd have to travel at high speeds underwater to reach an intercept, dramatically raising the chances they are identified by anti-submarine aircraft. But on the other hand if they do get a torpedo off, they will immediately be targeted and possibly sunk by escorts.
Now – subs are sneaky, and I think that a sub blockade of Taiwan might be extremely painful for Taiwan. While past submarine blockades haven't worked, there are a variety of reasons to think that Taiwan might be different. (It seems quite possible that a lack of Western manufacturing of transport ships is a huge Achilles heel, here!) But you can see how a blockade of Taiwan is (to use my word) complicated if you don't put large surface combatants with surface-search radars east of Taiwan.
To be clear – I am not saying a war against China would be an easy win for the United States. The United States might even lose! I am saying that mass manufacturing of cheap weapons systems of the sort that have been effective in Ukraine is unlikely to be as helpful in a naval war.
And this is not a new problem for the United States – the Soviet army significantly out-massed and out-gunned NATO forces during the Cold War. The US solution to this problem was to develop high-end capabilities that increased combat effectiveness so that brute manufacturing capability was not the determinative factor on the battlefield.
Now, looking at how that's turned out in Ukraine, I think it's clear that the US definitely underestimated the importance of manufacturing. But on the other hand, I think that air war and ocean war are much less vulnerable to the simple expedient of raising larger armies and manufacturing more artillery shells, and I do think high end technological edges matter more at sea in combat.
I do agree that abysmal rates of US manufacturing of ships and weapons systems are a legitimate issue here. I just think the story is not quite as simple as one might be tempted to conclude.
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Good response! Yes, I agree FPV drones are unlikely to be decisive in a naval war. Insofar as China's dominance in drones raises concerns about a US-China conflict, it's what it suggests about China's wider industrial dominance. I think the most plausible 'long war' scenario here involves China imposing a blockade/maritime exclusion zone around Taiwan, triggering an ongoing and gradually-escalating naval conflict with the US. I agree that submarines will likely be very important here, and I also agree that the US has a pretty significant edge here. Where I expect China to dominate is in anti-ship missiles and light combatants like the Houbei class which will effectively exclude the US Navy from the SCS.
Yes. I just question if the US needs to operate the Navy (outside of maybe submarines) in the SCS, particularly in a long conflict such as the one you mention, when it can launch airstrikes from Hawaii or CONUS. Big question here, of course, is how long Taiwan can hold out under a blockade. But if China blockades Taiwan and the United States decides an attritional strategy, it will likely go very poorly for the Houbei.
(Of course, how everything would play out is based on a lot of unknowns – nobody really knows exactly how well the technology and personnel involved in both sides will perform.)
Sortie generation is inversely proportional to distance, and Hawaii is ~5000 miles away from China's coast. If you can't stage out of Japanese bases or Guam then can you bring meaningful fires?
Yes – the distance would impede sortie tempo but I don't think it would stop the US from putting together extremely large strike packages. I particularly doubt that China can actually take out all the airstrips in Japan and keep them taken out.
If we were staging out of Hawaii the size of the package would probably be regulated by the ability to put aircraft and tankers in the air – it'd be a Rube Goldberg machine to stage bombers out of Hawaii or CONUS but I don't think it's impossible. Hawaii's got a couple of military bases and it looks like seven major commercial airports to boot, so I think a large sortie from there would be possible.
On doing a little poking around – Hawaii is probably too far to do a massed Rapid Dragon raid with C-17s, but you could probably send 50 B-52s with 20 LRASMS each for a 1,000 missile strike.
I'm not sure that's actually worth it – it looks like you'd need a decent fraction of the tanker fleet to support it. But I think it's doable considering that the US has hundreds of tanker aircraft.
If people want I could actually sit down and do some napkin math and write this up, but it would take a bit!
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