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
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Notes -
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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