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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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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