39-45:
- US, pop 130m, 40m Gross Tons. ~0.05m GT/m
2023:
- JP, 125m, 10m GT, ~0.08m GT/m (kind of in decline)
- SKR, 51m, 18m GT, ~0.35m GT/m (increasing in value)
- PRC, 1400m, 33 GT, ~0.02m GT/m (increasing++ in GT and value)
If modern US was serious as efficient as JP or SKR, it can do 30-120m GT per year. Meanwhile PRC casually building about entire 6 year US WW2 ship building program per year (2024 puts it close to 37m GT). But it's not out of question for US to be competitive in a few generations. But also kind of lulz that SKR peacetime ship building is like 7x more efficient than US during WW2.
i think it is - as in, if the need ever arises in a war, the loss would be far sooner than the time required for "competitiveness".
That is, of course, this new war is going to play out the same as the last one. But as with all history, it only rhymes.
I also doubt US built ships will ever be globally commercially competitive vs east asian builders (or whoever comes next), but the point is modern ship building has gotten efficient, and it's feasible for US to reshore enough ship building for domestic needs. I think for American's sake, it's illustrative to stop nostalgical pine for US WW2 ship building prowess, because it's really meagre compared to modern ship building scale.
Also be aware that if US WW2 shipping buildig dial was set to 10, PRC set the dial to not just 11, but 50. The consolation is it's very feasible for US to move dial from current 2 back to 10, perhaps even 20. And for US strategic interests (and ego) that's probably enough.
there is huge difference between building 1 x 500k GT container ship and 50 ships x 10k GT
About future sea based fighting - Ukrainian sea drones armed with Sidewinders have already shot down Russian helicopters and one Su-30 fighter (may be even 2).
https://www.twz.com/sea/aim-9-sidewinder-armed-ukrainian-dro...
A small sea battle between such a drone and a manned Russian fast light seacraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djKIu4gC_sQ The drone lost this time, yet one can clearly see potential if the drone were also armed with a small anti-ship missile or just a radar guided machine gun (or they may be organized in a pack where each drone carries one type of weaponry while still staying small and agile). The poor Russian Marines had really hard time and that against just one remotely controlled drone - when the drones become fully autonomous with more suitable weaponry, and attacking as a pack instead of alone, humans wouldn't stand a chance.
I’m ruminating about making some very cheap and simple anti drone systems - the idea is how to respond if say in a small regional theater an adversary launches a million of drones. Don’t see many working in that direction while it should be a large market soon.
I'm surprised this isn't on the list.
Maybe robotics and AI can be combined to close the gap... Its just that all competitors will be able to do that too.
Then consider that much of the U.S. aligned shipbuilding happens in places like South Korea. There is no guarantee the U.S. will be able to purchase ships from South Korea during a war in Asia.
Then again, surface ships are quickly becoming obsolete with drones and hypersonic missiles.
If the U.S. wants to get ahead, they need to build submarine drone carriers as quickly as possible.
I don't really have immense faith in the US leaders any more (as an outsider), but surely none of them genuinely believe the US can out-manufacture China?
What might be more difficult to scale up is steel production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
Chips too, but old style boats without computers still float and maybe are even easier to build.
It’d be good if we built more submarines, faster…
The GLSDB in Ukraine looked like it would turn the tide on paper—relatively cheap precision warheads with a huge stock of ammo which could outrange artillery and hit supply lines. But they’ve been a nonentity because of Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities. It’s similar with drones—Ukraine’s FPV drones stopped being effective due to EW, but then they switched to fiber optic cable and that’s made an enormous difference.
Aircraft carriers today are sitting ducks. The more we make, the more we’d lose.
The US isn't getting poor outcomes from their manufacturing sector because people are divided, but because the US has policies tending towards deindustrialisation and there is a broad political consensus to keep them. Ban the smokestacks, ban the smokestack economy and enjoy the clean air.
That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.
I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.
I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.
Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.
(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).
OP’s reading above was that quashing of dissent was what helped everyone pull in the same direction in world war ii.
The hammer gets bought down on dissenters, true enough. Happens in every big war, I count myself lucky that HN is remote and anonymous from some of the people I've talked to or I'm sure I'd have some nasty injuries from my views on the Ukraine war. But industrial production never has and never will be determined by how hard people wish for things and hold hands. Industrial production is a function of resource availability and capital investment. There is no strong need to get many people on side for either of those things and the people who handle capital investments tend to be a class that thinks alike so if a few are convinced then all of them will go along happily.
The pulling together is important insofar as bodies are required for the meat grinder and if you want to deploy literally everything in a war effort then work will be found for idle hands. But if we're talking about wartime manufacturing; it really isn't the major factor. The US is not industrially limited by its cohesion, it is limited by legislation written by people who are in the majority and enjoy a societal consensus which they are using to diminish industry.
[0] Which is logically impossible given that minimum of half the sides in wars must lose.
But the main lesson I'd want to take is to shut down strong aggressors early, then you don’t need to run a massive war production program in the first place.
Judging by Ukraine, we seem to have learned this lesson but not very well.
[1]: https://www.history.com/articles/japanese-american-relocatio...
You can be amazed at the output and the point of the article without turning this into yet another guilt post about how bad America is. What we did was wrong. But also, we stopped the nazis and the japanese and the italians. the war in the pacific killed 15-20 million chinese civilians, and I won't even go into the other theaters or the war crimes of the japanese or the axis powers (nothing to do with the internment). But maybe whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses is the way you're viewing the wars.
And no, no amount of good by US forces justifies or absolves us of the sin of the japanese internment but maybe some credit is due at least.
Societies today have immense latent potential. So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose. An existential threat - war - is a well known way to bring that out. But war is too destructive for modern tastes.
We've seen developing countries get great results by government directing private industry in stronger ways than we're used to in the West. For example China's regularly published national development priorities for the next 5 years. If you hew to these you'll be helped in various ways. Singapore's and South Korea's rises to global powers were helped along by government getting everyone to row in the same direction - among other things, I'm greatly simplifying. But to focus on this one idea, I hope you can agree that providing purpose through top-down leadership is a great way to harness societies' latent potential and mobilize in a given direction..
Rudderless, laissez-faire governance got the US a surprisingly long way. But we are seeing the resultant directionlessness leave leaders unable to agree on whether to tear up what's been built, leave it in place, or go some completely random direction.
It's not the ships that were built, it's what they represented. That was what got them built.
There's no shortage of authoritarian governments all over the world, many of which use exactly the guise of collective purpose or some other similar nonsense to justify their destructive, repressive activities..
In their professional lives, they are Patriots Advancing American Independence.
The unquestioned Purpose is what enables the lack of care for others (that blossom in oh-so-many dangerous ways)
But the problem with that kind of thing is that eventually it results in a wave of true believers. It doesn't mean that they stop padding their pockets, mind you - why would they, when they're obviously entitled to their fair share as the Champions of Something Great. But it vastly increases their capacity for damage because now they are going to do it even in situations where it doesn't benefit them in any way, and may even harm them, for the sake of their beliefs.
We're a generation of men raised by Fight Club—I'm wondering if a self-induced mass-culling event is really the answer we need.
IMO most of the world's woes these days are persisting because of a lack of political will to fix them.
I sometimes feel that China is able to achieve the things it's achieving because the government's near-absolute control over the population. The political power is absolute, and it's wielded in a very very effective way. If China decides tomorrow that they want to colonize Mars, they will probably get it done within a decade.
I do understand the needs of that particular war, The Nazis and Imperial Japan were truly invasive evils, big and globally dangerous enough to be worth fighting, even if it meant mass mobilization, but generally, there's no nostalgic beauty to such vast butchery, destruction and creation for the sake of destruction. I prefer finding my own purpose in life, and knowing that my children won't be ripped apart by artillery in some blood-soaked field of mud due to government decree.
Or what we could achieve in terms of renewable energy, if we all were behind the goal. There are many examples that benefit society, but anti-social forces and influences are everywhere, delaying, stopping, and sabotaging our future.
>It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well.
In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:
https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/primary_scost.gif
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...
Small-government types like me aren't against good things. We just believe that it takes much more than simply throwing resources at a problem to solve it.
In my view, the "you're just against good things" finger-pointing merely gets in the way of a constructive discussion regarding what actually works.
Based on what I've read about WW2, the US was able to rapidly mobilize because it had great leadership at the time. We're not able to mobilize in the same way nowadays because our government leadership sucks. The civic culture is weaker (in part due to political polarization, and also demoralization due to our failures in Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). There's lots of anti-Americanism in America nowadays. Even the right has become anti-American. (Arguably, that's a good thing if it gets us in fewer wars!) And politicians seem to care more about signalling to their constituents that "something is being done" rather than actually succeeding at the thing.
Salaries are higher and projects are more exciting in the private sector. US multinationals are growing fast, and starving the US government of the brilliant, hardworking individuals that would be needed for the government to do awesome stuff. The government turns those people off due to red tape, lower salaries, and a generally bad working environment. I graduated from one of the top universities in the US, and I don't remember talking to any student who even considered working for the government.
Sure. Food rationing, mass poverty, inability to do anything but prescribed work, mass hysteria. All things to look forward to.
Of course, the poison of social media took care of that in short order. FDR cracked down hard on misuse of the airwaves and the extremists for a reason.
The only way this makes sense for people is if they are racists deep down and think that humans should compete like ant colonies.
Warfare is a total failure of management and society.
The human zoos of the future are not going to allow warfare or build up to it.
We have instantaneous global communication and translation.
Our modern peace is not from enlightenment but because war became too destructive. Peace should never be assumed.
