Govini’s Numbers Matter report offers a sobering analysis on the scale of the U.S. reindustrialization gap: between 2014 and 2022, U.S. dependence on China for electronics in defense supply chains increased by 600%. The paper finds that “with just 25 well-constructed attacks, an adversarial military planner could cripple much of America’s manufacturing apparatus for producing advanced weapons.”
Posted by B3stThereEverWas
3 Comments
From Hardware FYI newsletter
*In We Are Building the Wrong Factories, Lesley Gao makes a broader point: there is no such thing as a “defense industrial base” separate from the rest of manufacturing. Tooling, metallurgy, sensors, battery cells, and semiconductor wafers form the backbone of all production; the same foundations that support cars, household appliances, and consumer electronics also support missiles and drones.*
*Gao argues the U.S. optimized for high-mix, low-volume precision over throughput, at the expense of surge capacity. Analysts warned as early as 2008 (pg. 74-75) that a “low-volume, tailored-requirement production model” is incompatible with “industrial surge capability.” What surprised us most: between 2002 and 2018, the U.S. lost 20% of its machine shops and nearly 45% of its tool-and-die workforce.*
Certainly makes for sobering reading. In the neoliberal race for global free trade I feel national defence capability is a tricky topic. On the one hand we all want low/no trade barriers and competitive advantage wherever it exists but at what cost to national defence capability? Manufacturing is to war what farming is to food security, its hand in glove.
Oh and an interesting/frightening graphic that Pentagon officials probably lose sleep over
https://preview.redd.it/uql9xxq07keg1.jpeg?width=1272&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b8d1312261837744faffacad173f62ca86dd48e
This is where the intersection of neoliberal “free market gud” and non-neoliberal “some industries need to remain domestic even if subsidized because national security concerns” typically has an impasse.
25 attacks on the mainland US is….a shit load. The author hand waves this like it’s basically a forgone conclusion, but short of using nukes, China has absolutely no way of pulling this off. If the factories were in Taiwan then yes they could do that because they have thousands of missiles with the range for that, but they can’t reach the US with anything but ICBMs (ok technically bombers have unlimited range if you have the tankers to support them, but good luck keeping those tankers alive). At best they may harm one or two for a couple weeks with espionage.