RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Claim that the US is not remotely near China in terms of production.
When presented with evidence that questions this claim, disbelieve it on the grounds that China is capable of producing more tenuously analogous but in fact entirely different items.
QED the USA is not remotely near China in terms of production.
Does China produce infinitely more TNT than the US? Factcheck: True. This says something important about the state of the US MIC. Chemical precursors, machine tools, component parts for what the US does produce, magnets, electronics - many of these are derived from China. What American production there is of important munitions and explosives is too small-scale.
OK... So how is US ABM production supposed to outscale Chinese missile production?
Firstly, you assume or bring up the idea that the US will hit or exceed its production targets in 7 years. The US routinely, almost constantly, misses munitions production targets because of industrial weakness, shortages of engineers and skilled workers, a lack of proficiency in quickly establishing factories and a poor regulatory environment. China doesn't have these problems.
Secondly, China's (much larger by floorspace!) expansion of missile production has to be outpaced by this US expansion. Maybe they'll add a few million more m^2 of production capacity in the next seven years. Or maybe they intensify their efforts further. If the US can intensify their efforts, why can't China?
Thirdly, the ABMs have to be actually accurate and performant. THAAD right now has been tested and found wanting against Iranian missile and drone attacks, of which China can surely launch at a much greater scale. It would be bizarre for a mid-size country, under severe sanctions, with 1/10th the engineers and 1/100th the money of China to outperform China quantitatively or qualitatively. Realistically THAAD will need to fire several interceptors against inbound missiles to achieve a good probability of a kill. It's an inherently uphill battle. Even with Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles (which do have internal terminal guidance), judging by anti-ship missile history it's always been harder to defend than attack.
Finally, THAAD and the rest of the munitions scaling needs to meet US strategic goals in a war with China. The victory condition for America is not simply 'defend Guam from being bombed to unusability' or 'defend airbases in Japan' but also to defend Taiwan's independence, which requires somehow securing long shipping lanes of food, fertilizer and LNG to a small island off the coast of China. It would require not only destroying the PLAN but also the bulk of the Chinese air force and missile (including SRBMs) and drone forces, depriving China of their coercive abilities. It's an incredibly difficult task. It would be much easier to secure the straits of Hormuz. And yet the US has shown no sign of being able to do that, thus far.
Keep in mind that US has been attempting ballistic missile defense for more than three decades; the first Chinese conventional IRBM, the DF-26, became operational about a decade ago.
The US has been attempting ballistic missile defence since the 1950s and at no point has it been cost-efficient against a strong power. It isn't cost-efficient today against Iran and I can't see why it would be against China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
On a quick Google, DoD estimated last year that China has around 1,300 MRBMs and 300 launchers and only about 550 IRBMs and 300 IRBM launchers, adding 50 of each since 2024. China's more numerous SRBMs won't range Guam and most of Japan, and the MRBMs will only range Japan. So the US pre-ramp-up produces more ballistic missile interceptors with THAAD systems alone (nearly 100/year) than China produces ballistic missiles that could range Guam (if DoD estimates are even ballpark accurate). Maybe the question we should be asking is "How is China supposed to outrace the US in scaling munitions production?"
I don't believe these estimates. A country that produces vastly more steel, chemicals, cars, electronics and drones than the US can logically also produce far more ballistic missiles than the US can produce missile interceptors. It's reasonable to expect that China has an advantage in missile production, even before considering that missile defence is inherently more complicated than missile offence.
Ballistic missiles aren't easily countable, they're concealed in depots deep underground. Even the launchers are concealed and camouflaged.
China conducts more missile tests than the rest of the world combined. Per CNN, they've added 2 million square meters of floor space (including research) in missile facilities. The US is adding nowhere near that much.
Furthermore, we should be considering protracted warfare. Even if the stockpile is 1800 missiles, what matters is production rates 1 year in, 2 years into the war. Major wars often take longer than expected, stockpiles are expended and what matters is the scaling of production. Ukraine is a good example.
I don't think TNT is used for most of the high-end weapons systems
That's right but it's significant in showing where the US MIC is. They aren't remotely near China in terms of production. The US also seem to have fallen behind in high-end explosives like CL-20, which America invented but seems to struggle in deploying.
It's completely plausible for the Korean peninsula to see large ground battles requiring huge quantities of TNT. The South Koreans may be serious and proficient but there is only a certain amount that South Korea can do against a gigantic country like China.
I too read and enjoyed Colby's book.
How much do purges hurt the PLA? The strength of the Chinese military is not in their professionalism or training or experience but in their numbers and the scale of the munitions and technology that Chinese industry can supply them with. They can learn how to fight as they go, adapt and improve in wartime. They can promote new, younger and more talented generals. They cannot make a new industrial base in wartime.
When we think about military purges, we all think back to the Soviet Union pre-WW2. Military purges reduced their combat effectiveness by some degree, sure. But the strength of the Red Army was not in fighting well. They improved over the war but never fought as well as Germany did. They didn't need to be especially competent to prevail. They had mass!
The US seems to be purging generals right now, during a major conflict. The Army Chief of Staff is a fairly high profile role. Furthermore, it's significant in that the US doesn't have a China-tier industrial base, totalitarian-state casualty tolerance or that gigantic recruiting pool. The US needs to be fundamentally more capable and competent to prevail against a much bigger country.
Over the next five years, US munitions production levels are slated to ramp up to extremely high numbers
Extremely high... by US standards. Annual production of 400 THAAD interceptors in 7 years? The Chinese will burn through that in a week, probably on day 1. If the THAAD batteries are even there, they might be sent off to the Middle East by then.
There is currently no TNT production in the US. That's part of the 'munitions buildup' - restarting TNT production from zero.
The Army has set aside $650 million to design and construct a domestic TNT facility, targeting 5 million pounds (~2,270 metric tons) per year.
Does anyone know how much TNT China produces? Probably a lot more than 0 tonnes a year, maybe 30,000 to 60,000 tonnes. 2000 tonnes a year, all things considered, won't make much difference. If the US is aiming to match Russia in munitions production, there's no chance of beating China.
How is the US supposed to outrace China in scaling munitions production? The Chinese industrial base has cheaper components, cheaper energy, an ocean of engineers and machine tools frothing about.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
One wonders what they have on Trump at this point, this isn't his usual modus operandi. The other half of the Epstein files?
Maybe they just got rid of all the moderating influences in the general staff and elsewhere. I was reading just today that they tried this exact routine on Bush in 2007 but the CENTCOM commander said 'over my dead body' and blocked it: https://x.com/ClimateAudit/status/2039752164894015529
Has the French system delivered excellence? The nuclear power switchover, that was done well. High speed rail and infrastructure buildout, that was done well. The glorious years. But that's in the past.
What has the French system delivered more recently? Not joining the Iraq War, that's about it.
France has serious demographic and terror issues. There are troops constantly patrolling Paris with machine guns. This is not a sign of a well-managed society. The French economy is extremely indebted and lacks dynamism. Where is France in AI? Mistral is on the level of a single second-rate Chinese AI firm. Where is France in aerospace? The Rafale is at or below the level of China's export-grade 4th gen light fighters with export-grade missiles, as seen with India and Pakistan. France doesn't do 'export-grade', that's the best they've got.
Where is France in semiconductors? Nothing of great significance. French cars? Second-rate at best. Heavy industry and machine tools? That's Germany's department, France is behind Spain.
Only Airbus really stands out as top-tier performance. And Louis Vuitton I suppose (handbags do not matter). French nuclear power has slipped, skills have been lost and costs have soared.
French elites could have chosen to focus on uniting Europe, creating a power-bloc to rival America and China. Yet they constantly leave pan-European projects like the Eurofighter, they're arrogant and uncooperative. Instead they've focused on bringing in low-performance Africans and raising taxes punishingly high, crippling economic development. France has seriously ugly problems with pensions and spending because of the inadequacy of its leaders, the ethos and approach and ends they pursue. There's no issue with the French people, they've shown excellent abilities throughout history.
I invite you to contemplate the current state of American governance with its parade of Filter Model all-stars and tell me with a straight face that this proposition is working.
American governance can and is constantly faceplanting and they'll still be doing better than France or Britain. The US can make terrible decisions with terrible consequences but retain the core wealth-generating machine of their society, their huge technological base and be fine. The US also has all kinds of serious self-inflicted demographic problems too. But if you build and maintain the wealth machine then these are all manageable.
There's a fallacy where people see smart people running country A and dumb people running country B and assume that country A is better run. That need not be the case! Smart people can do tremendous damage to a country, as can the stupid. Well-ordered, mature, serious legal institutions with all this beautiful jurisprudence and meticulously educated officials executing well-formulated plans can absolutely crush and wreck a country like France. They'll just do it in an orderly, mature, serious, sophisticated way.
Having smart people running the country isn't at all necessary and may even be undesirable on average. Occasionally you get a Lee Quan Yew or a De Gaulle. But you might also get a skilful, cunning, sophisticated wrecker like Blair or Macron. Better an intellectually mediocre leader who sincerely loves his country than a 160 IQ genius who went to the very best schools, if he is in love with some grand ideological scheme, foreign power, personal profit or whatever else.
Konrad is a captain but he's not a military or strategy expert... You can tell in the diction these guys use, the difference between amateur and expert. I have no doubt he knows lots about freighters but he overestimates the relevance of shipping. You do not take risks in a major war for 'the SHIPS Act, the Jones Act, the U.S. flag fleet, and CMA CGM’s unfulfilled promise to triple its U.S.-flag vessels or Greenland.' None of that matters much at all in contrast to the huge stakes here. He sees everything through a shipping angle and neglects to take a wider view.
If the US had the power to open the straits they would. Firstly, oil and gas and helium and fertilizer are traded on the world market. High oil prices harm America since the US consumes lots of oil domestically, trades with other countries that use lots of oil! Konrad makes this weird point about prices bifurcating but Brent has still gone up a lot. That hurts the US.
Secondly, not opening the straits shows the US to be weak and incapable of defending the petrodollar.
Thirdly, not opening the straits gives Iran leverage and confidence in victory. To win wars you need to take the other side's cards away from them. Iran will hold out for more favorable peace terms if their primary means of leverage remains. They're even charging fees! Trump certainly wants to win, win bigly like nobody's ever won before. He wants to open the straits, fastly!
The US isn't opening the straits of Hormuz because they can't. An Arleigh Burke only has 96 VLS tubes for missiles. Some of those will be taken up with Tomahawks, already fired. The straits are a very confined space by maritime standards, it's like fighting in a telephone box. The destroyers would have to escort dozens of freighters every single day, under drone and missile attack night and day. Drones and missiles get through, that's just how things go. Not to mention that the destroyers could just get saturated, even if US air defence missiles were magical, perfectly accurate wonder weapons (they aren't). The escort would fail and possibly lose some destroyers too. That's why they haven't tried it.
A more plausible model is that Trump has demanded that the straits be reopened and the navy is deliberately trying to slow things down because they know if they just charge in it'll be a disaster.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
Well some of them surely can't read... unless you don't classify them as civilizational?
Anyway, I agree with your main point. Going too meta and abstract is generally bad for writing. Professional authorities on writing don't seem to be very good at it. How many great novelists got a degree? How many NYT 'bestsellers' are actually good and fun to read? Not to mention all the destructive fads that have been spurred by books. In Germany for instance "The Cloud" terrified millions, written just after the Chernobyl disaster with a brutal description of a meltdown, radiation poisoning, social breakdown. It was taught in schools.
Then we see German denuclearization and horrendously costly energy policies, in part spurred by electoral realities from a generation who'd been brought up on these scare stories.
Agreed, prior to this war I thought that Trump was at least better than Bush Junior but he's dived a whole league beneath Bush with this. At least Iraq wasn't strong enough to be a big pain like Iran.
This is what happens when you can't think soundly in strategic terms. The value of Greenland is microscopic compared to the value of Europe. 2 nuclear powers, ASML chip equipment, machine tools, 600 million people, precision optics, a fairly advanced defence industrial base and about 2 million troops. Europe could be a decisive factor in a world war with China, they provide the numerical weight to somewhat counterbalance China. There was coalition-building where Britain and France were going to help send fleets to Asia, that was part of the strategy.
Greenland is a frozen wasteland. The only vaguely valuable thing there is basing and radar that the US already has! Trump wanted to map-paint there, antagonized much more valuable countries over it. Same with tariffs. Tariff your enemies and not your allies.
The Iran war was predictably a terrible idea. The US seems to be getting kicked out of Iraq, while Iran has secured the straits of Hormuz de facto, possibly soon formally. Trump is reduced to telling other countries to go in and secure the oil themselves, since Iran has been 'decimated'. If Iran is so beaten then why not just go in with the US Navy and secure the oil, secure a big W for America? It's obnoxious to falsely declare victory and then usher allies into the death zone to do some futile bleeding, demand their assistance in a war that worsens their interests, a war they lack the power to win.
It's worse than Suez. Britain and France and Israel were crushing Egypt militarily, they landed troops and took Port Said in a week. There was no doubt they had the power to prevail on a purely military level. British troops weren't 'working from home' sitting in hotels because their bases were getting bombed out. The US is not just losing strategically but hasn't made any traction at all with regard to the strait. There has been no traction with regard to regime change either. Maybe that will change in future but it's looking really bad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
This assumes that the Wuhan lab knew The Truth about what was going on
But they were the ones doing it? They couldn't accidentally be collecting these coronaviruses, testing them on humanized mice, putting furin cleavage sites in them...
I blame the scientists who were actually doing this stuff, not Chinese politicians who probably didn't understand or care that much and delegated to the 'experts'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
What're you gonna do about it, demand the world embargoes China
The Chinese govt wouldn't knowingly release a deadly virus on their own people. They made a costly display of how very 'anti-pandemic' they were, these are the people who invented lockdownism and stopping the spread.
The Chinese govt is naturally unwilling to admit any level of guilt or culpability for such a huge disaster, so they are covering it up and blaming the US. The US is behaving similarly.
My issue is with the researchers themselves, I want them punished severely to send a message and discourage others. Discouraging others is the whole point, we need to ensure this doesn't happen again. I don't care about the geopolitical level, all the blame should be dumped on Daszak, Bat Lady and the other gain of function researchers themselves.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
If it was zoonotic, why did the Wuhan laboratory take down their database of virus samples because of 'hacking' in late 2019 right when COVID emerged and then never bring it up again? How could they be so unlucky - this is key evidence that could've proven their innocence, if indeed they had no COVID precursor virus samples?
Who hacks databases of boring genetic information?
The whole epistemology of this is so bizarre. Biological researcher consensus concludes that biological researchers are not to blame for the biggest pandemic in living memory after all the evidence needed to confirm it either disappears or is solely under their control, is that really worthy of consideration? It was pretty straightforward in 2020 when we learnt about the biolab with its bat virus gain-of-function research program on humanized mice right next door... Nobody's going to do anything about this though. We live in a NGMI civilization.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
It seems like a very American invention, and a facile one, that we are seen as stupid outside of the US.
I enjoyed much of the essay but disagree here. Outside the US, amongst non-Americans, Americans are indeed looked down upon and considered stupid.
Some clips from Jeremy Clarkson: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JsMVncOU1K4
It's not merely my personal 'America is a greatly flawed country in many respects but also with great strengths' opinion but the strawman version of 'Americans are stupid, fat, uncultured, violent and fascist too'. My well-off Australian friends constantly bemoan America, how they harass you and ask for passwords and social media and fingerprints if you want to enter the US - those are just stories they've heard since they don't want to visit the US with Trump and all.
Even before Trump America was looked down on, the Clarkson clips are old and somewhat representative of ambient anti-American stereotypes. The War on Terror is perceived as a dumb idea executed badly, that the US dragged us into. Same with the war in Iran for that matter. They don't like American lifestyle either, how the food has chemicals in it, the tipping culture, the drug commercials, feeling unsafe in major cities... When I went to the US with some friends we didn't really like it, saw some guy shooting up on the street which was a new experience. Much preferred Europe, though it's also hard to feel safe in Paris with all the troops wandering around.
Nobody respects 'American institutions from law and universities to science and the humanities'. Nobody really thinks about them at all, except insofar as Trump is perceived as wrecking them. What good are these institutions if Trump emerged and seemingly took over, people think. My legal-inclined friends don't like US jurisprudence, they think it's a mutated and degraded cousin of proper common law. All maluses and no pluses. It's an immature way to think about countries but that's just how the media seems to behave, that's the base expectation. I could point out to them that in terms of authoritarianism, our freedom-of-speech is much more limited than the US, the UK arrests many more people for political crimes but that's not something that people feel comfortable saying or thinking so much.
Maybe it's different in the developing world or China or Japan.
One theory: the war with Iran is going far worse than expected. The nominally 'neutral' government of Iraq is about to fall without oil revenues to pay workers. In addition the US has been bombing elements of the pro-Iranian PMF militias that are the primary force in Iraq, they're stronger than the Iraqi army. To a certain extent, the US is now at war with Iraq as well.
The US is flying in a large number of troops to the Middle East in C-17s. We may be looking at a multi-year campaign to retake Iraq as a staging post for a ground invasion of Iran.
Desert Storm but much more retarded and much more costly.
At any rate the airborne troops being deployed are there to do something and it probably won't be cheap.
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