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I have some bad news for you - this won't eventually lead to national bankruptcy and a defence industrial base that cannot keep pace with China. You're already there! China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the USA, and their manufacturing capacity in just about every other industry is leagues ahead of the US as well. In wartime, civilian manufacturing capacity can be switched over to defence/military work - but building entirely new facilities and staffing/training them is substantially more expensive, difficult and time consuming. While the problem isn't as bad (but absolutely still present - https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2024/06/mixed-results-us-military-efforts-reduce-dependence-china/397368/) in military manufacturing, there's enough Chinese penetration into both to render them extremely vulnerable to disruption in the event of serious conflict with China. Keep pace with China? The defence industrial base isn't just failing to keep pace with China, it isn't even capable of standing on its own without their assistance!
Think about what an actual military conflict with China would entail - the removal of Chinese manufacturing capacity (or worse the subversion of critical US military infrastructure due to Chinese manufactured backdoors etc) would cause the US supply chain to fall apart, creating countless problems that would need resources diverted to fix them precisely when those resources would be needed to recreate a manufacturing base. Fixing it is going to be really complicated as well. First of all, the people who made the decisions to cut costs and sell US manufacturing to China are in many cases still in power and still profiting from those decisions. Second, actually seriously investing in domestic manufacturing and military manufacturing would greatly strengthen the domestic political enemies of those in power. This is actually one of the reasons the CHIPS act failed - the various left-wing political sinecures and set-asides put into the bill to make sure that they were on the right side of history were so odious that they held up progress on the proposed plant.
I agree with all of this. I hold out hope that there's still time for America to unfuck itself, but that that timeframe is measured in months at most.
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