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
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My own view is that if the US and China go to war, and the conflict isn't resolved in the first couple of days, then the US will lose, largely due to the factors mentioned here. While I support Noah Smith's vision of the reindustrialisation of America, I think it will face a significant uphill battle. The share of the US population working in manufacturing has fallen from 30% in 1950 to around 8% today. While some of this reflects more capital-intensive manufacturing processes, there's no way for the US to compete with China without considerably increasing the number of people employed in the secondary sector; note that China has more manufacturing robots per worker than the US and still has around 30% of its population in industry.
This leads to the core problem, namely that white-collar labour is higher status than blue-collar labour, even controlling for salaries, and as a consequence of deindustrialisation, a larger share of the US population now thinks of itself as being entitled to a white-collar job (a form of Turchin's elite overproduction). The kids of accountants, teachers, doctors, and business professionals generally won't want to become welders or machine lathe operators, even if these careers offer a better salary. Consequently, price signals alone won't drive reindustrialisation; some social engineering will be required to boost the status of manufacturing labour, and I'm doubtful of the cultural feasibility of this.
I think drones are plenty scary, but Noah's analysis [more drones = winner] kinda misses that the DJI drones are much more relevant in a land war. At sea they have a lot of value as a day-zero strike weapon but after that are close to being useless because of their limited range.
The way I see it is that longer the war goes, the more important submarines get. Submarines are extremely good at killing ships, but they're not particularly fast. The US probably still has a decent qualitative edge in submarines. If the conflict isn't decided quickly (it will almost certainly take longer than a couple of days for it to resolve, but in theory a decisive blow against e.g. Taiwan could be struck practically in a single day) than it probably means that China has failed to take Taiwan in a timely manner and the US is methodologically sinking every Chinese ship on Earth.
And yes, China's greater production capability doesn't necessarily help them out of this hole. If China can't sink our nuclear submarines reliably, and can't find a way to stop our stealth bombers strike from CONUS, then we merely have to build more missiles, mines and torpedoes than China can build ships. Guess which is considerably less manufacturing-intensive to build? And yet, if China wants to meaningfully strike at the US, it has no options besides that fleet or ICBMs (I don't think its own strategic bomber force is up to the task).
I definitely think we're silly behind in manufacturing and it's actually an open question as to whether or not we'll have said missiles, mines and torpedoes that we need, but China's problem if they go to war against the United States is much, much harder than "print infinite drones, win." It's more like "the United States has just sortied 25 aircraft from airbases you can't strike to launch 1000 stealth anti-ship cruise missiles at you in a single strike. You have 800 interceptor missiles in your VLS cells. Good luck! Oh, and by the way, this missile strike that's going to sink both of your carriers? It's launched from cargo aircraft, and they're going to sortie again tomorrow."
You can't solve that sort of problem with all the FPV suicide drones in Ukraine (unless you manage to stage them outside of US airbases and blow up all our aircraft on day zero of the conflict, which I will admit I find extremely concerning a possibility.)
Good response! Yes, I agree FPV drones are unlikely to be decisive in a naval war. Insofar as China's dominance in drones raises concerns about a US-China conflict, it's what it suggests about China's wider industrial dominance. I think the most plausible 'long war' scenario here involves China imposing a blockade/maritime exclusion zone around Taiwan, triggering an ongoing and gradually-escalating naval conflict with the US. I agree that submarines will likely be very important here, and I also agree that the US has a pretty significant edge here. Where I expect China to dominate is in anti-ship missiles and light combatants like the Houbei class which will effectively exclude the US Navy from the SCS.
Yes. I just question if the US needs to operate the Navy (outside of maybe submarines) in the SCS, particularly in a long conflict such as the one you mention, when it can launch airstrikes from Hawaii or CONUS. Big question here, of course, is how long Taiwan can hold out under a blockade. But if China blockades Taiwan and the United States decides an attritional strategy, it will likely go very poorly for the Houbei.
(Of course, how everything would play out is based on a lot of unknowns – nobody really knows exactly how well the technology and personnel involved in both sides will perform.)
Sortie generation is inversely proportional to distance, and Hawaii is ~5000 miles away from China's coast. If you can't stage out of Japanese bases or Guam then can you bring meaningful fires?
Yes – the distance would impede sortie tempo but I don't think it would stop the US from putting together extremely large strike packages. I particularly doubt that China can actually take out all the airstrips in Japan and keep them taken out.
If we were staging out of Hawaii the size of the package would probably be regulated by the ability to put aircraft and tankers in the air – it'd be a Rube Goldberg machine to stage bombers out of Hawaii or CONUS but I don't think it's impossible. Hawaii's got a couple of military bases and it looks like seven major commercial airports to boot, so I think a large sortie from there would be possible.
On doing a little poking around – Hawaii is probably too far to do a massed Rapid Dragon raid with C-17s, but you could probably send 50 B-52s with 20 LRASMS each for a 1,000 missile strike.
I'm not sure that's actually worth it – it looks like you'd need a decent fraction of the tanker fleet to support it. But I think it's doable considering that the US has hundreds of tanker aircraft.
If people want I could actually sit down and do some napkin math and write this up, but it would take a bit!
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