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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Notes -
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.)
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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