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Notes -
What is "adversary-proof production"? What does it look like? What policies achieve that end state or detract from it?
This has been on my mind for a while. It comes up regularly in discussions concerning international trade, tariffs and other trade policy, manufacturing, agriculture, defense, and geopolitics. I've joked about it before:
I remarked in that comment that I was kind of joking, but only kind of. I think it really is that I just actually don't know what "adversary-proof production" actually means. I don't think I have a set of criteria to go check whether or to what extent a country's production is adversary-proof. Thus, I don't think I have a way of determining whether any particular policy proposal would or would not contribute toward that goal.
With this context, one of my various aggregators linked to this tweet:
The tweet includes a price chart. I checked reasonably quickly to make sure it wasn't totally off the wall and found articles like this. Apparently, there are a bunch of subsidies/market controls on the domestic production of rice in Japan. Moreover, there is only a very small amount of imported rice allowed without tariffs. The result is that the vast vast majority of Japanese-consumed rice is grown in Japan. There are very few companies that have established any sort of importation supply chain, no relations with international producers, no pre-existing options deals, no experience with the logistics of importing.
And thus, because of some supply (and possibly some demand) factors (one might quibble with the details here, and it seems like different authors point to similar buy slightly different details; I don't think it matters too much), the price of rice in Japan has skyrocketed. One might not worry too much, though. The government is here to help. They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
If you can't tell, I am sympathetic to the view of the tweet author. I don't think that what "adversary-proof production" means is that you shut out international trade, regulate production in order to make sure you preserve some sense of what you think the domestic market "should" look like, and have almost the entirety of your production be domestic.
...but that still leaves me wanting to know... what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?
I'm having difficulty parsing the sentiment behind this.
A number of nations maintain a variety of strategic reserves or stockpiles. The US has a petroleum reserve, Japan too. Italy a natural gas reserve, China and India have food stockpiles. Canada has maple syrup and butter.
Right, a rice reserve hardly seems any sillier than the U.S. Strategic Cheese Reserve.
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Specific to this topic, the US even has a strategic cheese reserve hidden inside a network of caves, to guard against the eventuality of having to pacify a wisconsinite rebellion or something.
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Eh you know, you gotta tick those early boring boxes in the tech tree if you ever hope to get anywhere. At least light aircraft production is technologically adjacent to drone production.
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Preparedness measures always look dumb until/unless the thing youre preparing for happens. I mean, you said yourself that there was no importation supply chain set up that could avert the crisis - because it wasnt viable before now. Robust supply chains similarly dont exist unless you make them viable now. Whether this particular policy is a good one is up for debate of course, but note that many first world countries have heavy agricultural subsidies and oher interventions, and that they have in fact managed to keep agriculture on shore while manufacturing slipped away. Its often analysed in terms of lobbying, but the consistency across states suggests to me that the strategic considerations played a role. So I think that maybe this is broadly what adversary-proff production looks like, and the japanese where either incompetent or got unlucky and thats why they look dumb here.
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The article you linked goes over some of the things I was going to mention related to rice in Japan, but I still want to link this Asianometry video that covers the subject.
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as an aside to your point, strategic grain reserves are pretty common.
Canada of course famously has a strategic reserve of maple syrup (which a while ago was equally famously stolen).
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My naive assumption would be that a product is weakly "adversary-proof" for nation N when the production of the item and its inputs, as well as relevant transportation/shipment routes are located in territories directly controlled/defended by N's military, or the militaries of countries allied to N, and strongly "adversary-proofed" if all of the above conditions obtain plus production of the product and its inputs are located in places either beyond the direct reach of the conventional military and paramilitary capabilities of nations currently or plausibly adversarial to N, or which are meaningfully hardened against attack generally.
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Probably because this is my background but I would conceive of it as analogous to computer security. When you are talking about adversary-proofing your production you need to have in mind, what adversary? What capabilities does that adversary have? How are they going to try and attack my production? You need to start with a Threat model and go from there. Talking about "adversary-proof" in a vacuum is as useless as talking about a "secure" computer in a vacuum. Secure from what?
To take a common example, the United States imports a lot of the goods used in our defense industry. Particularly computer chips and the parts used in their production. Specifically, these parts are often imported from countries which we believe have a substantial likelihood of being adversaries in the future (primarily China). So it would be sensible to talk about adversary-proofing the United States supply chain for computer chips from China. If China decided to invade Taiwan tomorrow and we were unable to source chips from there, what are the alternatives? Same question for the case of China cutting off exports of all rare earth minerals. Crucially the answers to these questions may be different depending on who we are modeling as our adversaries and what their capabilities are.
In theory, defense supply chains aren't supposed to do this. In practice, counterfeit components do sneak in unexpectedly (and there are safeguards to reduce this risk), but I don't think Lockheed (or its subcontractors) are allowed to design in Chinese (or even Taiwanese) bolts and capacitors into an F-35 without a whole lot of paperwork, if at all. There are domestic component manufacturers for those, but often they're not used for vanilla commercial products because they are pricey. There is a reason "mil-spec" components are expensive: maybe part of it is grift, but part of it is supply chain management.
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Part of adversary proof production for the modern U.S. would almost certainly be near-shoring; Mexico has one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the world and it’s probably easier to convert a pickup truck factory into a humvee factory than to build a new factory.
The other thing that seems often left out of these discussions is diversion of civilian goods(probably through rationing). Civilian boots, food, fuel, mechanical parts- it can all get diverted to the army. This is part of why I think it unlikely the modern U.S. will engage in a full blown war anytime soon- thé cuts to civilian standard of living would be a no go.
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Here's my home-grown definition - defense treaties like NATO also need to include some economic provisions that ensure that every aspect of wartime production is covered by at least one of the member states. It's shameful that the NATO countries together cannot produce sufficient rare earth materials to supply our collective armies. Within member states, there should be enough capability to grow sufficient food, mine sufficient materials, process sufficient materials, produce sufficient sources of energy, etc so that if NATO countries went to war with a major adversary it could do so without pagers exploding or power grids being kill-switched.
"Adversary-proof production" doesn't mean Isolated America vs the World. It would mean blocks of allies against at least one adversary. There can be market competition between allies.
It's also helpful to remember that in the case of actual wartime production happening even the less-competitive producers will likely be going full-tilt.
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