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Well sure. I could produce more ballistic "missiles" than the US can produce missile interceptors. A ballistic missile is just a rocket that goes up and comes down again. But I think the Chinese have higher standards for their ballistic missiles than that.
This depends on what you are trying to hit. The kill chain for an interceptor is much simpler than the kill chain for an anti-ship ballistic missile of the kind that China has invested in.
There are a number of ways to keep an eye on these sorts of things if you really want to. For instance, you can likely estimate the number of missiles and launchers from the volume of the excavation, which you can observe from orbit. You can count the launchers deployed in snap drills, or estimate the number of launchers from the size of Chinese units, which you can determine with some degree of precision by sneaking a look at their housing allocations or catering or cell phone mapping or boot procurement or the number of porta-potties they use.
Whether or not the US actually bothers to do these things, I have no idea.
This is true, although I would argue that naval-centric wars tend to be more decisive. But I could be wrong.
Do you know what is directly analogous to a ballistic missile? Space launch vehicles. And space launches are relatively hard to hide, so we can use that as a relatively objective measure of US/China prowess. As it turns out, the US had about twice as many space launches as China. Since we're now estimating stockpiles by analogous goods instead of intelligence estimates, and since orbital rocket launches are much more analogous to ballistic missiles than steel, chemicals, cars, electronics and drones, we can agree that the US has a considerable edge in manufacturing ballistic missiles over China. Right?
No, the actual truth is that China outproduces the US in production in a great many areas (such a ballistic missiles and surface ships) and that there are several areas (such as submarines and orbital launch capability) where the US is ahead of China (both in quality and in scale.) 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. It's not surprising that the US might have an edge in producing ABMs relative to Chinese IRBMs, particularly if the Chinese are (intelligently, in my mind) iterating their weapons design before committing to mass production. An antiship ballistic missile with a maneuvering warhead and glide vehicle is a very exquisite weapon!
Lucky South Korea is a major manufacturer of TNT. I would be surprised if China decided to escalate horizontally against South Korea instead of attempting to deter them, but what do I know.
Submarines is an interesting one. The US is currently producing what, 1.3 Virginias/year, and they're trying (and currently failing) to get that up to 2.5 to support their own needs plus AUKUS? But then there's also the new Boomer class entering production.
I believe China is producing more subs/year, but that might also include diesels. Which are useful for them to protect their own backyard, but are not the sort of thing that would be in any way useful for America to make.
Quality-wise, though, I believe you're dead-on, that nobody can currently match US nuclear submarines, although China is narrowing the gap.
I went and eyeballed it a while back, and the Chinese are definitely producing more annually, but theirs are smaller. The new Virginias being constructed now are over 10,000 tons displacement, whereas the conventional 039, of which they've build a bit more than 1/year for 20 years, is about 3,600 tons, and even the nuclear 093 (built at less than half the rate) is only twice that, whereas the historical production rate of Virginias is about 1.5 since 2008, although until Block V they were only 7,900 tons.
Even the 095 that your article flags is only going to be about the same size as a Block V.
I don't think that displacement is everything with ships (for instance it can be better to have three conventional submarines instead of one nuclear submarine, because you could rotate the diesels for a persistent presence and not the nuclear submarine!) and certainly being bigger doesn't give you more HP, or something. But it does give you more payload, which is pretty relevant, particularly when you're slinging payloads of cruise missiles and going through lots of torpedoes. In a major war, that means that your ships can stay on station longer and do more damage.
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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.
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.
I agree that this is the case.
How are TNT shortages supposed to negatively impact the PAC-3, THAAD, or SM-3? They don't have warheads at all. TNT is important for shells, the US military has trouble making shells.
We should not be surprised if US ABM production could conceivably outscale Chinese IRBM production, specifically, because an IRBM is at least as complex, if not moreso, while being much larger. Just look at the TELs: the US can fit eight THAADs into a footprint smaller than a single DF-26.
Do you agree that China has its own set of problems, which have led to similar problems with delayed arms contracts and slower weapons deliveries?
Perhaps they will!
I don't particularly believe this. For starters, I would be surprised to learn that THAAD has ever been launched against an Iranian drone. THAAD is a dedicated ABM missile. And secondly, I think THAAD has been relatively effective against Iranian ballistic missiles, particularly the less sophisticated ones.
By this sort of logic, China has better chipmaking than Taiwan, right?
But of course nobody should be surprised that Iran can make more short range ballistic missiles than China can make intermediate-range ballistic missiles with hypersonic glide vehicles with capability to strike moving vessels. Particularly given that China has pursued a very balanced approach to their arms procurement. They are building large amounts of modern aircraft, ships, submarines and building out a nuclear arsenal with ICBMs. Iran fairly famously has negligible capability to build any of those things.
I also wonder if inter-service rivalries play a role here. Remember, it's not necessarily in the interest of China to dramatically underplay their capabilities - that ruins their ability to deter their enemies. But I've heard it suggested that the real target of the Chinese anti-ship ABM program was their own carriers - and obviously, that failed. PLAN beating PLARF in the bureaucratic game might be one reason why PLARF procurement is more modest, and that would imply nothing about China's production capability.
What do we mean by this? Anti-ship missile history (at least to the degree that I am familiar with it) suggests that most anti-ship missiles do not hit their intended targets. It might still be correct to say that it's harder to defend than attack, but I think we need to be clear, when we think about this and say this, what we mean by it. The problem with missile defense is that there's very little room for error. Which goes to your point about the uphill battle that it is.
Now, I do think this is much truer of ships - if China gets a few strays in on Guam, it won't cripple the airbase. It's harder to hit a carrier than Guam, but a single hit will probably put a carrier down for the count.
I'm not sure this is as true as you might think. Taiwan made the very foolish decision to pin so much of their energy intake on oil/LNG. Despite this, they still likely have enough domestic energy to maintain comms and power for an extended crisis. The same I think is likely true of food, although it is not clear to me that China would actually strike food shipments.
From a military perspective, the problem of stopping incoming shipments is also not exactly trivial, either.
And finally, a perfectly respectable win condition for the United States is that it puts enough political and economic pressure on China to get it to abandon its aspirations. Which suggests that China has to defend their supply chains, too.
We were talking about production quantities, not cost-effectiveness! And while there are inherent reasons why BMD is harder than building ballistic missiles, most of those do not apply once you start trying to hit ships with ballistic missiles. I don't know to what degree China is pursuing this capability - we know they have tested it: are they trying to ensure that every single one of their IRBMs has this capability? that's less clear. But it's not a technically trivial capability.
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