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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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