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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26872 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I vaguely remember a period in the 80s and 90s when cars were a culture war. "Assholes drive imports" was a slogan for a certain sort, who were patriotic enough to buy American cars even when the foreign imports were clearly superior. It was mostly working classs rightwing types doing that.

If we get a big wave of cheap, good-enough, electric cars made in China... how do the culture war lines break down? The right is more pro-American, but these days the left is more foreign-interventionist and might care more about opposing China. The left likes electric cars, but the right has more broke people who just want to save money. And Elon Musk doesn't fit clearly on either side.

On the other hand, does this even matter? Once upon a time the auto industry was a huge deal, both to create jobs and for the military-industrial complex. Nowadays, like you said, the big car companies are tiny compared to... gaming graphics card manufacturer. And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.

And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer.

Well, perhaps aside from armored vehicles and firearms. WWII suggests that industrial capacity is fungible in some specific contexts.

yeah. Naive calculation: Suppose Alice has a factory that produces tens of hi-tech bespoke post-Cold war optimized tanks during one year, say 50 units in year. Suppose Bob has several dozens of factories that can produce 500,000 of civilian vehicles each year. Bob needs only engineers to redesign the civilian car production line into something useful in military use -- perhaps, integrate anti-tank guided missile launcher and drone platform and minimal armor against small arms fire -- and then Bob can produce 10,000 modern anti-tank vehicles for each Alice's hi-tech bespoke tank. After the first couple of months, if both realize their current designs are not performing adequately in the field, assuming it takes equal time to come up with a redesign, after the resign and couple of months of production Bob has produced 80,000 upgraded vehicles against 8 Alice's upgraded bespoke units. But frankly, I presume if you have factories producing hundreds of thousands units for civilian consumption, your engineers are much better at setting up production lines, adapting and rolling out new redesigns than if your experience is producing hundreds of bespoke units to a contract.

I think the difference is that modern car factories can’t be retooled to build modern weapons the way WW2 factories could. So retooling the GM or Tesla factory to make modern missiles probably isn’t much easier than just taking over an Amazon warehouse and doing the same there.

Not the bespoke weapons, no. But evidently a modern civilian drone factory can make drones that are effective for military use. I believe a protracted total war, the side with more "Gigafactories" and difficult-to-predict quality of innovativeness and engineering that comes from running the factory will be better equipped to churn out useful equipment. In a massive war, you need massive amount of weapons, and wih current production numbers, it looks possible the West would run out of the bespoke weapons.

If the decisionmakers Alice and Bob realize it, it will affect their calculations of outcomes of protracted total war, such calculations will affect their diplomatic strategies. If either side don't realize it, they will walk into it blindly into the next protracted total war, and it will affect the outcome.

But that’s kind of the thing, there can be no protracted direct total war between great powers because of nuclear weapons. There can only be proxy conflicts or MAD. The unique thing about Ukraine is that it’s a moderate to large sized country with a zealous and relatively high IQ population backed by Western countries fighting a former superpower (with a poorly trained but large military and high manufacturing capacity) in conventional warfare.

The US doesn’t need huge volumes of conventional weaponry outside of this niche scenario of supporting Ukraine. No enemy will ever military invade the American homeland, only nuke it if it comes to it. The main scenarios for a hot conflict with China over Taiwan would either spiral very quickly into nuclear exchange or resolve themselves rapidly otherwise (eg very successful Chinese blitzkrieg and amphibious landing in 48h before US can decide on strategic response). The main scenario for a hot conflict with Russia involves some kind of Russian invasion of the baltics, and even there NATO forces in Europe outnumber the Russians, have better equipment and could easily repel the post-Ukraine remnants of the more skilled professional soldiers left, likely pressing into Russia and again leading to a question of nuclear exchange.

The only reason Ukraine is even happening is because it doesn’t have nukes and it’s considered taboo post-1945 to use nuclear weapons offensively against a country that doesn’t have them, even for Russians, especially against your supposed co-ethnic brothers.

and it’s considered taboo post-1945 to use nuclear weapons offensively against a country that doesn’t have them, even for Russians, especially against your supposed co-ethnic brothers.

Russia didn't even try to destroy an electric plant (as opposed to transformers) or kill Zelensky. Why nuke?

As far as I'm aware they certainly have tried to kill Zelensky on a number of occasions. But typically decapitation is a poor military strategy anyway, because it opens up the possibility of vengeance (including by the US) and because the people standing behind Zelensky seem to be more hardcore anti-Russian partisans than he is, so no change in policy would be likely. As for destroying power plants, their goal (unlike, say, the US' in WW2 or Iraq) is a permanent annexation of much of Ukraine so radicalizing the population against them is undesirable.

Looks like "no power plants" changed.

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