An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent and have turned what should have been a fairly straightforward modification of an existing design into a huge boondoggle, or is it that the government requirements are poorly thought out and/or overly ambitious, resulting in costly redesign efforts that aren't really necessary?
Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent
Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers.
The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades.
By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years.
It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
Finland is part of NATO. The US and Canada should collaborate with it too. Sharing knowledge is a perfect way for European NATO allies to carry more of the collective defense burden.
Does it really make sense for Finnish shipyards to share knowledge of icebreaking when there the released text above discusses things such as the US and Canada selling icebreakers to third parties?
It seems more like a way taking over the industry from the Finns.
Obviously there may be specifics of the deal that makes it acceptable, but the vague text I see seems just terrible for the Finns.
I suppose it might be accepted because of the Canadian ownership of the shipyard in question.
It is in US/Canada's interest to have a shipyard in North America building ice breakers. Even though Finland is a NATO member, if something happens to Finland NATO may need some ship yards elsewhere to build more ice breakers (running 24x7 shifts!) while liberating Finland. Remember NATO (and military in general) needs to plan for all worst cases not likely cases.
The above does not mean the shipyards need to be US/Canada. If they are Finland owned and operated that is fine. So long as the workers and a couple (minor) engineers are local that is enough - in the worst case (Finland's shipyard is taken and all the experts there killed) that shipyard is expanded and has some expertise to build on.
Yes, but the yard is Canadian owned. I suppose it was Russian-owned before.
But the combination of foreign ownership together with exporting know-how, this combination is kind of how one loses an industry to some other country; and then upon that there's that you can't even sell to the country that owns the company because of protectionism on their part.
It is a case of economic security. US National Security Advisor Daleep Singh spoke about this on the Odd Lots podcast a month ago. The goal is an integrated supply chain across all three countries, and an end result of marketing the ice breaker capacity to other allies.
Yes, he says 'What do they get. Well, in exchange, we agree to integrate our ice breaking supply chains so that they are interoperable at every stage of production', but that doesn't actually benefit Finland
Furthermore, suppose that it actually was something substantial, some kind of deal that NATO icebreakers are to be made by the US, Canada or Finland, then you screw the Aker group in Norway, who also make icebreakers.
The way I see it they expect that since the Canadians have been able to nab the shipyard after the disorder caused by the sanctions they can transfer all the knowledge from the Finns and make the icebreakers themselves, seizing appealing high-tech shipbuilding niche from the Finns, and they offer nothing in return but bullshit.
An integrated supply chain, sure, maybe that can save money, but once you've transferred your knowledge you no longer have your niche.
I think this is very obvious in the talk because of the vagueness in what is offered to the Finns; and my interpretation is that nothing meaningful is offered to the Finns and the the US is just expecting to seize this niche.
I don't think the 'there'll be enough for all of us' talk is plausible either. Surely, there might be an expansion demand, but there's really only the Baltic and the polar area that matters, and maybe US and Canada together do need 40 or so icebreakers to keep the North-West Passage safe and open in case it is to become a major trade route, but they'll last basically for ever, and my understanding is that the US is talking about only nine or so.
It's an interesting side note that in the 80's the Soviet Union, despite having a large icebreaking ship building capabilities, also bought icebreakers from Finland (then not a member of NATO)
Including a couple of Nuclear ones (they fitted the nuclear engine themselves):
When I was living in Helsinki, there were two huge icebreakers there whose main job it was to keep the baltic see open for the Russians. I think that probably changed a bit since they joined NATO.
I guess that aside from Alaska, the US doesn't have to deal with a lot of sea ice and isn't that dependent on arctic shipping routes. For Russia that's very different. The sea near St Petersburg can freeze over and Murmansk is also hard to reach in winter. And with Svebastopol and the black see fleet out of action, those would be strategically important for Russia. And they rely on the northern arctic route for trade with China as well.
The US Navy will send ships in the Arctic Ocean past Alaska. It tends to be more common for submarines to be there, but surface ships do go there on occasion.
Well...it's reasonable for the shipyard to still employ folks with hands on experience 20 years later. I occasionally get tapped to pitch in on things I did 20 years ago (even if it's just "why the hell did you do this?"), and shipbuilding changes vastly slower than my gig. That's much less likely 40 years on.
More likely though isn't the same as likely. If I'm going to buy an icebreaker from a foreign supplier, sure the US is in the market, but they're still more expensive and take longer than Finland.
To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on.
The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns.
But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes.
The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
I didn't mean it to be tasteless, and it wasn't personal against Finland.
My point was that "internal spending" and "external spending " are not (economically the same thing. Obviously, Finland wants to export - tests a given - but the price tag of a Finnish ship and a US ship are not the same unit.
>But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever".
You can make a deal that US buy icebreaker for 300M from Finland and Finns buy weapons from US for 300M. They need it because of Russia and you boosts US economy in other areas.
You get 300 million asset. If that asset produces more than 300 million in economic value you would have generally missed, isn't it still decent investment? If you do not need icebreaking, why spend money in first place? And instead use it somewhere that you get both benefits from.
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it.
The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
> We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
Thanks for the specifics. I don't know about guided munitions, but I'd imagine a million dollar a rocket will be quite expensive for a prolonged war. Also, the US debuted a killer zone, Rogue 1, a few months ago, and it cost about $94K. $94K! I'm sure the drone is more advanced than DJI Mavic 3 Pro, but is it really 50 times more advanced even if we take the cost of military-grade into consideration? It looks to me the only explanation is that without a healthy manufacturing sector in the US, the cost of anything would go through the roof because we have lost the economy of scale.
A million dollar rocket is expensive, but it hits exactly where you want it and so you need far less of them. Artillery is a lot cheaper but also much harder to get exactly where you want it and so you end up using far more of it.
Note that Russia and the US have both guided misstles and artillery. Both have value in different situations. They both have their reasons for their preference, but that is more about how they expect a war they are involved in to look than about thinking one is better.
Ah, I was actually thinking about how iron dome vs Hamas rockets. Iron dome was super effective, yet a million a pop to shoot down a rocket that costs a few thousand dollars at most may quickly bankrupt a country. That said, maybe it's just one aspect of the war while in grand scheme of things highly effective guided missiles will win the war.
Every hear the term "arms race". This is a constant in history. There precision weapons that don't use GPS. There are various ways to evade GPS denial (I don't know how effective they are). We will constantly be in a race of out doing each other.
There are alternatives to GPS but they are expensive. While the arms race is normal the issue is the penny hasn't dropped yet and no one wants to admit their weapons are now obsolete.
drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. the biggest reason is the need to deal with adversarial input. dealing with GPS spoofing, properly encrypted and jamming resistant spoofing, not leaking the location of the operator, etc all are really complicated requirements that need expensive mitigation (and worse, prevent you from using commercial components)
> drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more.
After following the development of drones in Ukraine since 2022 and also listening to people familiar with the US army, I also think there are some not so good ones, one particular nasty one being scope creep.
Recently heard about a US effort to create home built expendable drones for use at the squad level like the ones Ukrainians use and the result was too heavy and a lot more expensive (some of it thanks to the demand that everything be produced in a US controlled supply chain) but also as a result of good old fashioned scope creep.
And this is nothing new: AFAIK there is an old British military saying something like "an elephant is what a mouse would be if specified by a military procurement committee".
Note that FPV drones in Ukraine are not squad-level, there are separate drone units (at the very least 2 operators, at least 1 explosives guy because arming drones with makeshift explosives is not trivial and super risky, plus cover). Plus they are supplied literally on the back of a minivan in cardboard boxes because they only need to survive one way trip over a couple hundred km, the US needs to supply their units half a globe away.
US army drones are squad-level, have proper safing/arming, transportable, and shelf-stable. It's not scope creep, it's a very different doctrine and circumstances.
I don't think I wrote FPV, one way attack or kamikaze drone although I can understand why you interpreted it that way that I wrote home built (this was a mistake on my side, I was thinking about the commercial drones they use) and expendable (this doesn't mean attack drones, only that it is cheap enough that one doesn't hesitate too long to use it and don't try to recover it).
These surveillance drones can absolutely be used at the squad level.
US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be.
Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped.
What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
> Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
I think Yamamoto Isoroku gave the answer to this challenge: just keep a booming manufacturing industry. When he was trying to convince the Japanese government not to have a war with the US, he said that he saw so many chimneys when flying over Philadelphia. All those factories would turn into a giant war machine if a war ever broke out.
That is, the economy of scale matters. When the US had its entire supply chain domestically, replacing a special screw could cost a few cents. When we were in good terms with China, it would cost a few dollars as we had to order the replacement overseas, but well, it was still cheap. Now that we are trying to cut China off, then what will do if we'd need to get a replacement? Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
> Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here.
Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
> You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch
This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
We have a high dollar value of manufactured products, but volume is way down, and the supply chain is ragged or totally broken. If your factories are warehouses where you assemble Chinese feedstock with German tools, how much local expertise do you have, or is it just LEGO kit stuff for tariff evasion?
> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China
Is it? What is the theory that the US could keep up with China? That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy. It doesn't seem plausible that the US can fight a long sustained war.
The plan as far as I can see it is to make use of a large network of allies and partners as well as aiming to finish the war quickly by cutting off materials like food and industrial inputs to stall the manufacturing engine. If it turns into a slugfest where munition reserves start to matter that seems like it would favour China.
One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia. If that is the case it is hard to see it coming out ahead vs China in any plausible conflict.
>One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia.
The US hasn't been fighting Russia - if they'd deployed F35s in 2022 then Moscow would be called West Alaska by now. Don't conflate "doesn't" with "can't".
But if they "doesn't" fight Russia now, why are they going to fight China in the future? Pretty good odds they won't because the cost is too high.
What we appear to be seeing is they don't really have a lot of tools that can be used against an uncooperative nuclear-armed power; and many of those tools would probably fail against China.
Nobody wants to fight China because the cost is so high - we are talking about lives more than dollars here (though dollar cost is high too).
What everyone worries about is being forced to fight China anyway. China is not playing nice with the US on the world stage. They are clearly supporting Russia over Ukraine (while pretending to be neutral). They are siding with Iran in the middle east. They are doing things in Africa that are against US interests (the US doesn't have a good record in Africa, but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators which leaves lots of room for China to be worse though only time will tell). They escalating with Taiwan and the Philippians. Those are the major reasons I'm aware of to be worried about China, there is more that I didn't write.
How will this turn out - we can only guess. But there is reason to worry.
> but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators
In the Middle East the US's #1 ally is indeed a democracy, but is currently fending off various challenges [1, 2] accusing them of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Their #2 ally is an authoritarian regime run by a gentleman who can be identified with phrases like "the bone saw incident" let alone the Kingdom's long record of barbarism and human rights abuses.
The US might win a battle of who supports better causes, but it isn't a can of worms to open either. There is no particular indication that it cares about the government system or actions of the people it supports.
[0] If the US didn't do it directly, they endorsed it.
> That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy
Wouldn't it be sad if this were true? Since when US was no longer a "industrial superpower"? Just 25 years ago, Chinese government officials were astound by how wealthy and advanced the US was when they visited the US. They wrote articles after articles to reflect why China was so behind, yet now China is the "globe's industrial superpower". In Oliver Stone's movie Heaven & Earth, Joan Chen's character went to the US and was totally mesmerized by the abundance in a supermarket. That was how Chinese people was amazed by the US too. And now? It's definitely great for China, but isn't it sad for the US to be behind?
Or perhaps it was just inevitable for PRC, also a continental sized land power with 4x population to be ahead once they got shit together. Comparing US industrial stagnation in US lens frequently fails to grasp/comprehend that PRC industrialization at PRC scale brought forth another "weight-class" of industrial output. Last year, PRC ship building launched roughly same amount of tonnage as entire 5year US WW2 ship building program. IMO many people think US industry declined from 10 to 5, and maybe whole of system effort can bring in back to 10. Meanwhile PRC didn't just turn the industrial output dial to 11, it turned it to 20, beyond what US was ever capable of, and likely will be capable of. Same way US didn't so much leave British Empire behind in the industrial race as UK was never capable of running better than a 7 minute mile while US stalled at 5 minute mile (and now de-trained into a 6 minute mile), meanwhile PRC is now running a 3.5 minute mile. IMO ultimately, not about sadness but being realisitic about systemtic potential. Maybe US can AI/automate their way to overcome human capita disadvantage, but PRC playing that game too.
Yes, the theory is that the USA should keep up with China and maintain a qualitative edge in order to contain them. Keep it up long enough and hopefully they will collapse or undergo an internal revolution, sort of like what happened to the USSR.
> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population.
I don't think it's unclear at all. It's uncomfortable to call out an obvious truth: We couldn't even compare. The only hope we have is basically economic mutually assured destruction. If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
It's unclear if the US could even get production ramped up on the scale of a decade. We simply don't have the people to train the people we need. Much less the people with the skills to do the thing.
> If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
Why? There is essentially zero chance that China can mount an invasion of the mainland US or even strike at its heartland enough to disrupt an industrial ramp up, even if it takes a decade (which it won't). The US can literally wait out anyone except Canada and Mexico (which... lol) by defending its coasts, with plenty of domestic natural resources - including agriculture, metals, and oil - to supply not just its military but the entire civilian population.
There is zero chance of China invading the US or vice versa. But this issue isn't about a ground war in either place, it's about a war in some 3rd place.
It's not about "home country". The US doesn't need carrier groups to defend home country. It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
> There is zero chance of China invading the US or vice versa. But this issue isn't about a ground war in either place, it's about a war in some 3rd place.
Agreed
> It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two. Assuming they all get destroyed by hypersonic missiles within the first few months, the US still has military bases all over the world. As far as I know, China has zero military presence in the Western hemisphere except some surveillance balloons.
China may have a short term advantage in production and cost but the US has the advantage in every other area of logistics relevant to a military.
> Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Absolutely but it'd be a pyrrhic victory worth little except as domestic propaganda. If the US does help defend Taiwan, the invading Chinese fleet will likely be massacred. There's little room to hide in the 80 mile wide Taiwan strait against modern anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. China's only real advantage will likely be air power, which doesn't win wars without lots of boots on the ground.
> Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I don't think we'd let Japan or Australia slip into war without assistance. (but what do I know? :-))
> China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two
Today. China is clearly building up their ability. In a few years the situation will look different which is the real worry. Also China may not need to be as big - China isn't patrolling the ocean like the US and so it is their 2 carrier groups near Taiwan against whatever the US can afford to send
The recent incarnation of isolationism in American politics might manifest if the US had the wrong leadership during an invasion of Taiwan or, I guess, Australia.
Defending Japan is a reflex action. We have bases and troops there, as well as a mutual defense treaty.
The hypothetical war in Taiwan would likely be almost entirely naval/aerial so yeah the question is if US has enough political will. Don’t think artillery shells will be a huge factor and even on paper the Chinese navy (and probably the air force) doesn’t even come even remotely close to US (yet).
Actual invasions of Japan and Australia are even harder to imagine. How would that even work? And why?
China-Taiwan situations is technically still a civil war. Internal conflict to "China". Like war between Confederacy and Federation forces.
It is unlikely that China will invade Japan and certainly not Australia. I find it extremely more likely that USA will invade Mexico with some fake pretence like war on drugs.
Artillery and particularly guided artillery like Excaliber rounds are highly effective at resisting landings.
In the most recent US wargame, China succeeded in occupying parts of Taiwan which would make artillery even more important — as attacks from the mountain regions towards Chinese occupation would keep them from establishing a secure foothold.
War games can be very deceptive though. Back in 2019/20, 2 separate studies ( Polish and US) expected that it would only take Russia 4-5 days to get to Warsaw with Polish units sent to the border suffering 60-80% casualties.
To be fair NATO wasn’t taking really taking defense that seriously back and maybe they had a point, although considering what happened in Ukraine that seem like a very unlikely outcome (unless Britain/France/Germany decided to stay out and not risk their air forces ..)
I guess overestimating your opponents is usually better than the opposite. OTH had Britain/France not made that mistake in the 30s much of WW2 could have been prevented.
The purpose of wargames is to find holes in your defense and the shore them up. If your war game doesn't find holes you are probably doing it wrong. In the real world your enemy doesn't have spies everywhere, but in a war game you should give them spies everywhere just because you won't know where those spies are and so everything could be compromised.
You adapt. Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale.
You get smarter/more accurate with the constrained supply of shells, adopt drones etc.
In the 80s, expensive Maverick missiles were the primary airborne tank killer. Now the Ukrainians are dropping mortars into tank hatches from cheap drones.
80 years ago the priority was beating the nazis and japanese. The priority now is making money. Can't make money with ice breakers, so use the steel to make SUVs instead.
>There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society?
We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import many components due to them being made much cheaper elsewhere.
>We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
You're totally right. This war is coming very fast as well, and by some accounts has already started. I worry we will all soon find out just how bad of a position we are in, the hard way.
> We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US
I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that's just $3 a shell, or 0.3% of the cost of a Russian shell, or 0.075% of the cost of a US shell.
What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale. By the way, this is also what Tim Cook said. He said that Chinese labor not cheap anymore, but China has so much scale and expertise so that the output from China is still cheap. Again, economy of scale.
Are you kidding? Everything is outsourced because wages are high in the US. I can't believe I have to spell out such basic and obvious economic facts to presumably intelligent people.
>What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale.
We've lost a lot of things but the reason things are expensive here is NOT that we didn't have economies of scale. That issue came much later. You get to have scale in the first place by being economically competitive. When things are outsourced due to some other country using slave labor or else their workers surviving on a tenth of what you make in the US, that is when you lose economies of scale.
Literally the only way we could compete in an open market with countries that have cheap labor is to use automation. But even with automation, those machines can be set up anywhere in the world, and they will tend to go wherever it is cheapest to run them.
>> When things are outsourced due to some other country using slave labor or else their workers surviving on a tenth of what you make in the US, that is when you lose economies of scale.
There may be "Slave Labor" in some places, but the vast majority of people doing out-sourcing for US companies are very well paid (by local standards.) They are not "surviving" they are thriving.
living in the US is expensive. So prices go up to match. So wages go up. So materials go up. "National security" is expensive (and the US is obsessed by it.) 13% of the budget goes to the military. Protectionist tarrifs. Security theater like the TSA. All of this comes at a price.
The US has enjoyed a leadership role in world affairs, economic strength, influence etc for 75+ years. But it turns out that "expensive is the head that wears the crown".
I say this not as a criticism, merely as a statement of reality. Of course, whether it changes, or indeed even discussing if it should change is debatable.
If you check the real numbers, not everything is outsourced. There is still very significant manufacturing in the US - and the number is increasing. China is perhaps increasing faster, but that doesn't mean the US isn't doing well.
I believe initially yes, wage is a big factor. It's just that now the wage gives way to the economy of scale (maybe regulation plays a big role too). It's pretty sad too. The capital wants returns and growth, at the cost of weakening a country for generations to come.
I wasn't talking about a change in costs. Costs have been high in the US for a very long time. What matters in terms of industry is that the rest of the world is coming online and their products are much cheaper than ours, mostly due to cheap labor and the currency exchange rates. Cost increases of domestically sprouted goods in terms of dollars are overwhelmingly driven by inflation.
> I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper.
Read TFA. Faster, yes. Cheaper, no. Even after fully ramping up, Liberty ships cost considerably more to produce in the US than an equivalent ship elsewhere. In wartime that is acceptable. When you're producing for a global market, it's not.
>woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere
unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.
Other countries have unions too. I don't know the situation in Finland, but they are surrounded by countries that have even stronger union and union laws that the US. (and some of those countries also have ship building)
The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else
Don't forget that RFPs for this sort of thing get massively stuffed with pork so they're doomed to be bloated even regardless of the quality of the contractor who does the implementation.
They love including requirements that all but mandates a specific vendor's product because that vendor is a key employer in the district of some rep's who's vote they need or has a good lobbyist or whatever.
> Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?
It sounds like it is the former.
> If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere.
Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry. We need protectionist laws to guarantee that we can manufacture what we must have for strategic reasons, at minimum.
Maybe our dockworkers and shipbuilders are dragging to extend contracts that they only got due to protectionist laws to begin with. If they had more work to do and more experience, they might become more efficient.
I’m not sure labor costs could explain the difference the supposedly 5x difference in cost between Finland and the US. Labor is only a fraction of the overall cost and the difference is not that huge (e.g. average wage is $63k vs $50k).
It’s more likely that US workers (in this sector) expect to get paid $100k to produce $20k of value (relative to other countries)
Of course I'm not talking about averages. Average fast food workers make as much as engineers in some other countries. I'm not sure wages at the low-skill end are much lower in Europe, but certainly engineers seem to be paid less there. I assume that is similar across skilled professions. Comparing the US to Asia, yes the wage differences are across the board.
The root cause is that naval warfare has practically no role in national security and hasn’t in a long time.
Even ignoring nuclear weaponry and mutually assured destruction, ships are expensive and fragile. They are easily destroyed from above or below, which makes them only useful against nations that don’t have modern military technology. If you need a floating platform to fight Houthi rebels they’re useful, if we’re facing an actual invasion they’ll be worse than useless.
As a result there’s not much pressure to get it right. If breaking ice were an activity that our national security relied upon I have no doubt we would be building them quickly.
> ... allowing the Coast Guard to buy icebreakers from Finland would likely save over a billion dollars per ship, as well as years of construction time
How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money.
There is no [edit: economic] logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
> There is no logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program. It mandates an absurdly complex manufacturing schedule with thousands of European companies, effectively costing a lot more than just relying on SpaceX. At the same time, though, it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union.
Embezzling is a problem, and politicians funneling money to their cronies too. But it can be done differently.
Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine).
you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to
"solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected that this would be no longer needed.
Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
> Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods.
But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
Also, efficiency is everything in the competition with China: China, with ~ 4x the population of the US, can outproduce the US with just over 1/4 of the US's productivity. The US must maximize not only volume but productivity. Adding the countries listed above greatly increases volume, and the US can't afford the productivity cost of spending on inefficient manufacturers - the US needs to maximize output per dollar.
I do think the US can depend on Europe, Canada and Mexico. South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
I do think China can easily outproduce the US. But I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it. Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
The status quo can't be maintained, that's for sure.
> South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
While that was to some degree a concern years ago, before Biden took office, those countries have decisively and openly taken sides with the US and are members of a network of alliances that also includes The Philipines and, to a degree, India. The US has been building and improving bases, military training, etc. in and with those countries and all over the region For example, there is AUKUS, a major agreement between the US, Australia, and also the UK, for Australia to become the only country outside the UK to receive one of the US crown jewels, nuclear submarine technology. Australia also is hosting an expanding number of US bases.
> I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it.
The economics is trickier than that: Production is real economic value; printing money is just a statistic. Productivity = output/dollars. If you increase the dollars in that equation, you don't change the output and you reduce the nominal productivity number (though usually it's measured using inflation-adjusted dollars, so it's really unchanged).
The US can increase output by borrowing more dollars, increasing the volume of investment in shipyards without increasing productivity. But borrowing does cost something - IIRC the debt payments will soon exceed the military budget - and can cause inflation, which eventually negatively impacts output. In the end, China may be able to invest far more.
> Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
If you're measuring in decades, can you take any alliance for granted? Things can change in unpredictable ways.
Taking Europe as an example, if Trump or someone like him decides to leave Europe to its own devices while facing an aggressive Russia, we could see massive re-militarization. Who can say where a shift like this would lead? It's easy to view these countries as permanent allies when they depend on us for security, but they might not be so cooperative once they can stand up for themselves militarily.
This applies to Japan and South Korea as well vis a vis China/NK.
NATO, as well as the rest of the Atlantic relationships that form the 'West', has worked very well for 90 years, and NATO is still growing and strengthening.
Anything can happen, but that's not rational. Rationally, we need to anticipate what is likely and not treat risk as if it's all random, coin-flip, unpredictable chaos.
I agree; I meant that we need to rationally assess what outcomes are more likely and plan according to that, not treat every outcome as equally likely.
And not only plan, as if we are passive victims of history, but make it happen - invest in NATO, etc.
Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
So in terms of long term planning, I think hedging our bets make sense. It might be a good idea to invest in NATO, but we also don't want to be left in a highly vulnerable position in 10-20 years if NATO falls apart and our current allies stop giving us free trade agreements, because that's a real possibility.
I won't keep going in circles, but focus on this point:
> Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
The idea that democracies are less stable and predictable doesn't bear out in reality. They are the most stable and predictable forms of government, because they have many checks on their power: Free press, legislatures, competitive elections, etc. expose fraud and incompetence to their disinfectent, sunlight. The rule of law means that officials serve the law and the people, not a person. Putin is not someone you trust to keep their word in a deal with you.
Government by dictators is less stable: They lack the essential things above, and are subject to one person's whim - a person inevitably corrupted by their power. They change power through violence, which makes them even more unstable.
And to circle back after all to the evidence right in front of us: NATO has lasted 90 years so far. The US has greatly expanded and deepened its alliances in East Asia over the last 4 years. Now name an ally China or Russia has. They don't - dictators don't have allies on that level; nobody actually likes their values and wants them to succeed. China and Russia's current relationship is nothing like the US's with NATO;
When you do stupid and unpredictable things? Certainly. But that seems like an internal US problem. Of choice rebuilding local manufacturing might be easier than fixing that in theory. OTH the longterm cost would like be much higher due to lower global stability.
> But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
If our goal is to be robust against the risks of a great power conflict, we can't necessarily depend on manufacturing from these countries because a great power conflict might either overrun or cut off our supply lines to these countries. In fact, control over East Asian shipping lanes is the central point of the current cold war with China.
I agree there is some risk for the East Asian countries. I think China would be hard pressed to stop all that production and trade, but certainly they could impact it and who can say what a 21st century war would look like?
Still, it's a risk, not a deal killer. China could bomb US production too.
China can't bomb American production unless we suffer absolutely catastrophic, unimaginable, WW3-escalatory levels of naval losses in the Pacific (because Chinese bombers from the Chinese mainland don't have the range to reach the American mainland).
I'm not sure that's true. The US can't defend an entire Pacific front, obviously, and has a shortage of ships, many of which will be busy doing other things.
Anyway, I was thinking of missiles, which China has many of, and which can reach the US (including from submarines and other ships that can maneuver closer to the US).
There is close to zero escalation room between Chinese missile strikes on the US mainland and nuclear war. If we detect incoming missiles from China there’s a good chance the US assumes nuclear warheads and makes a retaliatory strike.
That’s a real risk, but because neither side of a conflict wants to actually escalate to a nuclear exchange, it is not very likely that China will launch missiles at the mainland US. (Likewise I think the US is unlikely to strike mainland China.)
Conversely, whichever side maintains naval superiority in the western Pacific Ocean can cut off any supply chains to and from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and mainland China itself, without the risk of nuclear escalation. And as I stated, this is the entire issue. If you control the seas of East Asia, you basically control the world.
The US doesn't have too much trouble manufacturing things like aircraft carriers and submarines and 5th-gen fighter jets and missiles, and indeed builds plenty of those, even exporting some. It does have trouble building an icebreaker, but it doesn't need those very often, so it can't keep any company interested in the business when it only wants one every ~30 years or whatever. It doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money just to build one ship, when they can just buy it from Finland.
FWIW, the US does have problems producing ships. For example, the US military and Congress very much want to increase the rate of submarine production, and haven't been able to do it. If you look at current news, you can see the desperate measures they are pursuing.
> It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program.
You haven't established that it's a 'good thing', but it does exist. I don't suppose Galileo is about economic sovereignty as much as strategic military independence. Modern militaries require satellite PNT systems - they are necessary to precision munitions, without which your military operates on a 1980s level. As close as the EU-US military relationship is, they perhaps don't want to give the POTUS a button to shut down, e.g., a French military operation. The POTUS might like Galileo too - they might not want the pressure to use that power. (I'll skip having another HN SpaceX discussion!)
> it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union
Or it just shifts money and jobs from all people - the taxpayers (including businesses) - to a few, the ones that get those jobs and especially the business owners. It's arguably better to just give people the money and have them do something they can do efficiently. It's make-work welfare, in a way.
The point I was trying to make was that keeping the technological manufacturing expertise alive is valuable in itself, even besides the geopolitical advantage of having the system itself in place. By retaining the ability to get payloads into space and use as well as operate an independent positioning system, even if a political conflict with former partners arises, the EU can make its foreign policy decisions without fear of retaliation through technology dependencies—or phrased differently, we avoid being vulnerable to extortion.
The key to this ability really is to keep the knowledge alive and the related industries strong, to be able to tap into it when it's necessary. And that involves having a broad range of companies actively involved into creating critical components.
Given the close economic and cultural ties of these countries, surely some kind of knowledge transfer could happen, if not actual nearshoring the construction. Could NAFTA (or whatever it's called now) be used to get around the Jones Act somehow?
It's amazing how hard communication can be! My simple sentence, "Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too." has three interpretations - all reasonable IMHO:
1. cgh's: 'Finland is ok because they are in NATO; Canada, who in contrast are not in NATO, also makes sense.'
2. yours: 'Finland is an ally of NATO, not a member.'
3. mine: 'Canada may have 'close economic and cultural ties' (from the parent comment), but Finland is a member of the NATO alliance. Canada still makes sense (no comment on their NATO membership, which is a fact).'
I think some is context: In what I read, 'NATO ally' is a somewhat common term for members of NATO (an alliance, of course), and I instinctively used it. It's hard to remember that other people read their own materials.
My mistake, sorry. I thought you were implying Canada wasn't a NATO member.
I agree with your economic nationalism comments. But Canada is in a special position here: the US Arctic is contiguous with Canada's much larger Arctic region and a US/Canada icebreaking partnership seems to make sense. The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA, generally close economic ties and the whole "fortress North America" thing. Canada has at least two shipyards capable of building icebreakers and the US has money.
> The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA
Why are nationalists ok with NAFTA, which is just like any other international fre trade agreement? Is it because Trump backed it - meaning, of course, that they aren't nationalists but Trumpists.
I've always heard people say nationalism is a good thing and globalism is the solution, yet they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
> they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
That was a complaint many years go, but things have changed dramatically: The US now is 'decoupling' its economy from China, and moving production to friendlier countries, and the US encourages and arranges for allies to do the same. The US and its Pacific allies are also intensely preparing for possible warfare with China.
Just because China is not a reliable partner doesn't mean the US should throw out all other partners. Should the US not buy icebreakers from Canada and Finland because of China? That would be greatly hamstrining the US. China's government would love it, I think.
The globalists, when it's time to go to war again. The same people who said you are a racist and fascist if you wave the flag have already done about face and now say it's the duty of young men and women to die for their country.
"Everybody for themselves, we're individuals" when there's peace and "We're all in this together, you've got to die for your country" when their wealth is threatened.
You have a point, IMHO, but it doesn't leave room for another group: Humanitarians who believe in human rights as fundamental. That is counter to nationalism (which says the 'nation' is fundemental - the nation being the nationalist powerbrokers); it assumes all have inalienable equal rights, regardless of where political borders are drawn.
Sometimes you need to get together and fight for human rights. But even as WWII was going on, Churchill, for example, was IIRC a harsh critic of nationalism.
Well, there is “a logic,” whether you agree with it or not, that it’s strategically important even if commercially suboptimal for us to have a domestic shipbuilding capability.
It is strategically critical to maintain friendly relations with Finland, Canada, and South Korea, all of which would be happy to sell icebreakers. If those countries were to become unreliable, the US will have problems a whole lot than a shortage of icebreakers.
Yes, it’s tragic. Even if you consider the job losses. We’d be better off paying those same shipbuilders to do Sudoku puzzles, with HALF the money we save on the ships. A billion bucks per ship would go a LONG way.
I mean, ideally we could try to not suck at building ships economically, though. But that’s a lot harder to figure out given how it’s a political problem.
Especially since Congress needed to allocate funds for the project anyway, just pass a law that says "buy some ice breakers from Finland, notwithstanding any other laws, and here's 1 billion dollars to do it."
"The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards. It’s possible to waive this requirement via presidential authorization[0], but there hasn’t appeared to be much interest in this."
> We also see the same cultural issues that we saw with American shipbuilding more broadly. There seems to be a lack of motivation to take maritime issues seriously or treat them as important.
This is the meat of the article in my mind. The US has globalized away its maritime industry in general and we now lack the institutional knowledge, infrastructure, and labor force needed to operate even semi-independently on the maritime front. Just look at our domestic shipbuilding capacity vs. China: https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/chinas-shipbuildi...
WA state has the same problem trying to get ferries built for the Puget sound. Every decade the fleet gets more dilapidated and the replacements get more expensive and farther behind schedule. The legislature has ditched the requirements that the boats be built at a WA shipyard and they still can't find builders.
> The US has globalized away its maritime industry
It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
> and they still can't find builders.
That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years in advance. The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts. So shipyards can't hire temporary workforce for a given project.
> The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts.
The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets to command insane prices because they know the US will pony up.
The reason the US was able to make advanced navy ships right up until the 80s is because shipbuilding was done by public industry. Insanely, Clinton and Reagan started the process of privatizing our fleet capabilities and it's landed us exactly where you think it would.
The reason we don't have ice breaker ships being built is because it's a niche market and ship builders are all too happy to say "no" or to charge an exorbitant price so the US military will go away.
Sorry, what are you talking about? None of this is true. Government-owned shipyards were not historically responsible for significant fraction of delivered tonnage. In fact, given the utter atrophy of private shipbuilding industry in US today, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of tonnage delivered by government owned shipyards today was higher than ever.
I see downvotes at the time I commented, which is unfortunate as ideas should be at least explored. Someone on the internet has been keeping statistics [0] that do suggest the collapse in output happened in the 1980s.
But on the other hand, the same stats show a steady decline in the number of companies from 1950 that was only stabilised after the collapse in output, so it is probably arguable that the high-production situation was unsustainable. Economics can be complex.
Yes, the collapse has happened, but it had not happened due to "privatization" of government shipyard. These were all privately owned shipyard that collapsed. The comment you are responding to is inventing some kind of alternative history that simply has not happened, and probably this is why it's downvoted.
This is a common communication problem between Americans and Europeans where we're using the same word to mean two different types of organization. In the US you should replace "union" with "cartel, likely criminal" eg the boilermakers
"A federal grand jury in Kansas returned an indictment yesterday charging seven defendants, including five current and former high-level officers of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmith, Forgers and Helpers (Boilermakers Union) for their alleged roles in a 15-year, $20 million embezzlement scheme."
I would guess the shipbuilding industry in Finland is also built on subsidy and "protectionism" just like every other successful industry too. A cursory google search shows millions that were made available to shipbuilders: https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/for-finnish-customers/serv...
I'd bet that's just scratching the surface. The only way any country has been able to develop their productive capacities is through public grants and subsidies. The history of US industry shows the same thing, research in materials, electronics, the internet, etc were all accomplished through publicly funded research.
It's just free markets in action. Finland is a small country that depends on international trade. Industries must remain competitive or go out of business. Unions that harm the competitiveness too much won't survive in the long term.
US domestic market is much larger. Uncompetitive industries can survive on domestic demand. Especially with some regulations that help. It doesn't even have to be explicitly protectionist regulation. Just regulate things the way Americans consider the best, instead of adopting international standards. That can create sufficient barriers to entry to allow uncompetitive industries and uncooperative unions survive.
The Jones Act only protects a very small part of US shipbuilding industry, those ships which will be used to ship goods between US ports.
Somehow the magical thinking here is that, if you allowed everyone to buy ships from anywhere they would buy more American made ships but because it is mandated that you buy American made ships for certain tasks, suddenly the industry is noncompetitive.
The reality of the situation is that the Jones Act is the only thing keeping the last vestigial of the shipbuilding industry alive. There are some inefficiencies in the industry it's self but for the most part, the primary drivers for the increased costs were related to the regulatory environment of the US(environmental, worker protection, etc), now there are even greater costs due to network effects of related industries having shrunk or died out.
Similar to posts about machine tools or electronic design, everyone talks about how in China its so much easier to get stuff done because the Fab shops are all next door and nothing like that exists in the US, you used to have more steel mills, fabricators and machine shops. Now there are fewer and further apart.
Unionized workers can be hired on a temporary basis. By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.
> Unionized workers can be hired on a temporary basis
With these unions ("Boilermakers")? No chance. They can officially give their jobs to their _children_ upon retiring.
There is a waiting list for apprenticeships. You have to complete 8000 hours of apprenticeship, even if you are already qualified.
> By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.
WA is ordering ferries at $1.5B per item. They cost 20 _times_ less if ordered from Turkey. This is not "wealth extraction from workers", this is "sucking on the teat of taxpayers".
For what it’s worth American workers as a whole make ~20x what Turkish workers do. While American shipbuilders make more than the average while Turkish ones are closer to their average countrymen, the 20x discrepancy in salaries doesn’t seem limited to shipbuilding. So not sure about the characterization of “sucking on the teat of taxpayers” per se vs overall higher regulations and salaries in the US.
Average national salary in the US $60k [1] vs 5k for turkey so closer to 11-12x (the coasts typically pay closer to 70k). So at most unions are costing US built ships to be twice as expensive due to unions and overall higher US wages are responsible for the price difference - difficult to compete on price with people that are willing to work for 1/10th your wage unless you can automate significantly more than them.
And cushy contracts mean products that are considerably more expensive. Pretty much the only unionized industries left are those where they are somehow protected from competition. That's because union products cost enough more to drive them out of the market.
The decline in quality of out Boeing has coincided with a collapse of the regulatory framework that kept profit extraction limited since the 70's and 80's. Now you've got the worst of both worlds, where the industry is protected and subsidized, production gets off-shored and outsourced anyway while massive profits flow into shareholders pockets in the form of stock buybacks. It's funny that you look at this and blame the protectionist aspect when "protectionism" literally built the industry in the first place.
Every country who isn't just getting exploited for their natural resources or labor has built their industry by protecting it.
Take a person with a full head of hair and remove one hair, are they bald? Remove another one, bald? Clearly not, but if you keep removing hairs at some point you have a head we consider bald. Deregulation has been working like that. It's hard to point to one discrete event.
In any case, the process really got going under Jimmy Carter. If we're talking about airlines, I guess you could point to the Airline Deregulation Act. The airline industry had been built in the first place by what people in this thread would call "protectionist" policies.
Stock buybacks are a big part of the story as well. These were illegal market manipulation I think from the Great Depression until the 80's under Reagan.
What do you think globalizing means?
Ships are too expensive to be built to a given level of quality in the US. This means we outsource the expertise, and in this case, even the expertise necessary to tell what a good deal is.
They've created a market in which a US based company cannot compete economically, because the cost of production elsewhere will be less. There is no margin by which any competition can take place, whether or not the government throws a ton of money and stopgap incentives into the mix.
You can't manufacture chips, small household goods, general purpose clothing, electronics, or a whole slew of other things in the US because our legal regime fundamentally disallows any American participation in those markets through economic disincentivization. If you can't make any profit because you have to pay higher wages or taxes if you manufacture in the US, then you're not going to manufacture in the US, even if you're a patriot.
The US doesn't have a rational system designed to maximize value to citizens, it's a hodgepodge of conflicting regulatory grifts designed to maximally benefit the corporations who paid for the lobby.
> they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
That's exactly what "globalizing" is. You literally cannot, under the current regulatory regime, create a ship building company that can compete with other established interests and competition from other countries. You'd have to relax the arbitrary labor and wage constraints, fix taxes and tariffs for sufficiently long term outlooks that anyone would bother investing. To achieve that, you'd need good faith operators throughout the government willing to rock the boat, and if you think that will ever happen, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya - I'll sell it cheap.
Other industries seem to be fine competing with other countries. Would there be some greater investment in manufacturing in the US if there were no labor (or environmental) constraints? Sure, but the fact that other industries compete just fine makes me believe it's simply not an economically efficient allocation of resources for labor heavy manufacturing to be done in the US.
China is winning because they are intentionally and directly investing in tech regardless of the financial circumstances. They don’t care about the profits, they are focused on the outcomes. They are doing what developed countries should be doing.
Winning is winning. History is written by the victors. Important to know who you’re playing against, and whether you’re playing by the same rules, and if the rules matter. It’s not great, but it is what it is. We must operate in a way based upon how the world is, not the way that we wish it was.
At this point, China is outdoing the West in so many ways, and rapidly catching up in the areas where it still lags. I’m not one to eagerly praise the CCP, but it’s hard to not see how China is progressing while the West lags more and more.
The West plays nice as much as possible. China is playing to win.
>China is outdoing the West in so many ways, and rapidly catching up in the areas where it still lags.
I'm not seeing it. Chinese economic power and tech capacity might exceed US capacity in time, but I give it only p = .25 or so. China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely.
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
> China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely, like it has done over and over thru history.
And the West isn’t? I honestly am not sure whether I prefer Xi Jinping over one of the candidates in the upcoming US elections.
There are still thankfully some checks and balances in place, but if the loudest elements of one of the two major US parties has everything their way, I’d honestly prefer to live in the PRC.
> China is winning because they are intensely, directly investing in tech regardless of the financial circumstances.
Investment can (and often is) different from protectionism. Typically, investment provides time-limited grants or other forms of support. If a company misuses them, a global (or local) competitor will outpace it.
Protectionism ensures that companies are indefinitely protected from global competition, so they don't feel as pressed to improve.
The developed world is unable to compete on a level playing field against other countries when taking into consideration potentially enormous subsidies or developing world labor costs. Protectionism, when implemented strategically, can reduce these counterparty advantages. Investment is also a component, but they both work in concert to arrive at a desired outcome. And I think that’s really where this problem lies, that we’re arguing about protectionism versus investment, when we should be identifying what the desired outcome is and then, based on an inventory of all of the policy and capital allocation tools that we have available to us, implement what is needed to arrive at the desired outcome. We don’t want to sacrifice innovation (which calls for mechanisms to prevent companies from leaning too far towards entrenched interests vs innovators), but we also don’t want to run a race we cannot win because we unnecessarily handicap ourselves in an inherently unfair and unequal global market.
I am not a terribly smart person, and I don’t have all the answers, but I would argue it’s clear what we’ve done so far isn’t working, based on all available evidence.
> The developed world is unable to compete on a level playing field against other countries when taking into consideration potentially enormous subsidies or developing world labor costs.
Cheap labor cost typically is only a fraction of a high-tech product. If anything, China was not the world's biggest factory, but the world's biggest assembler. It's changing right now, and China is producing more of its own high-tech components.
So a small amount of protectionism (like a 10-15% tariff) might be OK, and it will compensate for this labor cost discrepancy. But not tariffs that simply make the local industry complacent.
Music? I don't think anyone listens to American music these days outside of America (and maybe Canada). America used to produce great music, back in the 60s-80s, that people around the world wanted to listen to, but that went away after the 2000s.
American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU design: all the biggest CPU makers are in America: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. (Many of the CPUs are manufactured elsewhere, usually by TSMC, but all the design work is done in the US.)
According to this article (https://www.billboard.com/business/touring/taylor-swift-eras...), it looks like it's mainly American tourists going to Europe to see Swift's shows because the ticket prices are 1/10 as much as in America. Apparently, it costs about $5000 for a couple to see a Swift show in the US now, so it's actually a lot cheaper to just fly to Europe to see her show.
> $5000 for a couple to see a Swift show in the US now...
That's just not true. As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one. But ticketmaster and live nation should be regulated because they're a middleman monopoly in all of it.
It is literally false. The original tickets are nowhere close to that expensive and they do a lottery system with more verification now so that more fans get the tickets. I'm not defending Ticketmaster (they are awful and should be regulated), but original tickets just don't cost that much. Have you ever purchased Taylor Swift tickets? I have twice. Both times at original ticket prices.
Which are non critical and can be shed without much harm. Critical industries are, by definition, critical and require sacrificing efficiency to preserve.
If you want to be able to build and retain the capability, you have to protect the machine that does the building: people, institutional knowledge and domain expertise, equipment, etc. Otherwise, you forget how to build, the machine evaporates. And here we are.
Yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow but honestly, the workforce as a whole is kinda coddled at this point. Most people don’t even realize they're being paid more than what they're actually worth. Like, we’re not really creating enough value or building enough stuff that justifies what we think we should be getting. The only reason our value holds up right now is probably cuz of the defense industry flexing its muscle to keep things stable.
But let’s be real, as other countries rise up and we start losing our grip as the top dog, we're gonna feel the pain. It could be a slow burn or maybe a faster crash, but either way, it's gonna suck. We’re gonna have to go through some serious hardship to get back to where we think we should be. Not based on what we think we deserve, but what we actually do.
And it’s kinda mixed messaging too, right? We somehow believe our labor is more valuable than others, but at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to working harder. Longer hours, more back-breaking labor, real work, not just sitting in an office chair all day. We’re not entitled to cushy jobs forever, and things are gonna get a lot harder before they get better.
The American shipbuilding industry has been allowed to atrophy in an idea that protectionism would lead to good commercial the results.
What little gets built in the US is way behind the global peers in terms of economics and quality.
As usual the end results are that the entire shipping industry works around the Jones act, for example cruise ships from Florida docking in the Bahamas, and for the regions that can’t do it they are tough out of luck.
Why can’t the US build offshore wind? Because there are no jones act compliant vessels and the proposed workaround is staging all the materials in Canada and adding an enormous time waste to the projects.
Congress has been pushed not to eliminate would completely wipe out tiny remaining American Merchant Marine fleet. Most people who want to get rid of Jones Act are economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.
We could talk about modify it maybe allowing purchase of specialized ships from overseas friendly countries, like icebreakers from Finland.
What starts with good intentions ends with a bandaid that someday will have to be ripped off at the cost of the people who made a subsidized living based on it.
Except if you can't move stuff around without support of 3rd party nations, that's defense crippling.
If you want to be a global power, you require great navy, both civilian and military. That's been true since 1500s and will likely remain true for many years to come.
So question is, do we throw out Jones Act and slowly stop being World Superpower or leave it and pay higher upfront costs in certain places? That's political answer obviously.
What you’re missing is that our ability to move stuff around has already deteriorated to almost nil, precisely due to Jones Act and shipbuilding workforce unionization. We already cannot build vessels we need at quantities we need. This is already reality today. Repealing Jones Act cannot make our situation much worse.
It can, however, make us much better off, by for example allowing US companies to buy foreign ships to do tasks that currently are covered by Jones Act, and as a result are not done at all.
For example, we’d be able to ship gas from American oil fields in the South to consumers in the North, where there missing or insufficient pipeline capacity. Right now, Jones Act forces US consumers in the North to buy foreign gas.
Couple years back, before the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian Gazprom was making nice profit on the following run: 1) sail to Northeastern US, sell it Russian LNG 2) sail to Gulf of Mexico to buy American LNG for cheaper than it sold Russian gas to Americans in the North 3) sail elsewhere in the world to sell them American gas, eg to Europe or Africa.
This was only possible because Jones Act makes it impossible to ship LNG from Southern US to North. There are literally no vessels that can do it. It already cripples our ability to move things around.
I think there could be some discussion of modify the Jones Act to allow non US made ships to be use in Merchant Fleet. However, key provision of Jones Act around only US flagged ships may transport two US ports. If you eliminate that, forget it, US Merchant Marine fleet will go poof. Since it's a global industry, workers from other countries are obviously much cheaper than any US salaries.
The US merchant fleet has already gone poof. According to Wikipedia "As of 31 December 2016, the United States merchant fleet had 175 privately owned, oceangoing, self-propelled vessels of 1,000 gross register tons and above that carry cargo from port to port. " The list is likely even shorter today.
You see an emaciated man being fed a few grains of rice per day, someone says to stop the policy of feeding the man only a few grains of rice per day, and you argue "we can't stop feeding him these few grains of rice per day, they are the only thing keeping him alive!"
The Jones Act made sense when it was implemented in the 1920s while America was the world's leading ship builder, the shipping industry was heavily subsidized, and there was no alternative to shipping things by water. But after the subsidies stopped, and shipbuilding in america started to lose its competitiveness, and we built a massive interstate highway system that made transport by truck economical, the Jones Act proved far too restrictive. The more expensive domestic water shipping got, the less demand there was for ships, the less demand there was for ships, the more it cost to build ships domestically, the more it cost to build ships domestically, the more expensive domestic water shipping got.
There are alternative and better ways to keep the us merchant fleet alive, and even make it thrive, than keeping the current status quo which is obviously not working.
>Jones Act is not what killed the US Merchant Marine Fleet. Globalization is what killed it.
"Protectionism isn't what killed the US industry. Having any overseas competition whatsoever is what killed the US industry." This is farcical.
If globalisation is when the market lacks protectionism and as a result the manufacturing all moves to cheaper shores, then this was not globalisation by dint of US shipbuilding having abundant protectionism.
I think the argument among the anti-Jones contingent is that our only real hope of having a globally competitive shipbuilding industry is to repeal it and all the other things preventing our shipyards and merchant marine from having incentive to compete globally. As it is, there is a slow trickle of work for domestic shipyards that is based solely on policy (ships that legally HAVE to be US-made, whether for Jones Act reasons or military reasons). Without that protectionism, they would have to build ships at a quality, price, and timetable that is competitive with the rest of the world.
I'm not super sympathetic to arguments that presuppose the absolute requirement that US hegemony continue indefinitely, but certainly if you are trying to make sure your shipbuilders will be roughly as good as foreign ones or better (a reasonable policy goal, even leaving out military reasoning), cutting them off from competition with those foreign shipyards is not going to result in what you want. If there is a ready market for expensive, poor quality ships that take years longer to build than they do abroad, why would I as a shipbuilding executive invest to improve on any of those metrics? It would be wasted money, because my existing capital and workforce are already 100% utilized in high-margin activities, with orders stretching out years into the future.
More realistically without the Jones act, ships wouldn't be built or operated by the US at all. International vendors can do this cheaper.
You'd instead see all domestic shipping be entirely dependant on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third-world crews, and you'd have next to zero recourse against them if they, say, run one of their ships into a bridge, or spill a few million litres of oil.
They already are not built in the US at all. This is already true today. We already build less than one oceangoing Jones Act compliant ship a year. The US shipbuilding industry can hardly get any worse than it already is today.
My point is that it wouldn't get any better. Anyone blaming the Jones Act for this completely misidentified the root cause.
There are a few good reasons to repeal the Jones Act (reduce shipping and trade costs in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico) and a lot of really bad ones (the domestic shipping industry will be completely killed, and you're inviting unbounded liability from unregulated, fly-by-night international actors who don't give two craps about our laws.)
The way ocean shipping currently works is entirely incompatible with any national rule of law. Flags of convenience and corporations with non-existent liability mean that nobody in the international industry is actually following any of the rules.
The domestic industry has to follow them, which is the reason why it's not cost competitive.
I think you have a cursory understanding and are then pulling that to the extreme without actually knowing how the industry operates.
The problem stemming from flags of convenience is well known and the Port State Control system [1] was created to manage it.
In other words: live up to our requirements or we will detain your vessel.
The US is not a signatory to any international port state control scheme but as is usual the US runs its own nearly equivalent scheme through the coast guard. [2]
> you'd have next to zero recourse against them if they, say, run one of their ships into a bridge
You know that the Jones Act only applies to domestic shipping, right? So our ports are still full of ships dependent on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third -world crews who occasionally run their ships into a bridge.
You are saying that as if sacrificing a tiny industry to benefit the entire rest of the economy is somehow a bad thing. And the merchant marine isn't really big enough to contribute much to a hypothetical war either.
Of course there have to be considerations to maintain the capability to build warships. But other than that the Jones Act seems to do a lot of damage for very little benefit. Though ripping off the bandaid would be painful in that moment
> "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.
But isn't it the case that national security concerns are being reached, presently, under the effect of the Jones Act? We just don't have the capacity to build the naval vessels that we need for national security.
>But isn't it the case that national security concerns are being reached
It's not being fully met. Likely with elimination of Jones Act, it would disappear entirely. So it's one of those, it's bad now, do you want to eliminate it completely?
Only way I could see Jones Act disappearing but Merchant Marine Fleet to remain intact is announce that US is done playing world Navy Police. If it's not US Flagged, US is done giving a shit. Economic worldwide collapse to follow.
> Most people who want to get rid of Jones Act are economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.
I read "economists and other types" as people who understand basic economics. People oppose the Jones Act because it has devastated the US shipping industry, which is obviously bad for national security. It's not just about cheap shipping.
> economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping"
This is most people? National defense and the domestic shipbuilding industry are important, but the value of cheap shipping should not be underestimated. Plus, giving credit to the Jones Act for the current state of US civilian and military shipbuilding is, in my opinion, perhaps the strongest possible argument for repealing the Jones Act. The current state of American shipbuilding is disgraceful.
Isn't part of this that US vessels are not competitive on a global market because of taxation?
if you built and registered a ship in the US, wouldn't taxes be much more than say a ship registered in a small tax-advantageous country? (for a ship that basically wasn't in US 99.9% of the time)
Retirees do this with motorhomes - why register in california and pay all those taxes when you will be out of the state traveling all the time. Register in North Dakota or something and still drive the same route.
(note taxes could be state income taxes because of residency, or vehicle registration taxes which are a % of vehicle value)
I’m sure that’s definitely part of it, but there’s lots more stuff to it.
I’d say the “where to register your ship” question is the category of “complicated” - since obviously if we lowered our taxes to be as low as Panama then we’d get more registrations which sounds good - and “low tax” is better than the “zero” taxes we get from them now, but then the other country would just undercut that, and so on, and now nobody can get any tax revenue anymore.
It’s why the global economy doesn’t lend itself to simple sound bite answers like “just build American ships” or “just raise/lower tariffs” etc.
It’s too bad no one on any ballot seems to do anything but useless grandstanding, when it comes to actual problems like this.
People here keep blaming the Jones Act but the US has lost manufacturing capability across so many sectors so I don't really get how shipbuilding would be much better without the Jones Act. (Not that I like the Jones Act, I really don't, I'm just skeptical our shipbuilding would be much better without it. We were screwed either way)
We may have lost the capability to manufacture specific things but our capacity for manufacturing has only increased (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO). You can run per capita numbers as well and see it’s very similar.
So if we haven’t lost capacity but have lost capability doesn’t that imply something about the industries we’ve lost?
I’m not a ship industry expert but the US can make as much stuff as anyone in the world besides China and on a per person basis we are top tier. If ship building is a problem it’s not because of some generalized failing.
The problem in the US is not just protectionism against other countries, is that it doesn't incentivize internal competition. Instead, the US gov will throw more money at existing big corporations which from that point on have no fear of smaller companies innovating.
I don't find this explanation satisfying. If the Jones Act of 1920 is at fault, how do we explain the timeline? The U.S. was a ship-building powerhouse at least through the 50s, if not through the 70s. Why was there a multi-generation lag between the Jones Act and its effects?
The rest of the world was in total shambles until 1960s. Europe was destroyed by two world wars. East Asia was an economic backwaters. Same was true about most of South America, and its advanced regions were underpopulated compared to US. Africa was and is Africa. There was simply no other place that could build stuff at scale.
Basically the US wasn’t great at shipbuilding post civil war due to high costs. WWII was an existential threat so cost was no object, and we coasted on that capacity for a long time.
For other high income nations the ship building industry has specialized on higher tech vessels while leaving the enormous labor intensive container ships to South Korea and now lately China.
Also, the US commercial shipbuilding industry has always been small. WW2 was the exception where built lots of ships mostly in temporary yards. Since WW2, it has struggled. Naval shipbuilding has been the big part.
It is a lot of pain for reset of economy for protecting a small industry. If US wants more naval shipyards, then should incentivize building them. I get the impression that there has been much reason for yards to improve protected from competition.
The goal was to have a globally competitive merchant marine based on a home grown ship building industry to call on in case of war. Trying to balance both sides.
The end result is that that home grown ship building industry has all but disappeared together with the educated population required to crew it.
Your argument is post hoc ergo propter hoc. But as with car import tariffs and quotas, nobody doubts that removing all import obstacles would lead to the offshoring of most remaining car manufacturing.
What economists argue that the Jones Act is suppressing is greater use of domestic sea transport, which could be much cheaper than trains and trucks. Without the Jones Act sea transport would grow, but undoubtedly using foreign ships, perhaps relying on a primarily foreign crew. OTOH, a much larger domestic shipping industry would likely spur demand for downstream services, as well as open up opportunities for growth elsewhere in the economy, so overall jobs for Americans might grow. But deregulation grow the ship building industry domestically? Nobody expects that.
According to the article he references that talks about the problems with shipbuilding more generally[0], the US has never been competitive in shipbuilding at any point in the post-wooden ships period, long before globalization was the issue.
Passenger rail systems require the procurement of immense amounts of very pricey land, or the transfer of ownership of existing rail lines. I don’t see that as a similar cultural issue.
Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).
Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.
> Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).
I actually don't take it for granted that enough money thrown at a problem can automatically solve it. There's a critical mass of underlying assumptions without which the marginal output of each additional dollar supplied becomes so limited that it just doesn't make sense, even with the government money printer.
The US doesn't have effective passenger rail systems for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems: you have to optimize for one use case or the other or else have two completely separate systems, which takes up a lot of extra land.
There is also another reason, which is that passenger rail makes sense only in specific geographic and economic circumstances, and outside of Northeastern corridor, these are very few. Commuter rail requires urban population densities that do not exist in most US metros. Intercity passenger rail only makes sense at a very limited scope until air travel beats it on both speed and cost. Europe and Asia just have different patterns of development.
>for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems
...don't we? I'm not sure about the effectiveness or how to measure it, but I know that a lot of cargo - especially long distance cargo - travels by rail.
Even Whatcom County is having difficulty replacing the Whatcom Chief on budget, with the latest cost estimate being more than twice the federal grant they were given. This is all critical infrastructure in Washington but nobody knows how to build them in the US anymore.
I heard that we are now (2000 and onwards) mostly administrators that try to minimize their risk as opposed (think after great depression) to doers that get measured and appraised by what the deliver.
Getting stuff done in manufacturing with the right amount of ass covering, safety and documentation as opposed to over engineering it is very hard nowadays due to the complexities we have. The complex systems require different experts who cover themselves against fuckups.
I think that's the sentiment that think-tanks have been pushing recently. But outside a very "us-vs-them" viewpoint with China, I don't think it holds true. America's Navy does it's job pretty much perfectly for defending US interests at home and abroad. We have the tactical elements that we want to field, and we maintain them in a condition so they can provide the desired effect at any time. Building more ships isn't a panacea, and in many cases it's a great way to end up having billions of dollars in rusting assets sitting in dry-dock.
It's worth flipping the question on it's head. China's ambitions are very clearly best carried-out by a Navy that can harass Taiwan and expand their territorial claims in the waters surrounding Japan and eventually even threatening Australia. This is a smart move on their behalf, but they will be contending with unfriendly airspace and ground-based anti-shipping weapons. If you want to look at it from a purely military materiel perspective, I would argue the US has weighed their options and taken a less Naval-dependent route.
This type of thinking can strike as post-hoc rationalization.
the US need a navy to have a presence in the middle east , and Asia. We are down to the bones for force projection and to secure our own shipping. There is no 'less Naval dependent' way to police the worlds waters - the alternative is to give up.
Which is fine, the USA has been struggling with naval force projection for some time.
Why can't we just have a technology transfer agreement? Purchase the ships from Finland but make them at a US shipyard? Other countries do that with US defense manufacturers all the time. Purchase items, but with the condition that it will be manufactured in that country.
Yeah, I like to buy that ship again and while you are at it I want you to use imperial bolts, doors opening to the right and extra tall showers.
A copy job is never just a copy job.
So in short the US only builds a tiny number of them once every two to three decades, so nobody has any experience. And letting someone with experience build them is out of the question because then it wouldn't be built in the US.
This seems like a reoccurring story when talking about anything vaguely infrastructure related in the US.
Seems so, TSMC had issues with keeping costs under control while building their fab in Arizona. The military is having trouble building submarines and ships at the same rate as China is capable of. Nuclear plants are being built way over cost.
I'm reminded of this article which explains why elevators cost so much more here in the USA than the rest of the world:
> And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world.
There’s a lot of surprising info in that article. This one section that I actually have passing knowledge of is just blatantly false. The majority of US states use and heavily contribute to the international plumbing code which allows for single stack ventilation as described in their linked article. My house from 1958 has single stack ventilation…
Sections like that with easily verifiable falsehoods bring the rest of the facts presented by the article into question for me.
Now that Finland is a member of NATO, it would make sense to outsource icebreakers to Finland. Finland has 64 F-35 jets on order from the US, costing more than a few icebreakers.
VT Halter Marine, the troubled US contractor, went bust and was sold in 2022.
Of course, but then Congress couldn't create a jobs program to scare up a few more votes for the incumbent in certain districts. And so job security triumphs over national security.
It's not a stupid question, but ice is remarkably durable and has 'self healing properties', to describe ice-cubes sticking together in the most pretentious way possible. There have been projects to make battleships out of ice.
I'll answer this as someone who has spent some decent chunk of time on icebreakers. It's hard to really picture what travel through sea ice is like if you haven't done it. Breaking ice isn't that hard... at least if you only have to do it once. But breaking ice for hundreds or thousands of miles is really really hard. Articles like this one tend to gloss over just how specialized every single icebreaker is. And when they build new ones they often try new things to make it easier. My favorite thing I've seen is a set of compressor nozzles that attempt to make it easier for the ship to glide through the ice.
FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further.
All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.
As with Healy's fire leaving the US without an icebreaker this summer, this week a grounding apparently left the US Navy without an oiler in the Middle East[1]. Similar systemic shipbuilding challenges and fragility.
I can recommend The Terror first season series, despite its shortcomings, for a beautiful depiction of the struggle of breaking through the north passage in the mid 1800s.
My thought when I read things outlining American industrial and infrastructural woes is "What in the world is to be done about this?" As far as I can tell, protectionism doesn't seem to work, and globalism doesn't seem to work. I'd just like to hear a coherent plan on how a country should get out of this situation.
Peter Zeihan too talks about how USA is perfectly suited to have transport boats on its waterways but because of the Jones Act and lack of US shipbuilding we have to use trucks and rail which not only are clogging our roads but are much more expensive as well.
If it was actually more efficient the jones act wouldn’t matter because the other options use US labor and vehicles constructed in the US so it’s a fairly level playing field.
Instead the issue is shipping point to point usually saves a lot of overhead compared to ports and the distances involved are rarely enough to offset that overhead. You do see a fair amount of traffic via the Mississippi because that’s actually efficient.
Also, people forget about is how much oil, gasoline, and natural gas gets shipped by pipelines. Without that we’d see more ships going from the gulf to east coast cities.
> The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards.
Now this is a surprise! As soon as I read the headline, I thought "Jones Act."
When I describe the Jones Act to people, the usual response is "That can't be right," or even "I don't believe you," but these days there's usually another person around that can say "Yes, that's actually right!" to back me up.
It's a good example of protectionism, like tariffs, that is completely ineffective. The industrial policy of the IRA and CHIPS acts are in contrast quite effective.
I'm sure the Jones Act still plays a part, leading our domestic shipbuilding capabilities (including military and icebreakers) to atrophy in competitiveness.
Kind of pointless comparing Russian icebreaker number to anyone elses'. Russia is basically a huge pile of snow next to a huge floating pile of ice (geographically, not population-wise, but still). Nobody has even 10% of motivation for building icebreakers that Russia has.
Russia is very diverse and it's a huge oversimplification to reduce it to the cold parts. Just like America is not just California, Russia is not just Siberia.
We can, but we just won't invest the funds, meanwhile Russia and China will dominate as the ice melts. This is a lack of will and not lack of ability, I hate it when people act like the USA is a POS in blog articles.
I think the USA is overdue an ideological renewal. Free market, neoliberal capitalism isn't cutting it. The profit incentive isn't cutting it. Supply chains where it takes hundreds of contractors and subcontractors to build anything aren't cutting it.
We see this in Boeing, where management with an ideology of profit maximization and a structure dependent on a bunch of suppliers has led to a crisis. On the other side of the Pacific, BYD has vertically integrated critical parts of car manufacturing and now is moving extremely quickly and affordably.
Another example; the Federal Government invested billions on banks in 2008, billions into the auto industry in 2009, is now investing billions into Intel, but refuses to take any shares for some reason. It has this ideology of investing billions in the private sector to save industries key to national interest, but "state owning shares is spooky so we want nothing in return". It seems so backwards to me.
If the industry is that important to the country, maybe at least have a seat at the board of directors? You don't have no nationalize anything, but at least be in the same room. Other countries, from China to France, have demonstrated there's a lot of value in this state-private sector joint ownership.
I don't know what the right answer is, but the current status quo seemingly ain't it— not just in execution, but in ideology. Something fundamental is non-ideal.
You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example?
You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game".
China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
China in 1990 was a poverty-stricken, hungry backwater, following a philosophy that just bankrupted their richer big brother.
Ideological change was needed.
By contrast, the US system of capitalism + democracy is not only blowing the rest of the world out of the water, it has shown itself to be remarkably resilient and responsive to change.
China has thus far prospered by being great at manufacturing. Can they innovate and change as needed? We’ll see.
The US has thus far prospered by being great at whatever is currently most profitable. Will they change as needed? Yes. Change is how their system works.
I'm not saying the USA should stop being a democracy, or even being capitalist, like China didn't change its system of government in 1990. What I'm saying is its fundamental beliefs, goals derived from those beliefs, and systems designed around those goals —even within the same political and economic system that currently exists— could use an update.
Let me put it this way. Everyone has heard of Maoism [1] of course. There's also Dengism, which does claims to not reject Marxism–Leninism or Maoism, but instead adapt them to the times China was going through [2]. Turns out what Mao believed might or might not be true, but it certainly wasn't working. A change in system of government wasn't needed, but a change in philosophy was.
Now Xi'ism [3] has been taking shape, and rightly so. The world, and China's place in it, are very different from where they were two decades ago. It doesn't seem to far-fetched to re-think what the purpose of that government is, what it believes to be true, and to figure out how to shape policy around it.
To give another example closer to the USA, in 2022 Mexican President Obrador held a rally, where outlined the philosophy of his political movement. Inheriting largely from what people had been calling Obradorism, he defined Mexican Humanism, which takes from the general current of mumanism but adapts it to the moral and ethic values, the needs, and other philosophical currents of Mexican politics [4].
It just seems to be there haven't been fundamental "-isms" in the USA in a while. The philosophy is the same. The USA considers its position in the world the same. The game the country is playing, it's purpose in the world, it's goals all seem the same as they did last century. All we get is "Bidenomics" or "Trumponomics", which are not so much philosophies, but just different ways of spending money within the confines of the same set of beliefs— corporatism, neoliberalism, hegemonism in the exterior, political nationalism in the interior.
IMO presidents and candidates here just seem to have so little substance in ideology. Bernie is the most recent one I can think that really talked ideology, and spoke widely about democratic socialism. He wasn't talking about tearing the constitution, just about thinking of different goals within the same framework of government.
I'm not surprised that "identity politics" takes over instead, and people come to worry about where the grandparents of a candidate were born. If candidates give you little philosophy to relate to, I guess you have to assume their philosophy based on their skin color.
These are interesting points. It’s worth noting that in the 90’s, the US won the cold war, and also the same generation has been in charge since then. Why change things?
The next crop of leaders will likely be much younger, and you’ll see new ideas.
The article didn’t mention Canada’s role in the Arctic. While the American icebreaker fleet has been diminished, Canada’s is relatively strong. Our coast guard currently has a fleet of twenty, and tenders were just awarded for two polar icebreakers.
So it’s not like the Arctic is totally empty - a NATO partner has a bigger presence.
Because it considers manufacturing to be something poor nations do, and prefers to extract wealth through printing reserve currency and other forms of financial trickery.
Honestly, with how quickly sea ice and glaciers are melting away, I don't think icebreakers will be something we would necessarily need in the near future.
> The need for icebreaking vessels will remain even as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice: paradoxically, as new polar routes become accessible and sea ice becomes more mobile, the demand for icebreakers is likely to increase.
An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent and have turned what should have been a fairly straightforward modification of an existing design into a huge boondoggle, or is it that the government requirements are poorly thought out and/or overly ambitious, resulting in costly redesign efforts that aren't really necessary?
Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent
Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers.
The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades.
By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years.
It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
Like this? https://www.reuters.com/world/us-canada-finland-launch-effor...
Finland is part of NATO. The US and Canada should collaborate with it too. Sharing knowledge is a perfect way for European NATO allies to carry more of the collective defense burden.
Does it really make sense for Finnish shipyards to share knowledge of icebreaking when there the released text above discusses things such as the US and Canada selling icebreakers to third parties?
It seems more like a way taking over the industry from the Finns.
Obviously there may be specifics of the deal that makes it acceptable, but the vague text I see seems just terrible for the Finns.
I suppose it might be accepted because of the Canadian ownership of the shipyard in question.
It is in US/Canada's interest to have a shipyard in North America building ice breakers. Even though Finland is a NATO member, if something happens to Finland NATO may need some ship yards elsewhere to build more ice breakers (running 24x7 shifts!) while liberating Finland. Remember NATO (and military in general) needs to plan for all worst cases not likely cases. The above does not mean the shipyards need to be US/Canada. If they are Finland owned and operated that is fine. So long as the workers and a couple (minor) engineers are local that is enough - in the worst case (Finland's shipyard is taken and all the experts there killed) that shipyard is expanded and has some expertise to build on.
Yes, but the yard is Canadian owned. I suppose it was Russian-owned before.
But the combination of foreign ownership together with exporting know-how, this combination is kind of how one loses an industry to some other country; and then upon that there's that you can't even sell to the country that owns the company because of protectionism on their part.
It is a case of economic security. US National Security Advisor Daleep Singh spoke about this on the Odd Lots podcast a month ago. The goal is an integrated supply chain across all three countries, and an end result of marketing the ice breaker capacity to other allies.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/odd-lots/how-the-white-...
Transcript Notes at 00:17:51
Yes, he says 'What do they get. Well, in exchange, we agree to integrate our ice breaking supply chains so that they are interoperable at every stage of production', but that doesn't actually benefit Finland
Furthermore, suppose that it actually was something substantial, some kind of deal that NATO icebreakers are to be made by the US, Canada or Finland, then you screw the Aker group in Norway, who also make icebreakers.
The way I see it they expect that since the Canadians have been able to nab the shipyard after the disorder caused by the sanctions they can transfer all the knowledge from the Finns and make the icebreakers themselves, seizing appealing high-tech shipbuilding niche from the Finns, and they offer nothing in return but bullshit.
An integrated supply chain, sure, maybe that can save money, but once you've transferred your knowledge you no longer have your niche.
I think this is very obvious in the talk because of the vagueness in what is offered to the Finns; and my interpretation is that nothing meaningful is offered to the Finns and the the US is just expecting to seize this niche.
I don't think the 'there'll be enough for all of us' talk is plausible either. Surely, there might be an expansion demand, but there's really only the Baltic and the polar area that matters, and maybe US and Canada together do need 40 or so icebreakers to keep the North-West Passage safe and open in case it is to become a major trade route, but they'll last basically for ever, and my understanding is that the US is talking about only nine or so.
It's an interesting side note that in the 80's the Soviet Union, despite having a large icebreaking ship building capabilities, also bought icebreakers from Finland (then not a member of NATO)
Including a couple of Nuclear ones (they fitted the nuclear engine themselves):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaygach_(1989_icebreaker)
When I was living in Helsinki, there were two huge icebreakers there whose main job it was to keep the baltic see open for the Russians. I think that probably changed a bit since they joined NATO.
I guess that aside from Alaska, the US doesn't have to deal with a lot of sea ice and isn't that dependent on arctic shipping routes. For Russia that's very different. The sea near St Petersburg can freeze over and Murmansk is also hard to reach in winter. And with Svebastopol and the black see fleet out of action, those would be strategically important for Russia. And they rely on the northern arctic route for trade with China as well.
Sisu and Urho - they're still there - along with newer sister ships. Visible from satellite view of Google Maps.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rUq42cC1xFhUB8ij9
The US Navy will send ships in the Arctic Ocean past Alaska. It tends to be more common for submarines to be there, but surface ships do go there on occasion.
>However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years.
Is there really much difference?
Possibly this:
In twenty years, the experience retires. In forty, it dies.
Well...it's reasonable for the shipyard to still employ folks with hands on experience 20 years later. I occasionally get tapped to pitch in on things I did 20 years ago (even if it's just "why the hell did you do this?"), and shipbuilding changes vastly slower than my gig. That's much less likely 40 years on.
Yes. The longer that a shipyard goes with fewer and fewer contracts the more likely it is to go out of business.
And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
Also, shipyards that recently built one are more likely to get contracts to build more. Because other countries will be facing the same question.
More likely though isn't the same as likely. If I'm going to buy an icebreaker from a foreign supplier, sure the US is in the market, but they're still more expensive and take longer than Finland.
To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on.
The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns.
But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes.
The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
> But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever".
Even with the quotes, as a Finn I find this statement rather tasteless.
Or would you also claim that cross-border trade with more nearby nations is "money gone forever"?
Some people seems to be willing to spend significantly more if it means no one else makes a profit from it.
On a national level I understand the interest to keep investments within country borders.
For a random person or company I don't get it (except for very specific cases like voting with our wallets against dictatorships like China).
I didn't mean it to be tasteless, and it wasn't personal against Finland.
My point was that "internal spending" and "external spending " are not (economically the same thing. Obviously, Finland wants to export - tests a given - but the price tag of a Finnish ship and a US ship are not the same unit.
>But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever".
You can make a deal that US buy icebreaker for 300M from Finland and Finns buy weapons from US for 300M. They need it because of Russia and you boosts US economy in other areas.
And foreign deals are often set up this way.... if this can be arranged. It's seldom that straightforward though.
You get 300 million asset. If that asset produces more than 300 million in economic value you would have generally missed, isn't it still decent investment? If you do not need icebreaking, why spend money in first place? And instead use it somewhere that you get both benefits from.
What other countries? There are maybe 10 that care even a little a bit about icebreakers.
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it.
The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
> We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
Thanks for the specifics. I don't know about guided munitions, but I'd imagine a million dollar a rocket will be quite expensive for a prolonged war. Also, the US debuted a killer zone, Rogue 1, a few months ago, and it cost about $94K. $94K! I'm sure the drone is more advanced than DJI Mavic 3 Pro, but is it really 50 times more advanced even if we take the cost of military-grade into consideration? It looks to me the only explanation is that without a healthy manufacturing sector in the US, the cost of anything would go through the roof because we have lost the economy of scale.
A million dollar rocket is expensive, but it hits exactly where you want it and so you need far less of them. Artillery is a lot cheaper but also much harder to get exactly where you want it and so you end up using far more of it.
Note that Russia and the US have both guided misstles and artillery. Both have value in different situations. They both have their reasons for their preference, but that is more about how they expect a war they are involved in to look than about thinking one is better.
Ah, I was actually thinking about how iron dome vs Hamas rockets. Iron dome was super effective, yet a million a pop to shoot down a rocket that costs a few thousand dollars at most may quickly bankrupt a country. That said, maybe it's just one aspect of the war while in grand scheme of things highly effective guided missiles will win the war.
Not shooting them down would be more costly though.
Except the effectiveness of precision fires is now closer to 50% in a GPS denied environment. Now it's both expensive and inprecise.
Every hear the term "arms race". This is a constant in history. There precision weapons that don't use GPS. There are various ways to evade GPS denial (I don't know how effective they are). We will constantly be in a race of out doing each other.
There are alternatives to GPS but they are expensive. While the arms race is normal the issue is the penny hasn't dropped yet and no one wants to admit their weapons are now obsolete.
drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more. the biggest reason is the need to deal with adversarial input. dealing with GPS spoofing, properly encrypted and jamming resistant spoofing, not leaking the location of the operator, etc all are really complicated requirements that need expensive mitigation (and worse, prevent you from using commercial components)
> drone is an incredibly broad category and military ones have really good reasons for sometimes costing a ton more.
After following the development of drones in Ukraine since 2022 and also listening to people familiar with the US army, I also think there are some not so good ones, one particular nasty one being scope creep.
Recently heard about a US effort to create home built expendable drones for use at the squad level like the ones Ukrainians use and the result was too heavy and a lot more expensive (some of it thanks to the demand that everything be produced in a US controlled supply chain) but also as a result of good old fashioned scope creep.
And this is nothing new: AFAIK there is an old British military saying something like "an elephant is what a mouse would be if specified by a military procurement committee".
Note that FPV drones in Ukraine are not squad-level, there are separate drone units (at the very least 2 operators, at least 1 explosives guy because arming drones with makeshift explosives is not trivial and super risky, plus cover). Plus they are supplied literally on the back of a minivan in cardboard boxes because they only need to survive one way trip over a couple hundred km, the US needs to supply their units half a globe away.
US army drones are squad-level, have proper safing/arming, transportable, and shelf-stable. It's not scope creep, it's a very different doctrine and circumstances.
I don't think I wrote FPV, one way attack or kamikaze drone although I can understand why you interpreted it that way that I wrote home built (this was a mistake on my side, I was thinking about the commercial drones they use) and expendable (this doesn't mean attack drones, only that it is cheap enough that one doesn't hesitate too long to use it and don't try to recover it).
These surveillance drones can absolutely be used at the squad level.
Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course.
So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be.
Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped.
What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
> Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
I think Yamamoto Isoroku gave the answer to this challenge: just keep a booming manufacturing industry. When he was trying to convince the Japanese government not to have a war with the US, he said that he saw so many chimneys when flying over Philadelphia. All those factories would turn into a giant war machine if a war ever broke out.
That is, the economy of scale matters. When the US had its entire supply chain domestically, replacing a special screw could cost a few cents. When we were in good terms with China, it would cost a few dollars as we had to order the replacement overseas, but well, it was still cheap. Now that we are trying to cut China off, then what will do if we'd need to get a replacement? Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
> Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here.
Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
> You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch
This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
We have a high dollar value of manufactured products, but volume is way down, and the supply chain is ragged or totally broken. If your factories are warehouses where you assemble Chinese feedstock with German tools, how much local expertise do you have, or is it just LEGO kit stuff for tariff evasion?
> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China
Is it? What is the theory that the US could keep up with China? That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy. It doesn't seem plausible that the US can fight a long sustained war.
The plan as far as I can see it is to make use of a large network of allies and partners as well as aiming to finish the war quickly by cutting off materials like food and industrial inputs to stall the manufacturing engine. If it turns into a slugfest where munition reserves start to matter that seems like it would favour China.
One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia. If that is the case it is hard to see it coming out ahead vs China in any plausible conflict.
>One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia.
The US hasn't been fighting Russia - if they'd deployed F35s in 2022 then Moscow would be called West Alaska by now. Don't conflate "doesn't" with "can't".
But if they "doesn't" fight Russia now, why are they going to fight China in the future? Pretty good odds they won't because the cost is too high.
What we appear to be seeing is they don't really have a lot of tools that can be used against an uncooperative nuclear-armed power; and many of those tools would probably fail against China.
Nobody wants to fight China because the cost is so high - we are talking about lives more than dollars here (though dollar cost is high too).
What everyone worries about is being forced to fight China anyway. China is not playing nice with the US on the world stage. They are clearly supporting Russia over Ukraine (while pretending to be neutral). They are siding with Iran in the middle east. They are doing things in Africa that are against US interests (the US doesn't have a good record in Africa, but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators which leaves lots of room for China to be worse though only time will tell). They escalating with Taiwan and the Philippians. Those are the major reasons I'm aware of to be worried about China, there is more that I didn't write.
How will this turn out - we can only guess. But there is reason to worry.
All those reasons apply to Russia too.
> but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators
In the Middle East the US's #1 ally is indeed a democracy, but is currently fending off various challenges [1, 2] accusing them of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Their #2 ally is an authoritarian regime run by a gentleman who can be identified with phrases like "the bone saw incident" let alone the Kingdom's long record of barbarism and human rights abuses.
The US might win a battle of who supports better causes, but it isn't a can of worms to open either. There is no particular indication that it cares about the government system or actions of the people it supports.
[0] If the US didn't do it directly, they endorsed it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#International_Cr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#International_Co...
Every other option is even worse. Including walking away (they have too much oil so someone will control it)
> That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy
Wouldn't it be sad if this were true? Since when US was no longer a "industrial superpower"? Just 25 years ago, Chinese government officials were astound by how wealthy and advanced the US was when they visited the US. They wrote articles after articles to reflect why China was so behind, yet now China is the "globe's industrial superpower". In Oliver Stone's movie Heaven & Earth, Joan Chen's character went to the US and was totally mesmerized by the abundance in a supermarket. That was how Chinese people was amazed by the US too. And now? It's definitely great for China, but isn't it sad for the US to be behind?
> China is the "globe's industrial superpower
>isn't it sad for the US to be behind
Or perhaps it was just inevitable for PRC, also a continental sized land power with 4x population to be ahead once they got shit together. Comparing US industrial stagnation in US lens frequently fails to grasp/comprehend that PRC industrialization at PRC scale brought forth another "weight-class" of industrial output. Last year, PRC ship building launched roughly same amount of tonnage as entire 5year US WW2 ship building program. IMO many people think US industry declined from 10 to 5, and maybe whole of system effort can bring in back to 10. Meanwhile PRC didn't just turn the industrial output dial to 11, it turned it to 20, beyond what US was ever capable of, and likely will be capable of. Same way US didn't so much leave British Empire behind in the industrial race as UK was never capable of running better than a 7 minute mile while US stalled at 5 minute mile (and now de-trained into a 6 minute mile), meanwhile PRC is now running a 3.5 minute mile. IMO ultimately, not about sadness but being realisitic about systemtic potential. Maybe US can AI/automate their way to overcome human capita disadvantage, but PRC playing that game too.
Yes, the theory is that the USA should keep up with China and maintain a qualitative edge in order to contain them. Keep it up long enough and hopefully they will collapse or undergo an internal revolution, sort of like what happened to the USSR.
> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population.
I don't think it's unclear at all. It's uncomfortable to call out an obvious truth: We couldn't even compare. The only hope we have is basically economic mutually assured destruction. If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
It's unclear if the US could even get production ramped up on the scale of a decade. We simply don't have the people to train the people we need. Much less the people with the skills to do the thing.
> If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
Why? There is essentially zero chance that China can mount an invasion of the mainland US or even strike at its heartland enough to disrupt an industrial ramp up, even if it takes a decade (which it won't). The US can literally wait out anyone except Canada and Mexico (which... lol) by defending its coasts, with plenty of domestic natural resources - including agriculture, metals, and oil - to supply not just its military but the entire civilian population.
There is zero chance of China invading the US or vice versa. But this issue isn't about a ground war in either place, it's about a war in some 3rd place.
It's not about "home country". The US doesn't need carrier groups to defend home country. It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
> There is zero chance of China invading the US or vice versa. But this issue isn't about a ground war in either place, it's about a war in some 3rd place.
Agreed
> It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two. Assuming they all get destroyed by hypersonic missiles within the first few months, the US still has military bases all over the world. As far as I know, China has zero military presence in the Western hemisphere except some surveillance balloons.
China may have a short term advantage in production and cost but the US has the advantage in every other area of logistics relevant to a military.
> Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Absolutely but it'd be a pyrrhic victory worth little except as domestic propaganda. If the US does help defend Taiwan, the invading Chinese fleet will likely be massacred. There's little room to hide in the 80 mile wide Taiwan strait against modern anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. China's only real advantage will likely be air power, which doesn't win wars without lots of boots on the ground.
> Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I don't think we'd let Japan or Australia slip into war without assistance. (but what do I know? :-))
> China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two
Today. China is clearly building up their ability. In a few years the situation will look different which is the real worry. Also China may not need to be as big - China isn't patrolling the ocean like the US and so it is their 2 carrier groups near Taiwan against whatever the US can afford to send
The recent incarnation of isolationism in American politics might manifest if the US had the wrong leadership during an invasion of Taiwan or, I guess, Australia.
Defending Japan is a reflex action. We have bases and troops there, as well as a mutual defense treaty.
The hypothetical war in Taiwan would likely be almost entirely naval/aerial so yeah the question is if US has enough political will. Don’t think artillery shells will be a huge factor and even on paper the Chinese navy (and probably the air force) doesn’t even come even remotely close to US (yet).
Actual invasions of Japan and Australia are even harder to imagine. How would that even work? And why?
China-Taiwan situations is technically still a civil war. Internal conflict to "China". Like war between Confederacy and Federation forces.
It is unlikely that China will invade Japan and certainly not Australia. I find it extremely more likely that USA will invade Mexico with some fake pretence like war on drugs.
Artillery and particularly guided artillery like Excaliber rounds are highly effective at resisting landings.
In the most recent US wargame, China succeeded in occupying parts of Taiwan which would make artillery even more important — as attacks from the mountain regions towards Chinese occupation would keep them from establishing a secure foothold.
War games can be very deceptive though. Back in 2019/20, 2 separate studies ( Polish and US) expected that it would only take Russia 4-5 days to get to Warsaw with Polish units sent to the border suffering 60-80% casualties.
To be fair NATO wasn’t taking really taking defense that seriously back and maybe they had a point, although considering what happened in Ukraine that seem like a very unlikely outcome (unless Britain/France/Germany decided to stay out and not risk their air forces ..)
I guess overestimating your opponents is usually better than the opposite. OTH had Britain/France not made that mistake in the 30s much of WW2 could have been prevented.
The purpose of wargames is to find holes in your defense and the shore them up. If your war game doesn't find holes you are probably doing it wrong. In the real world your enemy doesn't have spies everywhere, but in a war game you should give them spies everywhere just because you won't know where those spies are and so everything could be compromised.
Russia didn’t overrun Ukraine quickly because they voluntarily withdrew for peace talks.
Excaliber became ineffective in Ukraine after Russia deployed effective jamming.
I think the Navy is mostly obsolete and they are focused on key assets. Ship acquisition seems too dumb.
[dead]
You adapt. Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale.
You get smarter/more accurate with the constrained supply of shells, adopt drones etc.
In the 80s, expensive Maverick missiles were the primary airborne tank killer. Now the Ukrainians are dropping mortars into tank hatches from cheap drones.
> Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale.
Not really. Most of what Ukraine is getting is things that were on the list to destroy because they are end of life anyway.
Of course the important lesson to take here is that the US doesn't have enough missile defense systems in storage.
That just moves the issue onto the production of drones.
80 years ago the priority was beating the nazis and japanese. The priority now is making money. Can't make money with ice breakers, so use the steel to make SUVs instead.
> Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society?
Maybe. Or a it’s a sign that workers, the environment, or some other factor is being exploited for gain.
>There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society?
We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import many components due to them being made much cheaper elsewhere.
>We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
You're totally right. This war is coming very fast as well, and by some accounts has already started. I worry we will all soon find out just how bad of a position we are in, the hard way.
> We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US
I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that's just $3 a shell, or 0.3% of the cost of a Russian shell, or 0.075% of the cost of a US shell.
What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale. By the way, this is also what Tim Cook said. He said that Chinese labor not cheap anymore, but China has so much scale and expertise so that the output from China is still cheap. Again, economy of scale.
Are you kidding? Everything is outsourced because wages are high in the US. I can't believe I have to spell out such basic and obvious economic facts to presumably intelligent people.
>What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale.
We've lost a lot of things but the reason things are expensive here is NOT that we didn't have economies of scale. That issue came much later. You get to have scale in the first place by being economically competitive. When things are outsourced due to some other country using slave labor or else their workers surviving on a tenth of what you make in the US, that is when you lose economies of scale.
Literally the only way we could compete in an open market with countries that have cheap labor is to use automation. But even with automation, those machines can be set up anywhere in the world, and they will tend to go wherever it is cheapest to run them.
>> When things are outsourced due to some other country using slave labor or else their workers surviving on a tenth of what you make in the US, that is when you lose economies of scale.
There may be "Slave Labor" in some places, but the vast majority of people doing out-sourcing for US companies are very well paid (by local standards.) They are not "surviving" they are thriving.
living in the US is expensive. So prices go up to match. So wages go up. So materials go up. "National security" is expensive (and the US is obsessed by it.) 13% of the budget goes to the military. Protectionist tarrifs. Security theater like the TSA. All of this comes at a price.
The US has enjoyed a leadership role in world affairs, economic strength, influence etc for 75+ years. But it turns out that "expensive is the head that wears the crown".
I say this not as a criticism, merely as a statement of reality. Of course, whether it changes, or indeed even discussing if it should change is debatable.
If you check the real numbers, not everything is outsourced. There is still very significant manufacturing in the US - and the number is increasing. China is perhaps increasing faster, but that doesn't mean the US isn't doing well.
I believe initially yes, wage is a big factor. It's just that now the wage gives way to the economy of scale (maybe regulation plays a big role too). It's pretty sad too. The capital wants returns and growth, at the cost of weakening a country for generations to come.
I'm pretty sure costs have gone up not due to workers' salaries...
I wasn't talking about a change in costs. Costs have been high in the US for a very long time. What matters in terms of industry is that the rest of the world is coming online and their products are much cheaper than ours, mostly due to cheap labor and the currency exchange rates. Cost increases of domestically sprouted goods in terms of dollars are overwhelmingly driven by inflation.
> I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper.
Read TFA. Faster, yes. Cheaper, no. Even after fully ramping up, Liberty ships cost considerably more to produce in the US than an equivalent ship elsewhere. In wartime that is acceptable. When you're producing for a global market, it's not.
>woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere
unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.
Ship building, like most other industries, is unionized in Finland and I would be surprised if it wasn't the same in Germany.
Other countries have unions too. I don't know the situation in Finland, but they are surrounded by countries that have even stronger union and union laws that the US. (and some of those countries also have ship building)
The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else
The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh
Recently OpenAI is failing to compete with Google's hardware and has asked US government for 5Gigawatt data center.
Don't forget that RFPs for this sort of thing get massively stuffed with pork so they're doomed to be bloated even regardless of the quality of the contractor who does the implementation.
They love including requirements that all but mandates a specific vendor's product because that vendor is a key employer in the district of some rep's who's vote they need or has a good lobbyist or whatever.
> Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?
It sounds like it is the former.
> If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere.
0: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Securit...
1: https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-...
This episode of War on the Rocks: goes into some depth on the issue, if interested: Can ICE Pact Salvage American Shipbuilding?
Episode webpage: https://warontherocks.libsyn.com/can-ice-pact-salvage-americ...
Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/warontherocks/WOTR_-_Icebr...
Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry. We need protectionist laws to guarantee that we can manufacture what we must have for strategic reasons, at minimum.
> Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry
This is true. But it’s not the root cause for our shipbuilding problems. Our dockworkers and shipbuilders are uniquely inefficient.
Maybe our dockworkers and shipbuilders are dragging to extend contracts that they only got due to protectionist laws to begin with. If they had more work to do and more experience, they might become more efficient.
I’m not sure labor costs could explain the difference the supposedly 5x difference in cost between Finland and the US. Labor is only a fraction of the overall cost and the difference is not that huge (e.g. average wage is $63k vs $50k).
It’s more likely that US workers (in this sector) expect to get paid $100k to produce $20k of value (relative to other countries)
Of course I'm not talking about averages. Average fast food workers make as much as engineers in some other countries. I'm not sure wages at the low-skill end are much lower in Europe, but certainly engineers seem to be paid less there. I assume that is similar across skilled professions. Comparing the US to Asia, yes the wage differences are across the board.
Unions in the US make for very high costs and long production schedules.
[dead]
The root cause is that naval warfare has practically no role in national security and hasn’t in a long time.
Even ignoring nuclear weaponry and mutually assured destruction, ships are expensive and fragile. They are easily destroyed from above or below, which makes them only useful against nations that don’t have modern military technology. If you need a floating platform to fight Houthi rebels they’re useful, if we’re facing an actual invasion they’ll be worse than useless.
As a result there’s not much pressure to get it right. If breaking ice were an activity that our national security relied upon I have no doubt we would be building them quickly.
Ships are useful for more than combat. Even icebreakers.
Didn’t say they weren’t.
But if they were useful for national security we’d be building them just fine.
> ... allowing the Coast Guard to buy icebreakers from Finland would likely save over a billion dollars per ship, as well as years of construction time
How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money.
There is no [edit: economic] logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
> There is no logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program. It mandates an absurdly complex manufacturing schedule with thousands of European companies, effectively costing a lot more than just relying on SpaceX. At the same time, though, it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union.
Embezzling is a problem, and politicians funneling money to their cronies too. But it can be done differently.
Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine).
you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected that this would be no longer needed.
Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
> Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods.
But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
Also, efficiency is everything in the competition with China: China, with ~ 4x the population of the US, can outproduce the US with just over 1/4 of the US's productivity. The US must maximize not only volume but productivity. Adding the countries listed above greatly increases volume, and the US can't afford the productivity cost of spending on inefficient manufacturers - the US needs to maximize output per dollar.
I think I only partially agree with this.
I do think the US can depend on Europe, Canada and Mexico. South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
I do think China can easily outproduce the US. But I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it. Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
The status quo can't be maintained, that's for sure.
> South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
While that was to some degree a concern years ago, before Biden took office, those countries have decisively and openly taken sides with the US and are members of a network of alliances that also includes The Philipines and, to a degree, India. The US has been building and improving bases, military training, etc. in and with those countries and all over the region For example, there is AUKUS, a major agreement between the US, Australia, and also the UK, for Australia to become the only country outside the UK to receive one of the US crown jewels, nuclear submarine technology. Australia also is hosting an expanding number of US bases.
> I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it.
The economics is trickier than that: Production is real economic value; printing money is just a statistic. Productivity = output/dollars. If you increase the dollars in that equation, you don't change the output and you reduce the nominal productivity number (though usually it's measured using inflation-adjusted dollars, so it's really unchanged).
The US can increase output by borrowing more dollars, increasing the volume of investment in shipyards without increasing productivity. But borrowing does cost something - IIRC the debt payments will soon exceed the military budget - and can cause inflation, which eventually negatively impacts output. In the end, China may be able to invest far more.
> Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
What connection is there?
> the revisionist Chinese and Russians
Or perhaps "revanchist", meaning that they want to conquer some territory they believe (or at least pretend) used to be theirs.
If you're measuring in decades, can you take any alliance for granted? Things can change in unpredictable ways.
Taking Europe as an example, if Trump or someone like him decides to leave Europe to its own devices while facing an aggressive Russia, we could see massive re-militarization. Who can say where a shift like this would lead? It's easy to view these countries as permanent allies when they depend on us for security, but they might not be so cooperative once they can stand up for themselves militarily.
This applies to Japan and South Korea as well vis a vis China/NK.
NATO, as well as the rest of the Atlantic relationships that form the 'West', has worked very well for 90 years, and NATO is still growing and strengthening.
Anything can happen, but that's not rational. Rationally, we need to anticipate what is likely and not treat risk as if it's all random, coin-flip, unpredictable chaos.
To me it seems more rational to be ready for a wide range of outcomes than to assume the next 90 years will be similar to the previous 90 years.
I agree; I meant that we need to rationally assess what outcomes are more likely and plan according to that, not treat every outcome as equally likely.
And not only plan, as if we are passive victims of history, but make it happen - invest in NATO, etc.
Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
So in terms of long term planning, I think hedging our bets make sense. It might be a good idea to invest in NATO, but we also don't want to be left in a highly vulnerable position in 10-20 years if NATO falls apart and our current allies stop giving us free trade agreements, because that's a real possibility.
I won't keep going in circles, but focus on this point:
> Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
The idea that democracies are less stable and predictable doesn't bear out in reality. They are the most stable and predictable forms of government, because they have many checks on their power: Free press, legislatures, competitive elections, etc. expose fraud and incompetence to their disinfectent, sunlight. The rule of law means that officials serve the law and the people, not a person. Putin is not someone you trust to keep their word in a deal with you.
Government by dictators is less stable: They lack the essential things above, and are subject to one person's whim - a person inevitably corrupted by their power. They change power through violence, which makes them even more unstable.
And to circle back after all to the evidence right in front of us: NATO has lasted 90 years so far. The US has greatly expanded and deepened its alliances in East Asia over the last 4 years. Now name an ally China or Russia has. They don't - dictators don't have allies on that level; nobody actually likes their values and wants them to succeed. China and Russia's current relationship is nothing like the US's with NATO;
> Things can change in unpredictable ways.
When you do stupid and unpredictable things? Certainly. But that seems like an internal US problem. Of choice rebuilding local manufacturing might be easier than fixing that in theory. OTH the longterm cost would like be much higher due to lower global stability.
> But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
If our goal is to be robust against the risks of a great power conflict, we can't necessarily depend on manufacturing from these countries because a great power conflict might either overrun or cut off our supply lines to these countries. In fact, control over East Asian shipping lanes is the central point of the current cold war with China.
I agree there is some risk for the East Asian countries. I think China would be hard pressed to stop all that production and trade, but certainly they could impact it and who can say what a 21st century war would look like?
Still, it's a risk, not a deal killer. China could bomb US production too.
China can't bomb American production unless we suffer absolutely catastrophic, unimaginable, WW3-escalatory levels of naval losses in the Pacific (because Chinese bombers from the Chinese mainland don't have the range to reach the American mainland).
I'm not sure that's true. The US can't defend an entire Pacific front, obviously, and has a shortage of ships, many of which will be busy doing other things.
Anyway, I was thinking of missiles, which China has many of, and which can reach the US (including from submarines and other ships that can maneuver closer to the US).
There is close to zero escalation room between Chinese missile strikes on the US mainland and nuclear war. If we detect incoming missiles from China there’s a good chance the US assumes nuclear warheads and makes a retaliatory strike.
That’s a real risk, but because neither side of a conflict wants to actually escalate to a nuclear exchange, it is not very likely that China will launch missiles at the mainland US. (Likewise I think the US is unlikely to strike mainland China.)
Conversely, whichever side maintains naval superiority in the western Pacific Ocean can cut off any supply chains to and from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and mainland China itself, without the risk of nuclear escalation. And as I stated, this is the entire issue. If you control the seas of East Asia, you basically control the world.
The US doesn't have too much trouble manufacturing things like aircraft carriers and submarines and 5th-gen fighter jets and missiles, and indeed builds plenty of those, even exporting some. It does have trouble building an icebreaker, but it doesn't need those very often, so it can't keep any company interested in the business when it only wants one every ~30 years or whatever. It doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money just to build one ship, when they can just buy it from Finland.
FWIW, the US does have problems producing ships. For example, the US military and Congress very much want to increase the rate of submarine production, and haven't been able to do it. If you look at current news, you can see the desperate measures they are pursuing.
> It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program.
You haven't established that it's a 'good thing', but it does exist. I don't suppose Galileo is about economic sovereignty as much as strategic military independence. Modern militaries require satellite PNT systems - they are necessary to precision munitions, without which your military operates on a 1980s level. As close as the EU-US military relationship is, they perhaps don't want to give the POTUS a button to shut down, e.g., a French military operation. The POTUS might like Galileo too - they might not want the pressure to use that power. (I'll skip having another HN SpaceX discussion!)
> it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union
Or it just shifts money and jobs from all people - the taxpayers (including businesses) - to a few, the ones that get those jobs and especially the business owners. It's arguably better to just give people the money and have them do something they can do efficiently. It's make-work welfare, in a way.
The point I was trying to make was that keeping the technological manufacturing expertise alive is valuable in itself, even besides the geopolitical advantage of having the system itself in place. By retaining the ability to get payloads into space and use as well as operate an independent positioning system, even if a political conflict with former partners arises, the EU can make its foreign policy decisions without fear of retaliation through technology dependencies—or phrased differently, we avoid being vulnerable to extortion.
The key to this ability really is to keep the knowledge alive and the related industries strong, to be able to tap into it when it's necessary. And that involves having a broad range of companies actively involved into creating critical components.
Canada has 20 light and medium icebreakers and just started a new project to build two more that will apparently "be among the most powerful conventional icebreakers in the world": https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/service...
Given the close economic and cultural ties of these countries, surely some kind of knowledge transfer could happen, if not actual nearshoring the construction. Could NAFTA (or whatever it's called now) be used to get around the Jones Act somehow?
Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too. And Norway and Sweden and whoever else might have the skills and experience.
For clarity Finland is a full member of NATO, as of 4 April 2023.
Perhaps that's what you meant, but Ally makes it sound like they're friendly with NATO rather than an actual member.
It's amazing how hard communication can be! My simple sentence, "Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too." has three interpretations - all reasonable IMHO:
1. cgh's: 'Finland is ok because they are in NATO; Canada, who in contrast are not in NATO, also makes sense.'
2. yours: 'Finland is an ally of NATO, not a member.'
3. mine: 'Canada may have 'close economic and cultural ties' (from the parent comment), but Finland is a member of the NATO alliance. Canada still makes sense (no comment on their NATO membership, which is a fact).'
I think some is context: In what I read, 'NATO ally' is a somewhat common term for members of NATO (an alliance, of course), and I instinctively used it. It's hard to remember that other people read their own materials.
Canada is a founding member of NATO.
Yes; I meant that Finland has a pretty good relationship with the US; I didn't say anything about Canada and NATO.
My mistake, sorry. I thought you were implying Canada wasn't a NATO member.
I agree with your economic nationalism comments. But Canada is in a special position here: the US Arctic is contiguous with Canada's much larger Arctic region and a US/Canada icebreaking partnership seems to make sense. The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA, generally close economic ties and the whole "fortress North America" thing. Canada has at least two shipyards capable of building icebreakers and the US has money.
Another example of this close, almost ambiguous economic relationship: the US Department of Defense is funding Canadian mining juniors. I have never heard of this happening before: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/377704...
Canada and the US have some disagreements about the arctic, particularly about the Northwest Passage: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2020/04/the-u-s-canada-nort...
That's got to be a factor here
> The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA
Why are nationalists ok with NAFTA, which is just like any other international fre trade agreement? Is it because Trump backed it - meaning, of course, that they aren't nationalists but Trumpists.
I've always heard people say nationalism is a good thing and globalism is the solution, yet they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
> they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.
That was a complaint many years go, but things have changed dramatically: The US now is 'decoupling' its economy from China, and moving production to friendlier countries, and the US encourages and arranges for allies to do the same. The US and its Pacific allies are also intensely preparing for possible warfare with China.
Just because China is not a reliable partner doesn't mean the US should throw out all other partners. Should the US not buy icebreakers from Canada and Finland because of China? That would be greatly hamstrining the US. China's government would love it, I think.
Presumably you need to monitor the situation and require that there's a significant enough amount of interdependence.
The issue with China is that they don't need the US as much as the US needs them.
Who ever said that nationalism is a good thing, apart from nationalists?
“Nationalism is an infantile disease, it’s the measles of mankind.”
-Albert Einstein
The globalists, when it's time to go to war again. The same people who said you are a racist and fascist if you wave the flag have already done about face and now say it's the duty of young men and women to die for their country.
"Everybody for themselves, we're individuals" when there's peace and "We're all in this together, you've got to die for your country" when their wealth is threatened.
You have a point, IMHO, but it doesn't leave room for another group: Humanitarians who believe in human rights as fundamental. That is counter to nationalism (which says the 'nation' is fundemental - the nation being the nationalist powerbrokers); it assumes all have inalienable equal rights, regardless of where political borders are drawn.
Sometimes you need to get together and fight for human rights. But even as WWII was going on, Churchill, for example, was IIRC a harsh critic of nationalism.
Well, there is “a logic,” whether you agree with it or not, that it’s strategically important even if commercially suboptimal for us to have a domestic shipbuilding capability.
It is strategically critical to maintain friendly relations with Finland, Canada, and South Korea, all of which would be happy to sell icebreakers. If those countries were to become unreliable, the US will have problems a whole lot than a shortage of icebreakers.
Yes, I meant economic logic. I updated my comment, thanks.
I’m with you as long as the country building it is a nato member
Yes, it’s tragic. Even if you consider the job losses. We’d be better off paying those same shipbuilders to do Sudoku puzzles, with HALF the money we save on the ships. A billion bucks per ship would go a LONG way.
I mean, ideally we could try to not suck at building ships economically, though. But that’s a lot harder to figure out given how it’s a political problem.
> How about we let Finland build the icebreakers
We can't. Jones Act.
We can change the law. It happens every day.
Especially since Congress needed to allocate funds for the project anyway, just pass a law that says "buy some ice breakers from Finland, notwithstanding any other laws, and here's 1 billion dollars to do it."
Yes, but repeals of very actively enforced law that's over 100 years old do not happen every day.
"The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards. It’s possible to waive this requirement via presidential authorization[0], but there hasn’t appeared to be much interest in this."
[0] https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-gu...
"In practice Congress would need to support such a plan by appropriating funds for the project."
> We also see the same cultural issues that we saw with American shipbuilding more broadly. There seems to be a lack of motivation to take maritime issues seriously or treat them as important.
This is the meat of the article in my mind. The US has globalized away its maritime industry in general and we now lack the institutional knowledge, infrastructure, and labor force needed to operate even semi-independently on the maritime front. Just look at our domestic shipbuilding capacity vs. China: https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/chinas-shipbuildi...
WA state has the same problem trying to get ferries built for the Puget sound. Every decade the fleet gets more dilapidated and the replacements get more expensive and farther behind schedule. The legislature has ditched the requirements that the boats be built at a WA shipyard and they still can't find builders.
> The US has globalized away its maritime industry
It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
> and they still can't find builders.
That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years in advance. The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts. So shipyards can't hire temporary workforce for a given project.
> The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts.
The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets to command insane prices because they know the US will pony up.
The reason the US was able to make advanced navy ships right up until the 80s is because shipbuilding was done by public industry. Insanely, Clinton and Reagan started the process of privatizing our fleet capabilities and it's landed us exactly where you think it would.
The reason we don't have ice breaker ships being built is because it's a niche market and ship builders are all too happy to say "no" or to charge an exorbitant price so the US military will go away.
Sorry, what are you talking about? None of this is true. Government-owned shipyards were not historically responsible for significant fraction of delivered tonnage. In fact, given the utter atrophy of private shipbuilding industry in US today, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of tonnage delivered by government owned shipyards today was higher than ever.
I see downvotes at the time I commented, which is unfortunate as ideas should be at least explored. Someone on the internet has been keeping statistics [0] that do suggest the collapse in output happened in the 1980s.
But on the other hand, the same stats show a steady decline in the number of companies from 1950 that was only stabilised after the collapse in output, so it is probably arguable that the high-production situation was unsustainable. Economics can be complex.
[0] http://shipbuildinghistory.com/statistics/decline.htm
Yes, the collapse has happened, but it had not happened due to "privatization" of government shipyard. These were all privately owned shipyard that collapsed. The comment you are responding to is inventing some kind of alternative history that simply has not happened, and probably this is why it's downvoted.
I can assure you, shipyards here in Finland are just as, if not more, unionized.
This is a common communication problem between Americans and Europeans where we're using the same word to mean two different types of organization. In the US you should replace "union" with "cartel, likely criminal" eg the boilermakers
"A federal grand jury in Kansas returned an indictment yesterday charging seven defendants, including five current and former high-level officers of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmith, Forgers and Helpers (Boilermakers Union) for their alleged roles in a 15-year, $20 million embezzlement scheme."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-presidents-boilerm...
$20M is small potatoes for a $300M ship that's now costing in the billions.
Maybe the problem isn't with American unions, it's with American corruption.
In other words maybe there's just less corruption in Finland.
I would guess the shipbuilding industry in Finland is also built on subsidy and "protectionism" just like every other successful industry too. A cursory google search shows millions that were made available to shipbuilders: https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/for-finnish-customers/serv...
I'd bet that's just scratching the surface. The only way any country has been able to develop their productive capacities is through public grants and subsidies. The history of US industry shows the same thing, research in materials, electronics, the internet, etc were all accomplished through publicly funded research.
It seems quite likely that Finish unions work differently to US ones. The legal details and organisational traditions matter.
It's just free markets in action. Finland is a small country that depends on international trade. Industries must remain competitive or go out of business. Unions that harm the competitiveness too much won't survive in the long term.
US domestic market is much larger. Uncompetitive industries can survive on domestic demand. Especially with some regulations that help. It doesn't even have to be explicitly protectionist regulation. Just regulate things the way Americans consider the best, instead of adopting international standards. That can create sufficient barriers to entry to allow uncompetitive industries and uncooperative unions survive.
The Jones Act only protects a very small part of US shipbuilding industry, those ships which will be used to ship goods between US ports.
Somehow the magical thinking here is that, if you allowed everyone to buy ships from anywhere they would buy more American made ships but because it is mandated that you buy American made ships for certain tasks, suddenly the industry is noncompetitive.
The reality of the situation is that the Jones Act is the only thing keeping the last vestigial of the shipbuilding industry alive. There are some inefficiencies in the industry it's self but for the most part, the primary drivers for the increased costs were related to the regulatory environment of the US(environmental, worker protection, etc), now there are even greater costs due to network effects of related industries having shrunk or died out.
Similar to posts about machine tools or electronic design, everyone talks about how in China its so much easier to get stuff done because the Fab shops are all next door and nothing like that exists in the US, you used to have more steel mills, fabricators and machine shops. Now there are fewer and further apart.
Network effects matter.
Unionized workers can be hired on a temporary basis. By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.
> Unionized workers can be hired on a temporary basis
With these unions ("Boilermakers")? No chance. They can officially give their jobs to their _children_ upon retiring.
There is a waiting list for apprenticeships. You have to complete 8000 hours of apprenticeship, even if you are already qualified.
> By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.
WA is ordering ferries at $1.5B per item. They cost 20 _times_ less if ordered from Turkey. This is not "wealth extraction from workers", this is "sucking on the teat of taxpayers".
For what it’s worth American workers as a whole make ~20x what Turkish workers do. While American shipbuilders make more than the average while Turkish ones are closer to their average countrymen, the 20x discrepancy in salaries doesn’t seem limited to shipbuilding. So not sure about the characterization of “sucking on the teat of taxpayers” per se vs overall higher regulations and salaries in the US.
> For what it’s worth American workers as a whole make ~20x what Turkish workers do.
It's about 7x.
> 20x discrepancy in salaries
Not salaries. The end-product costs.
Average national salary in the US $60k [1] vs 5k for turkey so closer to 11-12x (the coasts typically pay closer to 70k). So at most unions are costing US built ships to be twice as expensive due to unions and overall higher US wages are responsible for the price difference - difficult to compete on price with people that are willing to work for 1/10th your wage unless you can automate significantly more than them.
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll...
I looked up the salary for qualified machinists in both countries, not the average.
US-built cars do not cost 20 times that of Turkey-built cars.
US built cars are automated like crazy, have a lot of experience scaling, and save significantly on shipping costs.
Hire who? There won't be other skilled people.
And cushy contracts mean products that are considerably more expensive. Pretty much the only unionized industries left are those where they are somehow protected from competition. That's because union products cost enough more to drive them out of the market.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that the American addiction to cheap shit coincides with lower union membership and a shrinking middle class.
Isn't it a similar case with the American busses? They are crap because they're protected?
Similar with Boeing too.
The decline in quality of out Boeing has coincided with a collapse of the regulatory framework that kept profit extraction limited since the 70's and 80's. Now you've got the worst of both worlds, where the industry is protected and subsidized, production gets off-shored and outsourced anyway while massive profits flow into shareholders pockets in the form of stock buybacks. It's funny that you look at this and blame the protectionist aspect when "protectionism" literally built the industry in the first place.
Every country who isn't just getting exploited for their natural resources or labor has built their industry by protecting it.
When did the regulatory framework collapse? 90s? Was there a specific bill?
Take a person with a full head of hair and remove one hair, are they bald? Remove another one, bald? Clearly not, but if you keep removing hairs at some point you have a head we consider bald. Deregulation has been working like that. It's hard to point to one discrete event.
In any case, the process really got going under Jimmy Carter. If we're talking about airlines, I guess you could point to the Airline Deregulation Act. The airline industry had been built in the first place by what people in this thread would call "protectionist" policies.
Stock buybacks are a big part of the story as well. These were illegal market manipulation I think from the Great Depression until the 80's under Reagan.
What’s the general consensus on the state of US Navy ships?
The most recent classes seem riddled with various problems - see Zumwalt, LCS, Constellation. I suppose the Ford is relatively ok.
What do you think globalizing means? Ships are too expensive to be built to a given level of quality in the US. This means we outsource the expertise, and in this case, even the expertise necessary to tell what a good deal is.
They've created a market in which a US based company cannot compete economically, because the cost of production elsewhere will be less. There is no margin by which any competition can take place, whether or not the government throws a ton of money and stopgap incentives into the mix.
You can't manufacture chips, small household goods, general purpose clothing, electronics, or a whole slew of other things in the US because our legal regime fundamentally disallows any American participation in those markets through economic disincentivization. If you can't make any profit because you have to pay higher wages or taxes if you manufacture in the US, then you're not going to manufacture in the US, even if you're a patriot.
The US doesn't have a rational system designed to maximize value to citizens, it's a hodgepodge of conflicting regulatory grifts designed to maximally benefit the corporations who paid for the lobby.
> they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
That's exactly what "globalizing" is. You literally cannot, under the current regulatory regime, create a ship building company that can compete with other established interests and competition from other countries. You'd have to relax the arbitrary labor and wage constraints, fix taxes and tariffs for sufficiently long term outlooks that anyone would bother investing. To achieve that, you'd need good faith operators throughout the government willing to rock the boat, and if you think that will ever happen, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya - I'll sell it cheap.
Other industries seem to be fine competing with other countries. Would there be some greater investment in manufacturing in the US if there were no labor (or environmental) constraints? Sure, but the fact that other industries compete just fine makes me believe it's simply not an economically efficient allocation of resources for labor heavy manufacturing to be done in the US.
What industries? Steel? Protectionism. Batteries? Protectionism. Solar? Protectionism. Autos? Protectionism. Aircraft? Protectionism. Agriculture? Protectionism.
Why? Because efficiency is a tradeoff where you give up security and resiliency.
> What industries? Steel? Protectionism.
The US imports steel, and the protectionist regime almost killed the US steel: https://reason.com/2024/01/02/protectionism-ruined-u-s-steel...
> Batteries? Protectionism. Solar? Protectionism.
That's relatively new, and it _will_ lead to disaster. The US is already falling behind in battery tech compared to China and South Korea.
> Autos? Protectionism. Aircraft? Protectionism.
Need I remind you of Detroit and its handling of cheap Japanese imports in 70-s and 80-s?
Aircraft are only slightly protectionist, the US companies can (and do) buy foreign aircraft (Airbuses and Embraers are commonplace).
China is winning because they are intentionally and directly investing in tech regardless of the financial circumstances. They don’t care about the profits, they are focused on the outcomes. They are doing what developed countries should be doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
They’re also an authoritarian state that doesn’t have to worry about various pesky things that grind Western democracies to a halt.
If the Pharoah wants a fleet of aircraft carriers, the Pharoah will have a fleet of aircraft carriers.
Winning is winning. History is written by the victors. Important to know who you’re playing against, and whether you’re playing by the same rules, and if the rules matter. It’s not great, but it is what it is. We must operate in a way based upon how the world is, not the way that we wish it was.
At this point, China is outdoing the West in so many ways, and rapidly catching up in the areas where it still lags. I’m not one to eagerly praise the CCP, but it’s hard to not see how China is progressing while the West lags more and more.
The West plays nice as much as possible. China is playing to win.
>China is outdoing the West in so many ways, and rapidly catching up in the areas where it still lags.
I'm not seeing it. Chinese economic power and tech capacity might exceed US capacity in time, but I give it only p = .25 or so. China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
Emphasis mine.
> China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely, like it has done over and over thru history.
And the West isn’t? I honestly am not sure whether I prefer Xi Jinping over one of the candidates in the upcoming US elections.
There are still thankfully some checks and balances in place, but if the loudest elements of one of the two major US parties has everything their way, I’d honestly prefer to live in the PRC.
> The West plays nice as much as possible.
Please, tell us how you came to this conclusion
> China is winning because they are intensely, directly investing in tech regardless of the financial circumstances.
Investment can (and often is) different from protectionism. Typically, investment provides time-limited grants or other forms of support. If a company misuses them, a global (or local) competitor will outpace it.
Protectionism ensures that companies are indefinitely protected from global competition, so they don't feel as pressed to improve.
The developed world is unable to compete on a level playing field against other countries when taking into consideration potentially enormous subsidies or developing world labor costs. Protectionism, when implemented strategically, can reduce these counterparty advantages. Investment is also a component, but they both work in concert to arrive at a desired outcome. And I think that’s really where this problem lies, that we’re arguing about protectionism versus investment, when we should be identifying what the desired outcome is and then, based on an inventory of all of the policy and capital allocation tools that we have available to us, implement what is needed to arrive at the desired outcome. We don’t want to sacrifice innovation (which calls for mechanisms to prevent companies from leaning too far towards entrenched interests vs innovators), but we also don’t want to run a race we cannot win because we unnecessarily handicap ourselves in an inherently unfair and unequal global market.
I am not a terribly smart person, and I don’t have all the answers, but I would argue it’s clear what we’ve done so far isn’t working, based on all available evidence.
> The developed world is unable to compete on a level playing field against other countries when taking into consideration potentially enormous subsidies or developing world labor costs.
Cheap labor cost typically is only a fraction of a high-tech product. If anything, China was not the world's biggest factory, but the world's biggest assembler. It's changing right now, and China is producing more of its own high-tech components.
So a small amount of protectionism (like a 10-15% tariff) might be OK, and it will compensate for this labor cost discrepancy. But not tariffs that simply make the local industry complacent.
Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
Music? I don't think anyone listens to American music these days outside of America (and maybe Canada). America used to produce great music, back in the 60s-80s, that people around the world wanted to listen to, but that went away after the 2000s.
American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU design: all the biggest CPU makers are in America: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. (Many of the CPUs are manufactured elsewhere, usually by TSMC, but all the design work is done in the US.)
There's this Taylor girl who seems pretty popular but maybe you're right, the record concert sales probably implies nobody is listening to her.
According to this article (https://www.billboard.com/business/touring/taylor-swift-eras...), it looks like it's mainly American tourists going to Europe to see Swift's shows because the ticket prices are 1/10 as much as in America. Apparently, it costs about $5000 for a couple to see a Swift show in the US now, so it's actually a lot cheaper to just fly to Europe to see her show.
> $5000 for a couple to see a Swift show in the US now...
That's just not true. As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one. But ticketmaster and live nation should be regulated because they're a middleman monopoly in all of it.
>That's just not true.
According to the 1st paragraph of the linked article, it is.
>As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one.
That's pretty useless if they all get bought up by resellers.
It is literally false. The original tickets are nowhere close to that expensive and they do a lottery system with more verification now so that more fans get the tickets. I'm not defending Ticketmaster (they are awful and should be regulated), but original tickets just don't cost that much. Have you ever purchased Taylor Swift tickets? I have twice. Both times at original ticket prices.
Service industries.
Which are non critical and can be shed without much harm. Critical industries are, by definition, critical and require sacrificing efficiency to preserve.
If you want to be able to build and retain the capability, you have to protect the machine that does the building: people, institutional knowledge and domain expertise, equipment, etc. Otherwise, you forget how to build, the machine evaporates. And here we are.
That’s because a huge portion of the service industry requires local people.
Its kind of difficult for a hairdresser in Turkey to compete with the barber down the street from my house.
If we measured our service industries the same way we measure boats, we would rapidly see they can’t float either.
Yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow but honestly, the workforce as a whole is kinda coddled at this point. Most people don’t even realize they're being paid more than what they're actually worth. Like, we’re not really creating enough value or building enough stuff that justifies what we think we should be getting. The only reason our value holds up right now is probably cuz of the defense industry flexing its muscle to keep things stable.
But let’s be real, as other countries rise up and we start losing our grip as the top dog, we're gonna feel the pain. It could be a slow burn or maybe a faster crash, but either way, it's gonna suck. We’re gonna have to go through some serious hardship to get back to where we think we should be. Not based on what we think we deserve, but what we actually do.
And it’s kinda mixed messaging too, right? We somehow believe our labor is more valuable than others, but at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to working harder. Longer hours, more back-breaking labor, real work, not just sitting in an office chair all day. We’re not entitled to cushy jobs forever, and things are gonna get a lot harder before they get better.
It all stems from the Jones act. [1]
The American shipbuilding industry has been allowed to atrophy in an idea that protectionism would lead to good commercial the results.
What little gets built in the US is way behind the global peers in terms of economics and quality.
As usual the end results are that the entire shipping industry works around the Jones act, for example cruise ships from Florida docking in the Bahamas, and for the regions that can’t do it they are tough out of luck.
Why can’t the US build offshore wind? Because there are no jones act compliant vessels and the proposed workaround is staging all the materials in Canada and adding an enormous time waste to the projects.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
Congress has been pushed not to eliminate would completely wipe out tiny remaining American Merchant Marine fleet. Most people who want to get rid of Jones Act are economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.
We could talk about modify it maybe allowing purchase of specialized ships from overseas friendly countries, like icebreakers from Finland.
That is the problem with protectionism.
What starts with good intentions ends with a bandaid that someday will have to be ripped off at the cost of the people who made a subsidized living based on it.
Except if you can't move stuff around without support of 3rd party nations, that's defense crippling.
If you want to be a global power, you require great navy, both civilian and military. That's been true since 1500s and will likely remain true for many years to come.
So question is, do we throw out Jones Act and slowly stop being World Superpower or leave it and pay higher upfront costs in certain places? That's political answer obviously.
What you’re missing is that our ability to move stuff around has already deteriorated to almost nil, precisely due to Jones Act and shipbuilding workforce unionization. We already cannot build vessels we need at quantities we need. This is already reality today. Repealing Jones Act cannot make our situation much worse.
It can, however, make us much better off, by for example allowing US companies to buy foreign ships to do tasks that currently are covered by Jones Act, and as a result are not done at all.
For example, we’d be able to ship gas from American oil fields in the South to consumers in the North, where there missing or insufficient pipeline capacity. Right now, Jones Act forces US consumers in the North to buy foreign gas.
Couple years back, before the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian Gazprom was making nice profit on the following run: 1) sail to Northeastern US, sell it Russian LNG 2) sail to Gulf of Mexico to buy American LNG for cheaper than it sold Russian gas to Americans in the North 3) sail elsewhere in the world to sell them American gas, eg to Europe or Africa.
This was only possible because Jones Act makes it impossible to ship LNG from Southern US to North. There are literally no vessels that can do it. It already cripples our ability to move things around.
I think there could be some discussion of modify the Jones Act to allow non US made ships to be use in Merchant Fleet. However, key provision of Jones Act around only US flagged ships may transport two US ports. If you eliminate that, forget it, US Merchant Marine fleet will go poof. Since it's a global industry, workers from other countries are obviously much cheaper than any US salaries.
The US merchant fleet has already gone poof. According to Wikipedia "As of 31 December 2016, the United States merchant fleet had 175 privately owned, oceangoing, self-propelled vessels of 1,000 gross register tons and above that carry cargo from port to port. " The list is likely even shorter today.
Jones Act is what is keeping that tiny fleet alive on life support. It would likely approach ZERO outside the Great Lakes without the act.
Jones Act is not what killed the US Merchant Marine Fleet. Globalization is what killed it.
You see an emaciated man being fed a few grains of rice per day, someone says to stop the policy of feeding the man only a few grains of rice per day, and you argue "we can't stop feeding him these few grains of rice per day, they are the only thing keeping him alive!"
The Jones Act made sense when it was implemented in the 1920s while America was the world's leading ship builder, the shipping industry was heavily subsidized, and there was no alternative to shipping things by water. But after the subsidies stopped, and shipbuilding in america started to lose its competitiveness, and we built a massive interstate highway system that made transport by truck economical, the Jones Act proved far too restrictive. The more expensive domestic water shipping got, the less demand there was for ships, the less demand there was for ships, the more it cost to build ships domestically, the more it cost to build ships domestically, the more expensive domestic water shipping got.
There are alternative and better ways to keep the us merchant fleet alive, and even make it thrive, than keeping the current status quo which is obviously not working.
>Jones Act is not what killed the US Merchant Marine Fleet. Globalization is what killed it.
"Protectionism isn't what killed the US industry. Having any overseas competition whatsoever is what killed the US industry." This is farcical.
If globalisation is when the market lacks protectionism and as a result the manufacturing all moves to cheaper shores, then this was not globalisation by dint of US shipbuilding having abundant protectionism.
Sorry to ask, are not any gas pipelines in US? In Europa there is a huge network of pipelines moving gas around in any direction.
There is but there isn't enough capacity in particular over the Rockies. So LNG ships are needed to help move what pipelines can't.
The problem is that the US fleet is minuscule.
The entire US Jones act compliant fleet comprises 60 vessels. It is not a great civilian navy.
https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2021-...
I think the argument among the anti-Jones contingent is that our only real hope of having a globally competitive shipbuilding industry is to repeal it and all the other things preventing our shipyards and merchant marine from having incentive to compete globally. As it is, there is a slow trickle of work for domestic shipyards that is based solely on policy (ships that legally HAVE to be US-made, whether for Jones Act reasons or military reasons). Without that protectionism, they would have to build ships at a quality, price, and timetable that is competitive with the rest of the world.
I'm not super sympathetic to arguments that presuppose the absolute requirement that US hegemony continue indefinitely, but certainly if you are trying to make sure your shipbuilders will be roughly as good as foreign ones or better (a reasonable policy goal, even leaving out military reasoning), cutting them off from competition with those foreign shipyards is not going to result in what you want. If there is a ready market for expensive, poor quality ships that take years longer to build than they do abroad, why would I as a shipbuilding executive invest to improve on any of those metrics? It would be wasted money, because my existing capital and workforce are already 100% utilized in high-margin activities, with orders stretching out years into the future.
More realistically without the Jones act, ships wouldn't be built or operated by the US at all. International vendors can do this cheaper.
You'd instead see all domestic shipping be entirely dependant on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third-world crews, and you'd have next to zero recourse against them if they, say, run one of their ships into a bridge, or spill a few million litres of oil.
They already are not built in the US at all. This is already true today. We already build less than one oceangoing Jones Act compliant ship a year. The US shipbuilding industry can hardly get any worse than it already is today.
My point is that it wouldn't get any better. Anyone blaming the Jones Act for this completely misidentified the root cause.
There are a few good reasons to repeal the Jones Act (reduce shipping and trade costs in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico) and a lot of really bad ones (the domestic shipping industry will be completely killed, and you're inviting unbounded liability from unregulated, fly-by-night international actors who don't give two craps about our laws.)
The way ocean shipping currently works is entirely incompatible with any national rule of law. Flags of convenience and corporations with non-existent liability mean that nobody in the international industry is actually following any of the rules.
The domestic industry has to follow them, which is the reason why it's not cost competitive.
I think you have a cursory understanding and are then pulling that to the extreme without actually knowing how the industry operates.
The problem stemming from flags of convenience is well known and the Port State Control system [1] was created to manage it.
In other words: live up to our requirements or we will detain your vessel.
The US is not a signatory to any international port state control scheme but as is usual the US runs its own nearly equivalent scheme through the coast guard. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_state_control
[2]: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/Assistant-Commanda...
In practice, these inspections are insufficient, and the liability problem remains (which can vastly exceed the value of the ship).
The problem is that there is too much to check, too many incentives and reasons to break the rules, and too few consequences for people who do.
> you'd have next to zero recourse against them if they, say, run one of their ships into a bridge
You know that the Jones Act only applies to domestic shipping, right? So our ports are still full of ships dependent on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third -world crews who occasionally run their ships into a bridge.
You are saying that as if sacrificing a tiny industry to benefit the entire rest of the economy is somehow a bad thing. And the merchant marine isn't really big enough to contribute much to a hypothetical war either.
Of course there have to be considerations to maintain the capability to build warships. But other than that the Jones Act seems to do a lot of damage for very little benefit. Though ripping off the bandaid would be painful in that moment
> "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.
But isn't it the case that national security concerns are being reached, presently, under the effect of the Jones Act? We just don't have the capacity to build the naval vessels that we need for national security.
>But isn't it the case that national security concerns are being reached
It's not being fully met. Likely with elimination of Jones Act, it would disappear entirely. So it's one of those, it's bad now, do you want to eliminate it completely?
Only way I could see Jones Act disappearing but Merchant Marine Fleet to remain intact is announce that US is done playing world Navy Police. If it's not US Flagged, US is done giving a shit. Economic worldwide collapse to follow.
> Most people who want to get rid of Jones Act are economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.
I read "economists and other types" as people who understand basic economics. People oppose the Jones Act because it has devastated the US shipping industry, which is obviously bad for national security. It's not just about cheap shipping.
> economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping"
This is most people? National defense and the domestic shipbuilding industry are important, but the value of cheap shipping should not be underestimated. Plus, giving credit to the Jones Act for the current state of US civilian and military shipbuilding is, in my opinion, perhaps the strongest possible argument for repealing the Jones Act. The current state of American shipbuilding is disgraceful.
Isn't part of this that US vessels are not competitive on a global market because of taxation?
if you built and registered a ship in the US, wouldn't taxes be much more than say a ship registered in a small tax-advantageous country? (for a ship that basically wasn't in US 99.9% of the time)
Retirees do this with motorhomes - why register in california and pay all those taxes when you will be out of the state traveling all the time. Register in North Dakota or something and still drive the same route. (note taxes could be state income taxes because of residency, or vehicle registration taxes which are a % of vehicle value)
I’m sure that’s definitely part of it, but there’s lots more stuff to it.
I’d say the “where to register your ship” question is the category of “complicated” - since obviously if we lowered our taxes to be as low as Panama then we’d get more registrations which sounds good - and “low tax” is better than the “zero” taxes we get from them now, but then the other country would just undercut that, and so on, and now nobody can get any tax revenue anymore.
It’s why the global economy doesn’t lend itself to simple sound bite answers like “just build American ships” or “just raise/lower tariffs” etc.
It’s too bad no one on any ballot seems to do anything but useless grandstanding, when it comes to actual problems like this.
People here keep blaming the Jones Act but the US has lost manufacturing capability across so many sectors so I don't really get how shipbuilding would be much better without the Jones Act. (Not that I like the Jones Act, I really don't, I'm just skeptical our shipbuilding would be much better without it. We were screwed either way)
We may have lost the capability to manufacture specific things but our capacity for manufacturing has only increased (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO). You can run per capita numbers as well and see it’s very similar.
So if we haven’t lost capacity but have lost capability doesn’t that imply something about the industries we’ve lost?
I’m not a ship industry expert but the US can make as much stuff as anyone in the world besides China and on a per person basis we are top tier. If ship building is a problem it’s not because of some generalized failing.
The problem in the US is not just protectionism against other countries, is that it doesn't incentivize internal competition. Instead, the US gov will throw more money at existing big corporations which from that point on have no fear of smaller companies innovating.
I don't find this explanation satisfying. If the Jones Act of 1920 is at fault, how do we explain the timeline? The U.S. was a ship-building powerhouse at least through the 50s, if not through the 70s. Why was there a multi-generation lag between the Jones Act and its effects?
The rest of the world was in total shambles until 1960s. Europe was destroyed by two world wars. East Asia was an economic backwaters. Same was true about most of South America, and its advanced regions were underpopulated compared to US. Africa was and is Africa. There was simply no other place that could build stuff at scale.
This article covers a lot of the history. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships
Basically the US wasn’t great at shipbuilding post civil war due to high costs. WWII was an existential threat so cost was no object, and we coasted on that capacity for a long time.
Thanks for the link. That article doesn't really support the GP's contention that the Jones Act is the root cause of the U.S.' shipbuilding failures.
Increasing wages and the service economy.
For other high income nations the ship building industry has specialized on higher tech vessels while leaving the enormous labor intensive container ships to South Korea and now lately China.
Also, the US commercial shipbuilding industry has always been small. WW2 was the exception where built lots of ships mostly in temporary yards. Since WW2, it has struggled. Naval shipbuilding has been the big part.
It is a lot of pain for reset of economy for protecting a small industry. If US wants more naval shipyards, then should incentivize building them. I get the impression that there has been much reason for yards to improve protected from competition.
“Leading to good commercial results” is definitely not the rationale for the Jones Act.
Read the wiki link. [1]
The goal was to have a globally competitive merchant marine based on a home grown ship building industry to call on in case of war. Trying to balance both sides.
The end result is that that home grown ship building industry has all but disappeared together with the educated population required to crew it.
[1]; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
Your argument is post hoc ergo propter hoc. But as with car import tariffs and quotas, nobody doubts that removing all import obstacles would lead to the offshoring of most remaining car manufacturing.
What economists argue that the Jones Act is suppressing is greater use of domestic sea transport, which could be much cheaper than trains and trucks. Without the Jones Act sea transport would grow, but undoubtedly using foreign ships, perhaps relying on a primarily foreign crew. OTOH, a much larger domestic shipping industry would likely spur demand for downstream services, as well as open up opportunities for growth elsewhere in the economy, so overall jobs for Americans might grow. But deregulation grow the ship building industry domestically? Nobody expects that.
Globalization, not the Jones act made it disappear.
If you want to bring it back, you have to deglobalize. (Good luck with that!)
>globalized away it's maritime industry
According to the article he references that talks about the problems with shipbuilding more generally[0], the US has never been competitive in shipbuilding at any point in the post-wooden ships period, long before globalization was the issue.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...
Interesting. I would conjecture that we have the same cultural issues at this point preventing us from building effective passenger rail systems.
Passenger rail systems require the procurement of immense amounts of very pricey land, or the transfer of ownership of existing rail lines. I don’t see that as a similar cultural issue.
Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).
Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.
> Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).
I actually don't take it for granted that enough money thrown at a problem can automatically solve it. There's a critical mass of underlying assumptions without which the marginal output of each additional dollar supplied becomes so limited that it just doesn't make sense, even with the government money printer.
Have you tried the new Caltrain? It's getting good reviews even from Japanese.
The US doesn't have effective passenger rail systems for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems: you have to optimize for one use case or the other or else have two completely separate systems, which takes up a lot of extra land.
There is also another reason, which is that passenger rail makes sense only in specific geographic and economic circumstances, and outside of Northeastern corridor, these are very few. Commuter rail requires urban population densities that do not exist in most US metros. Intercity passenger rail only makes sense at a very limited scope until air travel beats it on both speed and cost. Europe and Asia just have different patterns of development.
>for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems
...don't we? I'm not sure about the effectiveness or how to measure it, but I know that a lot of cargo - especially long distance cargo - travels by rail.
Even Whatcom County is having difficulty replacing the Whatcom Chief on budget, with the latest cost estimate being more than twice the federal grant they were given. This is all critical infrastructure in Washington but nobody knows how to build them in the US anymore.
I heard that we are now (2000 and onwards) mostly administrators that try to minimize their risk as opposed (think after great depression) to doers that get measured and appraised by what the deliver. Getting stuff done in manufacturing with the right amount of ass covering, safety and documentation as opposed to over engineering it is very hard nowadays due to the complexities we have. The complex systems require different experts who cover themselves against fuckups.
Seems more likely they just chose America first partners and ignored the industry leaders and support.
Globalization would have selected the experts rather than whatever random Germans and inexperienced firms present.
This is all about isolationism.
I think that's the sentiment that think-tanks have been pushing recently. But outside a very "us-vs-them" viewpoint with China, I don't think it holds true. America's Navy does it's job pretty much perfectly for defending US interests at home and abroad. We have the tactical elements that we want to field, and we maintain them in a condition so they can provide the desired effect at any time. Building more ships isn't a panacea, and in many cases it's a great way to end up having billions of dollars in rusting assets sitting in dry-dock.
It's worth flipping the question on it's head. China's ambitions are very clearly best carried-out by a Navy that can harass Taiwan and expand their territorial claims in the waters surrounding Japan and eventually even threatening Australia. This is a smart move on their behalf, but they will be contending with unfriendly airspace and ground-based anti-shipping weapons. If you want to look at it from a purely military materiel perspective, I would argue the US has weighed their options and taken a less Naval-dependent route.
This type of thinking can strike as post-hoc rationalization.
the US need a navy to have a presence in the middle east , and Asia. We are down to the bones for force projection and to secure our own shipping. There is no 'less Naval dependent' way to police the worlds waters - the alternative is to give up.
Which is fine, the USA has been struggling with naval force projection for some time.
Why can't we just have a technology transfer agreement? Purchase the ships from Finland but make them at a US shipyard? Other countries do that with US defense manufacturers all the time. Purchase items, but with the condition that it will be manufactured in that country.
Technological knowhow is one thing, but the real problem is that we can’t build any kind of ship anymore, neither commercial nor naval:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073
What about nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers built in Newport News, VA ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News_Shipbuilding
That is what is being done with the next class of US Navy frigates [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
Which itself is turning into a bit of a disaster in terms of how different they are to the original Italian design...
Yeah, I like to buy that ship again and while you are at it I want you to use imperial bolts, doors opening to the right and extra tall showers. A copy job is never just a copy job.
they already do see
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/0...
So in short the US only builds a tiny number of them once every two to three decades, so nobody has any experience. And letting someone with experience build them is out of the question because then it wouldn't be built in the US.
This seems like a reoccurring story when talking about anything vaguely infrastructure related in the US.
Seems so, TSMC had issues with keeping costs under control while building their fab in Arizona. The military is having trouble building submarines and ships at the same rate as China is capable of. Nuclear plants are being built way over cost.
I'm reminded of this article which explains why elevators cost so much more here in the USA than the rest of the world:
https://archive.is/u7Bp9
> And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world.
There’s a lot of surprising info in that article. This one section that I actually have passing knowledge of is just blatantly false. The majority of US states use and heavily contribute to the international plumbing code which allows for single stack ventilation as described in their linked article. My house from 1958 has single stack ventilation…
Sections like that with easily verifiable falsehoods bring the rest of the facts presented by the article into question for me.
Now that Finland is a member of NATO, it would make sense to outsource icebreakers to Finland. Finland has 64 F-35 jets on order from the US, costing more than a few icebreakers.
VT Halter Marine, the troubled US contractor, went bust and was sold in 2022.
Of course, but then Congress couldn't create a jobs program to scare up a few more votes for the incumbent in certain districts. And so job security triumphs over national security.
Might as well go all in then and equip the ships with the world's best buggy whips.
I'm afraid this might be too much of a stupid question (and I promise I'm not American), but can't they just shoot at the ice as they go?
It's not a stupid question, but ice is remarkably durable and has 'self healing properties', to describe ice-cubes sticking together in the most pretentious way possible. There have been projects to make battleships out of ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
Bonus answer: melting it with a flamethrower would be incredibly expensive because of enthalpy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy
I'll answer this as someone who has spent some decent chunk of time on icebreakers. It's hard to really picture what travel through sea ice is like if you haven't done it. Breaking ice isn't that hard... at least if you only have to do it once. But breaking ice for hundreds or thousands of miles is really really hard. Articles like this one tend to gloss over just how specialized every single icebreaker is. And when they build new ones they often try new things to make it easier. My favorite thing I've seen is a set of compressor nozzles that attempt to make it easier for the ship to glide through the ice.
FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further.
All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.
As with Healy's fire leaving the US without an icebreaker this summer, this week a grounding apparently left the US Navy without an oiler in the Middle East[1]. Similar systemic shipbuilding challenges and fragility.
[1] https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-for...
I can recommend The Terror first season series, despite its shortcomings, for a beautiful depiction of the struggle of breaking through the north passage in the mid 1800s.
My thought when I read things outlining American industrial and infrastructural woes is "What in the world is to be done about this?" As far as I can tell, protectionism doesn't seem to work, and globalism doesn't seem to work. I'd just like to hear a coherent plan on how a country should get out of this situation.
Peter Zeihan too talks about how USA is perfectly suited to have transport boats on its waterways but because of the Jones Act and lack of US shipbuilding we have to use trucks and rail which not only are clogging our roads but are much more expensive as well.
If it was actually more efficient the jones act wouldn’t matter because the other options use US labor and vehicles constructed in the US so it’s a fairly level playing field.
Instead the issue is shipping point to point usually saves a lot of overhead compared to ports and the distances involved are rarely enough to offset that overhead. You do see a fair amount of traffic via the Mississippi because that’s actually efficient.
Also, people forget about is how much oil, gasoline, and natural gas gets shipped by pipelines. Without that we’d see more ships going from the gulf to east coast cities.
"Why Johnny can't read" has become "Why the US can't build X" it seems.
> The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards.
Now this is a surprise! As soon as I read the headline, I thought "Jones Act."
When I describe the Jones Act to people, the usual response is "That can't be right," or even "I don't believe you," but these days there's usually another person around that can say "Yes, that's actually right!" to back me up.
It's a good example of protectionism, like tariffs, that is completely ineffective. The industrial policy of the IRA and CHIPS acts are in contrast quite effective.
I'm sure the Jones Act still plays a part, leading our domestic shipbuilding capabilities (including military and icebreakers) to atrophy in competitiveness.
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Does this say anything concerning about the US ability to produce warships?
Scaling up shipbuilding in wartime demands skilled labour and construction facilities. To say nothing of the material inputs.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073
I always felt that Erkanoplans were superior for traveling over ice, especially now that they can be made with carbon fiber
Kind of pointless comparing Russian icebreaker number to anyone elses'. Russia is basically a huge pile of snow next to a huge floating pile of ice (geographically, not population-wise, but still). Nobody has even 10% of motivation for building icebreakers that Russia has.
You're probably right about the motivation, but
>Russia is basically a huge pile of snow
Russia is very diverse and it's a huge oversimplification to reduce it to the cold parts. Just like America is not just California, Russia is not just Siberia.
We can, but we just won't invest the funds, meanwhile Russia and China will dominate as the ice melts. This is a lack of will and not lack of ability, I hate it when people act like the USA is a POS in blog articles.
??
The author never suggested "the USA is a POS" - they gave a very nuanced breakdown of the factors at play.
One of the article's main points is the US is spending 4-5x as much per ship, I don't know where you get "just won't invest the funds" from that.
I think the USA is overdue an ideological renewal. Free market, neoliberal capitalism isn't cutting it. The profit incentive isn't cutting it. Supply chains where it takes hundreds of contractors and subcontractors to build anything aren't cutting it.
We see this in Boeing, where management with an ideology of profit maximization and a structure dependent on a bunch of suppliers has led to a crisis. On the other side of the Pacific, BYD has vertically integrated critical parts of car manufacturing and now is moving extremely quickly and affordably.
Another example; the Federal Government invested billions on banks in 2008, billions into the auto industry in 2009, is now investing billions into Intel, but refuses to take any shares for some reason. It has this ideology of investing billions in the private sector to save industries key to national interest, but "state owning shares is spooky so we want nothing in return". It seems so backwards to me.
If the industry is that important to the country, maybe at least have a seat at the board of directors? You don't have no nationalize anything, but at least be in the same room. Other countries, from China to France, have demonstrated there's a lot of value in this state-private sector joint ownership.
I don't know what the right answer is, but the current status quo seemingly ain't it— not just in execution, but in ideology. Something fundamental is non-ideal.
You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example?
You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game".
China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
>Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
Possibly George W. Bush. His disastrous illegal invasion of Iraq marks the point, I think, where America really started going down the tubes.
China in 1990 was a poverty-stricken, hungry backwater, following a philosophy that just bankrupted their richer big brother.
Ideological change was needed.
By contrast, the US system of capitalism + democracy is not only blowing the rest of the world out of the water, it has shown itself to be remarkably resilient and responsive to change.
China has thus far prospered by being great at manufacturing. Can they innovate and change as needed? We’ll see.
The US has thus far prospered by being great at whatever is currently most profitable. Will they change as needed? Yes. Change is how their system works.
I'm not saying the USA should stop being a democracy, or even being capitalist, like China didn't change its system of government in 1990. What I'm saying is its fundamental beliefs, goals derived from those beliefs, and systems designed around those goals —even within the same political and economic system that currently exists— could use an update.
Let me put it this way. Everyone has heard of Maoism [1] of course. There's also Dengism, which does claims to not reject Marxism–Leninism or Maoism, but instead adapt them to the times China was going through [2]. Turns out what Mao believed might or might not be true, but it certainly wasn't working. A change in system of government wasn't needed, but a change in philosophy was.
Now Xi'ism [3] has been taking shape, and rightly so. The world, and China's place in it, are very different from where they were two decades ago. It doesn't seem to far-fetched to re-think what the purpose of that government is, what it believes to be true, and to figure out how to shape policy around it.
To give another example closer to the USA, in 2022 Mexican President Obrador held a rally, where outlined the philosophy of his political movement. Inheriting largely from what people had been calling Obradorism, he defined Mexican Humanism, which takes from the general current of mumanism but adapts it to the moral and ethic values, the needs, and other philosophical currents of Mexican politics [4].
It just seems to be there haven't been fundamental "-isms" in the USA in a while. The philosophy is the same. The USA considers its position in the world the same. The game the country is playing, it's purpose in the world, it's goals all seem the same as they did last century. All we get is "Bidenomics" or "Trumponomics", which are not so much philosophies, but just different ways of spending money within the confines of the same set of beliefs— corporatism, neoliberalism, hegemonism in the exterior, political nationalism in the interior.
IMO presidents and candidates here just seem to have so little substance in ideology. Bernie is the most recent one I can think that really talked ideology, and spoke widely about democratic socialism. He wasn't talking about tearing the constitution, just about thinking of different goals within the same framework of government.
I'm not surprised that "identity politics" takes over instead, and people come to worry about where the grandparents of a candidate were born. If candidates give you little philosophy to relate to, I guess you have to assume their philosophy based on their skin color.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maoism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping_Theory
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought
[4]: https://puedjs.unam.mx/revista_tlatelolco/el-concepto-de-hum...
These are interesting points. It’s worth noting that in the 90’s, the US won the cold war, and also the same generation has been in charge since then. Why change things?
The next crop of leaders will likely be much younger, and you’ll see new ideas.
The article didn’t mention Canada’s role in the Arctic. While the American icebreaker fleet has been diminished, Canada’s is relatively strong. Our coast guard currently has a fleet of twenty, and tenders were just awarded for two polar icebreakers.
So it’s not like the Arctic is totally empty - a NATO partner has a bigger presence.
Because it considers manufacturing to be something poor nations do, and prefers to extract wealth through printing reserve currency and other forms of financial trickery.
Honestly, with how quickly sea ice and glaciers are melting away, I don't think icebreakers will be something we would necessarily need in the near future.
> The need for icebreaking vessels will remain even as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice: paradoxically, as new polar routes become accessible and sea ice becomes more mobile, the demand for icebreakers is likely to increase.
> In fact, no existing U.S. shipyard has built a heavy > polar icebreaker since before 1970.
What does since before mean?
The last polar icebreaker built in a US shipyard occurred in 1969 or earlier.
We have simply accreted too many regulations and special interest groups like barnacles.
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