Before we spend trillions on a scaled up defense we need to discuss whether the US wants to, and will be able in the future, to be a global hegemon with military dominance right up to China's beaches. After watching the U.S. blow trillions of dollars on misguided efforts to find a military solution to the Middle East's tribal problems. I have zero confidence in the U.S. military/foreign policy "blob" at this point.
What is the US getting for the money it spends? I couldn’t tell from this piece what the primary issues were, or how related the separate issues were. Is the primary issue that our defense industries need to import to many things from China or other places, so that currently with all our spending we are able to produce enough stuff, but we just can’t produce enough only domestically and with close allies? Is it that there’s too much waste in the defense spending for some of the reasons you mentioned above? Are higher wages in the US one of the reasons we spend so much?
I thought this was a good piece that runs counter to some commonly held beliefs, and I think it could have helped those of us who don’t pay as much attention to defense stuff to have a little more details about the disconnect between the apparent very high spending in the US compared to other countries and the inability to produce enough materials.
Are progressives less enthusiastic about military employment then they should be? The healthcare, pension, college/post grad tuition payments line up well with a lot of progressive goals, and for many conservatives it’s one of the main forms of big government they seem to tolerate. Similarly the industrial build out could target regions that would benefit from new industry which would bring blue collar jobs that progressives and “populist” conservatives like to push for. I doubt that support for the things your advocating for would be well received by such a coalition, but perhaps the public sentiment could push it that way.
Military procurement policies and procedures need a huge rethink - you make a good point there. That can go hand-in-hand with a general change in force posture and a military rebuild as well.
Wages are the main reason why we seem to get less for our money than Russia or China. Defense procurement intentionally favours domestic contractors (for obvious reasons), and what can't be procured domestically has to be sourced from close US allies, who are also all high-wage developed countries.
I would certainly not be shocked if a deep dive into the Pentagon budget found some significant waste. The procurement process is terrible; the protectionism is obviously understandable, but a lot of the other rules are inefficient: the procurement system is trying to be both a national security program and a jobs program with social-justice features, and the "lowest bidder" mandate can be gamed so that the low bid ultimately costs more than higher ones.
Another part of the problem, though, is actually that we're spending too *little*; we're not buying enough volume to enable efficiencies of scale or robust competition. This is a particular problem in markets whose civilian equivalents have been heavily offshored.
We spend a trillion dollars a year on defense spending and still don’t have enough artillery shells for a year of medium intensity conflict. We need to spend our money more efficiently and get rid of all the corruption in the MIC first before letting them come ask for more.
Our our strength is in our economy, which we should invest more in. Adding to our technology lead is more important than more aircraft carriers.
As background I work in scientific manufacturing, specifically building x-ray sources. We're not quite talking aerospace tolerancing here but it's close. As part of this I have to source parts and interact with customers, and my experience (including talking with people who are either Chinese nationals or who have spent significant time over there) is that a lot of China's supposed prowess is basically fake. The quality of parts from China is awful. The wrong grades of steel, way out of tolerance, and when you try to get it fixed it comes back the same. I've never encountered a domestic shop that was as bad as the best we managed to find over there. Now, surely there are some that can produce great things, but I find it hard to square with Noah's constant "China is the workshop of the world" or the various "army of process engineers" comments when it's difficult to find a shop that can hold a five thou tolerance, let alone one or less.
I've also worked with customers at large technical universities and they are hilarious incompetent. These are the equivalent of a research group at MIT or Caltech, and they're unable to do extremely basic tasks that would take our small team very little time at all. Colleagues who have lived or spent significant time over there all say the same thing, anyone who's actually competent leaves, and what you have left is people who had no real other option just coasting up the ladder. China's research output has an extremely large amount of outright fraud (Derek Lowe wrote about this recently), and given what we know about their economic management it just doesn't strike me as likely that this is isolated to science.
This is a long way of saying that I am skeptical about these warnings. Everything seems to start from the basis of "China is big and competent and scary" but when you drill down to any of these facets it's just a house of cards built on fraud and lies. Why do we think their military is any different?
Yup, my college roommate is a corporate lawyer who spent years working in Hong Kong and aggressively states that everything that comes out of China is a lie.
I hope Noah can write on the state of US shipbuilding. From what I've generally picked up, it isn't pretty, but I've yet to see a comprehensive article on how it came to be this way.
While Noah’s broader point is worth considering count me in the group who thinks surface ships’ primary use in high-intensity modern war will be as target practice for enemy missiles.
On the one hand, shooting down incoming missiles is becoming increasingly doable, even routine.
On the other hand, yeah, a major surface ship is a target worth a *lot* of missiles. Plus I don't trust the Navy to objectively assess vulnerabilities in their pride-and-joy vessels.
The RAND report Noah linked advocated trying out underwater drone missile carriers, "large-diameter unmanned underwater vehicles (LDUUV)" -- cheap unmanned submarines for launching missiles from.
An SM-6 is about $5M. You could buy, what, 250 Shahed drones for that cost? An SM-2 is $2.1M, an ESSM is $1.1M. And ships don't have the space for an unlimited number of them either.
This. Until somebody can reliably shoot down missiles with something other than million-dollar missiles of which ships can only carry a limited supply of, the advantage remains with the defenders launching missiles from cheap distributed platforms.
For the most part, Ukraine has been winning the war with surplus equipment from the EU and the US, doled out in limited amounts through a combination of the desire to give Russia an off-ramp and the unwillingness of the military to give up anything they might actually use. The only real exceptions are artillery shells and missiles. Scrapping one or two carrier battle groups would save enough money to ramp missle production to the point where the Chinese navy might as well stay home (the Chinese know this and are building their own missiles).
So we need to dramatically increase defense spending in order to defend Taiwan, a move that, by your own reckoning, would precipitate WWIII? Why not simply use our existing supply of weapons to destroy the planet tomorrow and put us all out of our misery?
Final point. The central case for defense expenditure was the threat from Russia and China. It's clear that (apart from nukes) Russia has ceased to be a threat. Its massive tank armies are gone, the professional armed forces have been wiped out, the navy has proved to be a paper tiger etc. So there's now just one threat, not two.
True. Russia is finished as a conventional military power. Sadly, Ukraine has similar problems with a big hole in the 20-30 age group. But even so, they have (at a minimum) fought the Russians to a standstill.
Who doesn't have big demographic issues these days? Well, the US I suppose, but that's only because of immigration, and there are certain domestic political elements that may be a bit "concerned" about that.
I think this needs to be a whole series of posts. I'm sympathetic to the general idea but full of questions and doubts about the details.
What is the purpose of the US military at this point? I mean that as an honest question. Is the primary litmus test whether we can repel an invasion of Taiwan, and what actually affects that probability? I strongly support Taiwan, but I think we need to actually work out what percentage of GDP we are willing to spend for how long to achieve that goal. Are there other goals? Apart from wars of adventurism, it seems like there are no other major threats on the horizon, from a naive perspective.
Ensuring an adequate supply of ammunition seems like a no brainer, as does retooling towards more drones and similar equipment. I haven't read the RAND study, but those goals don't seem like they should be that expensive.
How much money are we willing to pour into the leaky bucket of the defense budget? Can we credibly avoid creating trillion dollar boondoggles in order to achieve $100 billion goals?
And also what is the role of DARPA and similar advanced research these days? Competing on the manufacturing playing field with China puts us at an automatic disadvantage for the next X years. Is there a set of technologies that we can use to leapfrog currently deployed capabilities?
Secondarily, you could argue that much of Silicon Valley and the internet is a dividend from the first round of DARPA research. I'm much more optimistic about recouping downstream benefits from research than from building carriers or commodity jets.
Along these lines, if the US's future strategy is to be the "arsenal of democracy" that's pretty distinct from actually having a military. You don't need (much) of a navy or air force if your real goal is building stuff for other countries.
As another comment elsewhere mentions, you can pay for a lot of stuf for Ukraine and Taiwan if you scrapped the US submarine fleet and air credit carrier fleet.
China tried to conquer part of Vietnam in 1979, and is claiming literally thousands of miles out into the South China Sea, so we can be pretty sure they wouldn't stop at Taiwan unless forced to.
I don't believe China would stop there, the Philippines or another Southeast Asian country would be next on the chopping block. I don't understand the reluctance to allow Taiwan surreptitiously to acquire nuclear weapons, if it changes the cost-benefit analysis in Taiwan's favor, and causes the Chinese to have second thoughts.
My gut feeling is that the US is afraid that the brinkmanship required to do this would force China into a situation, where they would either have to invade or back down and look weak. The irony is that an invasion of Taiwan would wreck China's foreign relations irreparably, lead to a possible insurgency and guerrilla warfare against Chinese rule, weaken China and the rule of the Chinese Communist party. Here it seems, it'd be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Most likely, although its a.o's guess what China decides in the moment. I think the biggest bottleneck here wouldn't be building a weapon or getting access to weapons grade material( Taiwan has nuclear engineers n scientists who could construct this in short order) but having a delivery system of submarines or ballistic missiles. The best approach still seems to be fortifying Taiwan with conventional weapons and fortifications to enable a protracted guerrilla war, but developing a credible delivery system wouldn't hurt either.
I hope Noah can write about the military recruitment problem(only 20% of Americans are eligible to serve, and the other 80% would be disqualified under the current standards due to being overweight or obese, prior criminal convictions, drug problems or physical/mental health conditions). Of those 20%, a significant percentage have told recruiters they have no desire to serve in the military, leaving only about 5-6% who would be eligible and wants to serve. Building more ships is great, but if we can't find sailors, it's a fool's errand. We could relax the standards, allow more immigrants in, but under the current political climate, I find this highly unlikely. War over Taiwan would likely require the draft to be reinstated, but under conditions of peacetime, I dont believe it's a viable option.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making. The military offers some exceptional benefits(healthcare during service and after, GI Bill for education for themselves or dependents, low cost VA loans, military pension) but it's still not enough of an incentive to entice enough Americans to join up. If the idea is making the benefits and pay even more generous, I'm not sure any amount of money or benefits ultimately could outweigh the opportunity cost of yrs overseas away from friends and family, having your life dictated by the military brass, and living an insular life on base, surrounded by other military families. I think it's a noble calling, but it's not an easy life and it takes a special kind of person to do that. It reminds me of those who would join the clergy and become monks or nuns, which ironically have had some of the same problems the military is encountering. Both have to make a conscious decision towards a higher ideal than just merely wealth and self-fulfilment and individualism(patriotism and love of country on the one hand, God and faith on the other).
The biggest single lesson from the Ukraine war is that navies are useless. Ukraine's was wiped out on day 1. Russia's Black Sea Fleet was supposed to provide the capacity to mount a seaborne assault anywhere on Ukraine's coast. Instead, the flagship got sunk by home-made Ukrainian missile. It's now holed up in Sevastopol and Novorossiysk, used only to threaten civilian shipping and provide a platform for missile attacks. And even that is only feasible because the US won't give them long-range anti-ship missiles. China can build as many ships as they want, but the missiles needed to sink them will be cheap by comparison.
“Navies are useless” is an insane take considering the British built the largest empire based off of naval power, naval blockades proved decisive in both War Worlds in Europe, and an entire front was fought basically on sea.
Further, the entire way America has waged war is by forward deploying resources and logistical prowess which comes down to having a navy. Who do you think protects sea routes where most of global trade and military equipment traverse? It’s not tanks.
Taiwan is an island. Do you think China is going to drive to it? I understand the Ukraine conflict is recent, but I think we should be careful in taking what we see in a dying imperial power that has never been a naval power in Russia, and incredibly poor Ukraine, and applying it universally
Navies were useful before the development of jets and missiles. That was a long time ago. Even 40 years ago, the Royal Navy barely prevailed over a third rate enemy in the Falklands. They would have lost if the Argentines had stocked up on Exocets and made sure their bombs were working.
Where do you think those jets fly off of? Air craft carriers. Air craft Carriers have the benefit of being closer to the fight (instead of flying from the continental US) and they move, making it significantly harder to hit (where as bases in Guam and Japan are static and can’t move out the way from a missiles).
And how did the British get there to fight Argentina? (Hint a navy). We can debate whether Argentina would have won with better weapons, but for Britain to even be in the fight, it needed a navy (which was hollowed up due to budget cuts in the 70s btw)
What the article doesn’t account for is 1. Uncertainty which has the tendency to drive up costs and 2. Supply chains are brittle. We literally lived through three years where we watched how even slight changes in Just In Time manufacturing fucked everything up. Imagine expecting oil in 10 hrs, and instead getting int 20 hours because of a diversion. The cost will sky rocket
Never mind that every second in logistics in a military campaign is critical.
Russia’s navy is the best in the black sea lol. But crucially, the black sea is not a blue water navy and there severe limitations on military ships that can through the Dardanelles straights (the US couldn’t sail a carrier group through, for example). Russia’s navy is ass anywhere else because it’s traditionally a land power.
The range of planes and (even more) missiles is now in the thousands of kilometers, making aircraft carriers much less useful. And while they can move, they can't go much faster than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Missiles can be moved around faster by truck, hidden in caves etc.
The unclassified operational range of the F-35 is about 500 miles without refueling. Do you know how big the pacific is? The only military plane currently in service that has operational range that far is the B-2, which want be enough.
“Aren’t faster that 100 years ago” bro air craft carriers are nuclear powered and are some of the fastest ships. And again all they need to do is slightly get out of the way because the ocean is big and accuracy is hard
No one is saying missiles aren’t useful. I’m just saying navy’s are important to get in an out the fight and have a place too
Navies are useless for a land invasion. I get the feeling that if China were to attempt to invade Taiwan some sort of navy might be necessary. And unfortunately LRASMs are $3M+ a pop, and who knows how many it would take to sink a well-defended ship.
Ukraine stopped Russian plans for a naval invasion without a navy of its own (as I mentioned it was wiped out on day 1). Cheap missiles sink expensive ships.
You're right. From what I've read about the sinking of the Moskva the ship was basically decrepit and completely unprepared with no working defensive systems, but missiles are generally cheap compared to most ships. How many will it take though? It's a lot more economically efficient to shoot a bunch of missiles at a carrier strike group than at a huge array of landing craft. Russia didn't need to mount a naval invasion and never built up the resources to effect one the way China would for invading Taiwan.
Carriers at least have anti-missile defences. China's "plan" for landing craft is to rely on minimally converted civilian ferries and fishing boats. They would be as close to sitting ducks as a ship could be. And its still worth plenty of missiles to sink a ship with tanks and a few hundred troops aboard.
I agree, the way to stop a Chinese invasion is to procure thousands of missiles for Taiwan. At $3M+ a pop that's tens of billions of dollars, so way more than our recent aid package but a fraction of our defense budget. If that's the main threat our military needs to be prepared for it's well worth it. Assuming China isn't able to take out the launch platforms.
Carriers don't really have credible anti-missile defenses, carrier strike groups do. No clue whether the anti-missile defense ships could defend a flotilla of landing craft. Against thousands of missiles? Definitely not.
For those looking at the "we spend more than the next 10 nations combined" factoid and wondering why that still isn't enough, Perun did a good video on the Chinese military buildup addressing the question of why China is seemingly closing the gap on the US despite spending much less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH5TlcMo_m4
Summarizing what I remember from the video:
- Not all the money that a country spends for defense purposes necessarily goes into the official defense budget. There are some items that get counted in the US defense budget not the Chinese one. This makes up a bit of the gap in spending.
- PPP advantages, ie the old "a dollar in China goes further than in the US." This is a bit more complicated to calculate for military rather than general consumer PPP, but those who have studied it think the ratio is about 2:1 to China's advantage.
Now, combining the above two points still gets you to a Chinese effective military budget that is only about half as large as that of the US. But there are a few other points working in China's favor:
- The US budget has to cover its military commitments around the world, while China can (mostly) focus on countering the US in the South China Sea.
- The US has to spend a lot of money on maintaining its existing military equipment, much of which is relatively old or would not come into play in any conflict with China (given its decades-long focus on land-based counterinsurgency). Meanwhile China was starting from a relatively low base of equipment and could afford to buy new models of exactly what they need.
- Somewhat related to other points, but since China is in the middle of its buildup it can take advantage of economies of scale and its massive industrial base to further drive costs down. Whereas like Noah noted, the US defense industrial base (like its civilian industrial base) has been mostly hollowed out.
Of course none of this means there aren't inefficiencies with US defense spending and procurement; I'm sure there are plenty of things that should be improved. But it's not like US military planners are hilariously incompetent compared to their Chinese counterparts; there's just a lot of structural factors that are helping China.
The little bit in the middle about how we spend more than the next 10 countries combined -- meaning we spend more than China -- screams that we don’t need to spend more, we need to reallocate what we spend and fix how we spend it. Which is probably harder than throwing money at the problem.
I must say, I've enjoyed your transformation into a liberal hawk.
I mean that unironically. I agree with the broad strokes of this piece and it's great to see someone on your side of the aisle make the point forcefully.
Either I am misremembering what Peter Zeihan has been saying or I have run into some of his out-of-date videos, but two of my more trusted sources have just butted heads.
Again I would like to see Bill Maher facilitate a panel discussion of some of these topics.
While the makeup of that panel would change depending on the topic, I think this one would involve Noah Smith and Peter zeihan and perhaps a retired commander of combined forces.
It would be nice if we could direct all that effort towards making life better for all of humanity, but I agree with Noah that there's always going to be another Tamerlane on the horizon, just certain that he can knock off those weak democracies and help himself to the spoils.
But maybe it's a moot point. Some peacenik will say "stop all war" and his artificial intelligence servant will just kill all of us.
That last sentence caused me to glance at the clock and see that it's 3:30 a.m. and that I have drifted into extreme and fanciful speculation.
Keep up the good work of making us think about our choices Noah!
I agree with your point about spending the money to make life better for all humanity, but I wonder is in retrospect we will realize that was what we did after WWII by maintain a global military. Obviously, we (the US) have made huge mistakes at various points but enabling the current degree of globalization (and its impact in lifting a couple billion people out of poverty) may have been the best thing we could have spent the money on...on the downside if it all comes apart and a billion or two people die in the aftermath maybe it wasn't...
Before we spend trillions on a scaled up defense we need to discuss whether the US wants to, and will be able in the future, to be a global hegemon with military dominance right up to China's beaches. After watching the U.S. blow trillions of dollars on misguided efforts to find a military solution to the Middle East's tribal problems. I have zero confidence in the U.S. military/foreign policy "blob" at this point.
What is the US getting for the money it spends? I couldn’t tell from this piece what the primary issues were, or how related the separate issues were. Is the primary issue that our defense industries need to import to many things from China or other places, so that currently with all our spending we are able to produce enough stuff, but we just can’t produce enough only domestically and with close allies? Is it that there’s too much waste in the defense spending for some of the reasons you mentioned above? Are higher wages in the US one of the reasons we spend so much?
I thought this was a good piece that runs counter to some commonly held beliefs, and I think it could have helped those of us who don’t pay as much attention to defense stuff to have a little more details about the disconnect between the apparent very high spending in the US compared to other countries and the inability to produce enough materials.
Are progressives less enthusiastic about military employment then they should be? The healthcare, pension, college/post grad tuition payments line up well with a lot of progressive goals, and for many conservatives it’s one of the main forms of big government they seem to tolerate. Similarly the industrial build out could target regions that would benefit from new industry which would bring blue collar jobs that progressives and “populist” conservatives like to push for. I doubt that support for the things your advocating for would be well received by such a coalition, but perhaps the public sentiment could push it that way.
Military procurement policies and procedures need a huge rethink - you make a good point there. That can go hand-in-hand with a general change in force posture and a military rebuild as well.
Wages are the main reason why we seem to get less for our money than Russia or China. Defense procurement intentionally favours domestic contractors (for obvious reasons), and what can't be procured domestically has to be sourced from close US allies, who are also all high-wage developed countries.
I would certainly not be shocked if a deep dive into the Pentagon budget found some significant waste. The procurement process is terrible; the protectionism is obviously understandable, but a lot of the other rules are inefficient: the procurement system is trying to be both a national security program and a jobs program with social-justice features, and the "lowest bidder" mandate can be gamed so that the low bid ultimately costs more than higher ones.
Another part of the problem, though, is actually that we're spending too *little*; we're not buying enough volume to enable efficiencies of scale or robust competition. This is a particular problem in markets whose civilian equivalents have been heavily offshored.
We spend a trillion dollars a year on defense spending and still don’t have enough artillery shells for a year of medium intensity conflict. We need to spend our money more efficiently and get rid of all the corruption in the MIC first before letting them come ask for more.
Our our strength is in our economy, which we should invest more in. Adding to our technology lead is more important than more aircraft carriers.
As background I work in scientific manufacturing, specifically building x-ray sources. We're not quite talking aerospace tolerancing here but it's close. As part of this I have to source parts and interact with customers, and my experience (including talking with people who are either Chinese nationals or who have spent significant time over there) is that a lot of China's supposed prowess is basically fake. The quality of parts from China is awful. The wrong grades of steel, way out of tolerance, and when you try to get it fixed it comes back the same. I've never encountered a domestic shop that was as bad as the best we managed to find over there. Now, surely there are some that can produce great things, but I find it hard to square with Noah's constant "China is the workshop of the world" or the various "army of process engineers" comments when it's difficult to find a shop that can hold a five thou tolerance, let alone one or less.
I've also worked with customers at large technical universities and they are hilarious incompetent. These are the equivalent of a research group at MIT or Caltech, and they're unable to do extremely basic tasks that would take our small team very little time at all. Colleagues who have lived or spent significant time over there all say the same thing, anyone who's actually competent leaves, and what you have left is people who had no real other option just coasting up the ladder. China's research output has an extremely large amount of outright fraud (Derek Lowe wrote about this recently), and given what we know about their economic management it just doesn't strike me as likely that this is isolated to science.
This is a long way of saying that I am skeptical about these warnings. Everything seems to start from the basis of "China is big and competent and scary" but when you drill down to any of these facets it's just a house of cards built on fraud and lies. Why do we think their military is any different?
Yup, my college roommate is a corporate lawyer who spent years working in Hong Kong and aggressively states that everything that comes out of China is a lie.
I will look up Derek Lowe's comment, thanks!
Edit: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/systematic-fraud
I hope Noah can write on the state of US shipbuilding. From what I've generally picked up, it isn't pretty, but I've yet to see a comprehensive article on how it came to be this way.
I am OK with buying hulls from S Korea while the US ramps up- they’d be cheaper, better and get here faster
I'll bet you $2 there is some bullshit law that would prevent us from doing that...
While Noah’s broader point is worth considering count me in the group who thinks surface ships’ primary use in high-intensity modern war will be as target practice for enemy missiles.
On the one hand, shooting down incoming missiles is becoming increasingly doable, even routine.
On the other hand, yeah, a major surface ship is a target worth a *lot* of missiles. Plus I don't trust the Navy to objectively assess vulnerabilities in their pride-and-joy vessels.
The RAND report Noah linked advocated trying out underwater drone missile carriers, "large-diameter unmanned underwater vehicles (LDUUV)" -- cheap unmanned submarines for launching missiles from.
An SM-6 is about $5M. You could buy, what, 250 Shahed drones for that cost? An SM-2 is $2.1M, an ESSM is $1.1M. And ships don't have the space for an unlimited number of them either.
This. Until somebody can reliably shoot down missiles with something other than million-dollar missiles of which ships can only carry a limited supply of, the advantage remains with the defenders launching missiles from cheap distributed platforms.
As we see in Ukraine- it is hard to destroy a well-defended fixed target with missiles. A ship is a moving target and needle in a haystack
For the most part, Ukraine has been winning the war with surplus equipment from the EU and the US, doled out in limited amounts through a combination of the desire to give Russia an off-ramp and the unwillingness of the military to give up anything they might actually use. The only real exceptions are artillery shells and missiles. Scrapping one or two carrier battle groups would save enough money to ramp missle production to the point where the Chinese navy might as well stay home (the Chinese know this and are building their own missiles).
Defense procurement is fascinatingly broken. I'd love to read articles or interviews on what could actually be done to fix it.
DARPA works, but probably doesn't scale. "Buy commercial" can work, but heavy weapons aren't sold on Amazon.
How do we not just say the words "reform defense spending," but actually achieve it?
So we need to dramatically increase defense spending in order to defend Taiwan, a move that, by your own reckoning, would precipitate WWIII? Why not simply use our existing supply of weapons to destroy the planet tomorrow and put us all out of our misery?
I believe Noah's contention is that, if the military is big enough, then no one would dare the USA to use it.
Final point. The central case for defense expenditure was the threat from Russia and China. It's clear that (apart from nukes) Russia has ceased to be a threat. Its massive tank armies are gone, the professional armed forces have been wiped out, the navy has proved to be a paper tiger etc. So there's now just one threat, not two.
True. Russia is finished as a conventional military power. Sadly, Ukraine has similar problems with a big hole in the 20-30 age group. But even so, they have (at a minimum) fought the Russians to a standstill.
Who doesn't have big demographic issues these days? Well, the US I suppose, but that's only because of immigration, and there are certain domestic political elements that may be a bit "concerned" about that.
I think this needs to be a whole series of posts. I'm sympathetic to the general idea but full of questions and doubts about the details.
What is the purpose of the US military at this point? I mean that as an honest question. Is the primary litmus test whether we can repel an invasion of Taiwan, and what actually affects that probability? I strongly support Taiwan, but I think we need to actually work out what percentage of GDP we are willing to spend for how long to achieve that goal. Are there other goals? Apart from wars of adventurism, it seems like there are no other major threats on the horizon, from a naive perspective.
Ensuring an adequate supply of ammunition seems like a no brainer, as does retooling towards more drones and similar equipment. I haven't read the RAND study, but those goals don't seem like they should be that expensive.
How much money are we willing to pour into the leaky bucket of the defense budget? Can we credibly avoid creating trillion dollar boondoggles in order to achieve $100 billion goals?
And also what is the role of DARPA and similar advanced research these days? Competing on the manufacturing playing field with China puts us at an automatic disadvantage for the next X years. Is there a set of technologies that we can use to leapfrog currently deployed capabilities?
Secondarily, you could argue that much of Silicon Valley and the internet is a dividend from the first round of DARPA research. I'm much more optimistic about recouping downstream benefits from research than from building carriers or commodity jets.
Along these lines, if the US's future strategy is to be the "arsenal of democracy" that's pretty distinct from actually having a military. You don't need (much) of a navy or air force if your real goal is building stuff for other countries.
As another comment elsewhere mentions, you can pay for a lot of stuf for Ukraine and Taiwan if you scrapped the US submarine fleet and air credit carrier fleet.
Would China stop at Taiwan or would a win there entice them to look at other countries in region?
China tried to conquer part of Vietnam in 1979, and is claiming literally thousands of miles out into the South China Sea, so we can be pretty sure they wouldn't stop at Taiwan unless forced to.
I don't believe China would stop there, the Philippines or another Southeast Asian country would be next on the chopping block. I don't understand the reluctance to allow Taiwan surreptitiously to acquire nuclear weapons, if it changes the cost-benefit analysis in Taiwan's favor, and causes the Chinese to have second thoughts.
My gut feeling is that the US is afraid that the brinkmanship required to do this would force China into a situation, where they would either have to invade or back down and look weak. The irony is that an invasion of Taiwan would wreck China's foreign relations irreparably, lead to a possible insurgency and guerrilla warfare against Chinese rule, weaken China and the rule of the Chinese Communist party. Here it seems, it'd be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
I think the “surreptitiously” part of that would be the vulnerability. China catching wind of it would guarantee an invasion or strike?
Most likely, although its a.o's guess what China decides in the moment. I think the biggest bottleneck here wouldn't be building a weapon or getting access to weapons grade material( Taiwan has nuclear engineers n scientists who could construct this in short order) but having a delivery system of submarines or ballistic missiles. The best approach still seems to be fortifying Taiwan with conventional weapons and fortifications to enable a protracted guerrilla war, but developing a credible delivery system wouldn't hurt either.
I hope Noah can write about the military recruitment problem(only 20% of Americans are eligible to serve, and the other 80% would be disqualified under the current standards due to being overweight or obese, prior criminal convictions, drug problems or physical/mental health conditions). Of those 20%, a significant percentage have told recruiters they have no desire to serve in the military, leaving only about 5-6% who would be eligible and wants to serve. Building more ships is great, but if we can't find sailors, it's a fool's errand. We could relax the standards, allow more immigrants in, but under the current political climate, I find this highly unlikely. War over Taiwan would likely require the draft to be reinstated, but under conditions of peacetime, I dont believe it's a viable option.
I think the military just missed its recruiting goals by over 30%. I agree that seems like a big problem that's completely missing from Noah's post.
Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making. The military offers some exceptional benefits(healthcare during service and after, GI Bill for education for themselves or dependents, low cost VA loans, military pension) but it's still not enough of an incentive to entice enough Americans to join up. If the idea is making the benefits and pay even more generous, I'm not sure any amount of money or benefits ultimately could outweigh the opportunity cost of yrs overseas away from friends and family, having your life dictated by the military brass, and living an insular life on base, surrounded by other military families. I think it's a noble calling, but it's not an easy life and it takes a special kind of person to do that. It reminds me of those who would join the clergy and become monks or nuns, which ironically have had some of the same problems the military is encountering. Both have to make a conscious decision towards a higher ideal than just merely wealth and self-fulfilment and individualism(patriotism and love of country on the one hand, God and faith on the other).
The biggest single lesson from the Ukraine war is that navies are useless. Ukraine's was wiped out on day 1. Russia's Black Sea Fleet was supposed to provide the capacity to mount a seaborne assault anywhere on Ukraine's coast. Instead, the flagship got sunk by home-made Ukrainian missile. It's now holed up in Sevastopol and Novorossiysk, used only to threaten civilian shipping and provide a platform for missile attacks. And even that is only feasible because the US won't give them long-range anti-ship missiles. China can build as many ships as they want, but the missiles needed to sink them will be cheap by comparison.
“Navies are useless” is an insane take considering the British built the largest empire based off of naval power, naval blockades proved decisive in both War Worlds in Europe, and an entire front was fought basically on sea.
Further, the entire way America has waged war is by forward deploying resources and logistical prowess which comes down to having a navy. Who do you think protects sea routes where most of global trade and military equipment traverse? It’s not tanks.
Taiwan is an island. Do you think China is going to drive to it? I understand the Ukraine conflict is recent, but I think we should be careful in taking what we see in a dying imperial power that has never been a naval power in Russia, and incredibly poor Ukraine, and applying it universally
Navies were useful before the development of jets and missiles. That was a long time ago. Even 40 years ago, the Royal Navy barely prevailed over a third rate enemy in the Falklands. They would have lost if the Argentines had stocked up on Exocets and made sure their bombs were working.
The sea lanes story doesn't stand up to economic scrutiny. https://insidestory.org.au/keeping-the-sea-lanes-open-a-cost-benefit-analysis/
And until the Black Sea Fleet failed, no one was calling it decrepit. Here's a typical analysis from 2019
https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/the-naval-power-shift-in-the-black-sea/
Where do you think those jets fly off of? Air craft carriers. Air craft Carriers have the benefit of being closer to the fight (instead of flying from the continental US) and they move, making it significantly harder to hit (where as bases in Guam and Japan are static and can’t move out the way from a missiles).
And how did the British get there to fight Argentina? (Hint a navy). We can debate whether Argentina would have won with better weapons, but for Britain to even be in the fight, it needed a navy (which was hollowed up due to budget cuts in the 70s btw)
What the article doesn’t account for is 1. Uncertainty which has the tendency to drive up costs and 2. Supply chains are brittle. We literally lived through three years where we watched how even slight changes in Just In Time manufacturing fucked everything up. Imagine expecting oil in 10 hrs, and instead getting int 20 hours because of a diversion. The cost will sky rocket
Never mind that every second in logistics in a military campaign is critical.
Russia’s navy is the best in the black sea lol. But crucially, the black sea is not a blue water navy and there severe limitations on military ships that can through the Dardanelles straights (the US couldn’t sail a carrier group through, for example). Russia’s navy is ass anywhere else because it’s traditionally a land power.
The range of planes and (even more) missiles is now in the thousands of kilometers, making aircraft carriers much less useful. And while they can move, they can't go much faster than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Missiles can be moved around faster by truck, hidden in caves etc.
The unclassified operational range of the F-35 is about 500 miles without refueling. Do you know how big the pacific is? The only military plane currently in service that has operational range that far is the B-2, which want be enough.
“Aren’t faster that 100 years ago” bro air craft carriers are nuclear powered and are some of the fastest ships. And again all they need to do is slightly get out of the way because the ocean is big and accuracy is hard
No one is saying missiles aren’t useful. I’m just saying navy’s are important to get in an out the fight and have a place too
F-35 range is about 2000km, so operating radius is 1000 (about 600 miles). Both Taiwan and PRC can cover most of South China Sea from land.
Aircraft carrier speed typically rated at 30 knots. Destroyers in 1920s were faster.
Anti-ship missiles faster than 2 Mach, and getting more accurate all the time.
Navies are useless for a land invasion. I get the feeling that if China were to attempt to invade Taiwan some sort of navy might be necessary. And unfortunately LRASMs are $3M+ a pop, and who knows how many it would take to sink a well-defended ship.
Ukraine stopped Russian plans for a naval invasion without a navy of its own (as I mentioned it was wiped out on day 1). Cheap missiles sink expensive ships.
You're right. From what I've read about the sinking of the Moskva the ship was basically decrepit and completely unprepared with no working defensive systems, but missiles are generally cheap compared to most ships. How many will it take though? It's a lot more economically efficient to shoot a bunch of missiles at a carrier strike group than at a huge array of landing craft. Russia didn't need to mount a naval invasion and never built up the resources to effect one the way China would for invading Taiwan.
Carriers at least have anti-missile defences. China's "plan" for landing craft is to rely on minimally converted civilian ferries and fishing boats. They would be as close to sitting ducks as a ship could be. And its still worth plenty of missiles to sink a ship with tanks and a few hundred troops aboard.
I agree, the way to stop a Chinese invasion is to procure thousands of missiles for Taiwan. At $3M+ a pop that's tens of billions of dollars, so way more than our recent aid package but a fraction of our defense budget. If that's the main threat our military needs to be prepared for it's well worth it. Assuming China isn't able to take out the launch platforms.
Carriers don't really have credible anti-missile defenses, carrier strike groups do. No clue whether the anti-missile defense ships could defend a flotilla of landing craft. Against thousands of missiles? Definitely not.
For those looking at the "we spend more than the next 10 nations combined" factoid and wondering why that still isn't enough, Perun did a good video on the Chinese military buildup addressing the question of why China is seemingly closing the gap on the US despite spending much less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH5TlcMo_m4
Summarizing what I remember from the video:
- Not all the money that a country spends for defense purposes necessarily goes into the official defense budget. There are some items that get counted in the US defense budget not the Chinese one. This makes up a bit of the gap in spending.
- PPP advantages, ie the old "a dollar in China goes further than in the US." This is a bit more complicated to calculate for military rather than general consumer PPP, but those who have studied it think the ratio is about 2:1 to China's advantage.
Now, combining the above two points still gets you to a Chinese effective military budget that is only about half as large as that of the US. But there are a few other points working in China's favor:
- The US budget has to cover its military commitments around the world, while China can (mostly) focus on countering the US in the South China Sea.
- The US has to spend a lot of money on maintaining its existing military equipment, much of which is relatively old or would not come into play in any conflict with China (given its decades-long focus on land-based counterinsurgency). Meanwhile China was starting from a relatively low base of equipment and could afford to buy new models of exactly what they need.
- Somewhat related to other points, but since China is in the middle of its buildup it can take advantage of economies of scale and its massive industrial base to further drive costs down. Whereas like Noah noted, the US defense industrial base (like its civilian industrial base) has been mostly hollowed out.
Of course none of this means there aren't inefficiencies with US defense spending and procurement; I'm sure there are plenty of things that should be improved. But it's not like US military planners are hilariously incompetent compared to their Chinese counterparts; there's just a lot of structural factors that are helping China.
The little bit in the middle about how we spend more than the next 10 countries combined -- meaning we spend more than China -- screams that we don’t need to spend more, we need to reallocate what we spend and fix how we spend it. Which is probably harder than throwing money at the problem.
I must say, I've enjoyed your transformation into a liberal hawk.
I mean that unironically. I agree with the broad strokes of this piece and it's great to see someone on your side of the aisle make the point forcefully.
Either I am misremembering what Peter Zeihan has been saying or I have run into some of his out-of-date videos, but two of my more trusted sources have just butted heads.
Again I would like to see Bill Maher facilitate a panel discussion of some of these topics.
While the makeup of that panel would change depending on the topic, I think this one would involve Noah Smith and Peter zeihan and perhaps a retired commander of combined forces.
It would be nice if we could direct all that effort towards making life better for all of humanity, but I agree with Noah that there's always going to be another Tamerlane on the horizon, just certain that he can knock off those weak democracies and help himself to the spoils.
But maybe it's a moot point. Some peacenik will say "stop all war" and his artificial intelligence servant will just kill all of us.
That last sentence caused me to glance at the clock and see that it's 3:30 a.m. and that I have drifted into extreme and fanciful speculation.
Keep up the good work of making us think about our choices Noah!
I agree with your point about spending the money to make life better for all humanity, but I wonder is in retrospect we will realize that was what we did after WWII by maintain a global military. Obviously, we (the US) have made huge mistakes at various points but enabling the current degree of globalization (and its impact in lifting a couple billion people out of poverty) may have been the best thing we could have spent the money on...on the downside if it all comes apart and a billion or two people die in the aftermath maybe it wasn't...