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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!