Apart from these inaccuracies however I'd mostly agree that us-american manufacturing is not in a great position, to put it mildly. That's not neccessarily where the real value lies, however: That's usually exactly in the designs, where the USA are strong.
The real loss is that industrial enterprises employ a lot of people who are exposed to hard problems. I'm skeptical that the current set of "design"/"marketing" only hardware businesses will last much longer than the international trade pacts that support US patent law.
because that worked so well for the weimar republic?
The 100-year history of strategic bombing theory has consistently held that once you start strategic bombing, the enemy's will or ability to fight will collapse very quickly. The actual application of strategic bombing has consistently failed to live up to those expectations, with the atomic bombings of Japan being the only example people give of countries capitulating due to strategic bombing, and even then it's still debatable what factors induced it to surrender.
It should also be pointed out that people saying great power wars will be swift and decisive is usually followed by a great power war that is exactly the opposite of swift and decisive.
Right now we're just talking about economies and being able to have a well off society where people don't struggle to make ends meet. And from that point of view, the future of the US as it continues to lose competitive advantage to other countries doesn't look as good as it used too.
Are we saying the US plan in case this trend reaches extreme levels is to start a war?
Can you grow semiconductors on corn plants? Big moats don't help with embargoes, and if your economy is based on international trade (like the globalization crowd has championed), an embargo would be crippling.
Around WWII, they used to call America the "workshop of the world," but China has that title now.
Also, you seem to be forgetting that long range, intercontinental missiles and bombers exist now, when they didn't during WWII.
Hypothetical non-nuclear WWIII is terrible for everybody but the US, with the ability to control oceans that aren't within a few thousand miles of the Chinese mainland, is probably in a better position than China is to recover economically.
This is less an argument against civilization, and more like a wake-up call: America has multiple interlocked badly broken systems that all need massive reform. Forget about justice, I think its necessary for our civilization to survive. It is urgent that we reform our judicial system (where any involvement IS the punishment), our medical system (where getting sick is a prelude to bankrupcy), our social safety net (where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness), consumer rights (where deregulation and arbitration clauses leave individual consumers to fight alone against huge well-funded interests), the tax system (which is too large and complex for anyone to use properly), and education (where students must take enormous debt to get educated, and so much of that debt funds administrative overhead). Personally, I don't even think these things should be about your location on a politcal scale - right or left, these are table stakes for a 21st century democracy. The lack of on-shore manufacturing, particularly for big infrastructure projects, e.g. things like roads, the electrical grid, tall buildings, and factories, is merely a symptom, I think, of all the rest. Yeah, the consumer market is strong, but for the everyday Joe, it is painful to deal with all these broken systems on a day-to-day basis.
I think you're spot on, but I want to point out the above situation was created by design. IIRC, part of the creation of a modern market system was the demolition of traditional social safety nets, so peasants were put in the situation where the alternative to selling their labor in the market was starvation. Early market advocates understood this clearly, and praised the motivating power of an empty stomach.
Intel has 4 fabs in the US
Global Foundries has 3
Also, ICBMs fly both ways. But while nobody decides to press the "End Game" button, the US with its self sufficient continent can weather more punches than any other country in any conceivable conventional war scenario.
You are focusing too much on the war aspect instead of what happens at home.
What happens to companies like Apple and nVidia when for whatever reason they can no longer manufacture in China. Apple luckily has a rainy day fund to fund itself until heat death of the universe, but other companies may not be so lucky.
I’m sure it would take decades at this point to develop the talent, infrastructure and scale in manufacturing that China currently has
Sure, the US military has maintained low-volume domestic manufacturing capability in those areas to meet peacetime military demand.
However, you mentioned WWII. Did the US fight that with just its preexisting military-allocated production capacity? It did not. You had jukebox companies drafted into making rifles and car companies into building tanks and airplanes. Electronics are key to most modern military equipment, and guess who has the spare manufacturing capacity in that area now?
> Also, ICBMs fly both ways. But while nobody decides to press the "End Game" button, the US with its self sufficient continent can weather more punches than any other country in any conceivable conventional war scenario.
Attacks with long-range conventional missiles are also a distinct possibility.
You also used that word "self-sufficient" again. The issue here is contemporary Western politico-economic dogma has abandoned the idea of self-sufficiency in favor of interdependence and free trade. China, has not done that, and appears to have deliberate industrial policy with the goal of modernized self-sufficiency. IIRC, its main imports are raw materials, which it may still be able to obtain through trade (e.g. Russian oil and gas) or military capture in a hot war.
Furthermore for all the Chinese efforts for self sufficiency, it lacks that in high tech manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-to-...
Also, surprisingly, more people in the US work in manufacturing today than in 1939. And obviously the $ value of that manufacturing is much higher due to increased productivity.
https://thelevelfield.com/dashboard/us-manufacturing-employm...
Any conflict would be terrible and should be avoided, but its not like the US became very vulnerable recently.
First, it is funny accounting, second, it is LOWER productivity of most companies, not higher, which is counter-weighted in statistics by few supergiant companies like Boeing, third, it is slow shift to lower value goods, and processes in smaller companies, and sky higher ones in big ones.
Likewise, oil and gas aren't all that helpful if you can't get them out of the ground because your equipment is broken and all the replacement parts are made in China.
I say this as a patriotic American. Comparisons to WWII are fairly off-base because in the 1930's and 40's we were much less reliant on foreign countries for manufactured goods.