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Comment by ganzuul | Hacker News Reader

Steel remains a technology with huge potential for future development. Some keywords: eutectic solution, bulk metallic glass, and boron steel.

It seems crazy to me that any first world nation would let it's steel production fall into foreign hands. As a machinist for 5 years in my country I would have been excempt from military service even in total war.

If US steel is unable to innovate and foreign ownership is somehow not a problem, this development is probably a good thing. The Zaibatsu system is a good fit for what steel is.

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America has started to have the appearance of griefing their own enlisted. I'm not sure if America actually cares about those types of war and military considerations any longer. Have you looked at ship construction times lately?

On the materials side. Totally agree. However the issue there, is that's not what corporations tend to optimize. The story itself really spells it out pretty clearly (it may be biased, never worked at US Steel personally). However, the article's description is:

US Steel became a monopoly, and immediately acted like a monopoly. Innovation ceased. Money extraction began. Commanding obedience was the norm. Convincing themselves all competitors would fail was the norm. And US Steel did not want to invest in anything outside its own sunk costs.

>I'm not sure if America actually cares about those types of war and military considerations any longer. Have you looked at ship construction times lately?

it's kind of funny because the US won WWII by the ability to churn out huge volumes of decent quality goods but now our military seems to be adopting the German idea that small numbers of expensive wunderwaffen will turn the tide

Well, what will a future war look like?

We're never going to fight WW2 again, because all the great powers have nuclear weapons now. The US army will never take the field in a straight up slugfest against Russia or China.

So that leaves non-nuclear regional powers. But you simply don't need a whole-of-society mobilization to fight Iran. The phase of active combat against Iran will not take years-- it won't take months.

If we really needed to, we could be building millions of Jeeps again. But we don't need to, and won't need to.

I find your lack of faith disturbing. Humans can totally figure out how to fight a ground war version of WWIII if they really want to.

For perusal in the many ways humans have found to deploy nukes other than ICBMs. Note: SAMs, Artillery, RPGs, Mines, and Torpedoes. [1] Yields stretching from 0.02 KT at 50 kg [2] weight to 50,000 KT at 27,000 kg. [3][4] Sure, the high end stuff is world ending, yet the low end stuff is war enabling. And there's enough ways to knock missiles out of the air. Wargames computers are still calculating.

Note the propensity of the wealthy to build bunker houses. Feel like they know something I don't know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield

My guess is that the future of war looks like Ukraine, where small, cheap automated drones will overwhelm expensive, low volume hardware, munitions, and defensive positions.

And Chinese military build out seems to be "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and "quantity has a quality all its own", so soon we're likely to be the ones playing catch up despite our huge military budget and outlays.

>And Chinese military build out seems to be "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and "quantity has a quality all its own",

They're moving away from that - they're becoming more similar to the US in prioritizing quality. China is racing to build a first-world economy before their demographics shut down their growth, so relying on cheap, plentiful troops makes less and less sense as the years go on.

Which they are likely sorely regretting as tensions flare higher with China and our navy is struggling to protect shipping around Israel.

They really aren't struggling we have plenty of firepower there. But yeah, China will soon outstrip our naval numbers by a large amount within the end out of the decade. We still have better tech but what do we do when they launch 200 "good enough" cruise missiles at each aircraft carrier sitting in the Taiwan Straight?

They really aren't struggling. But yeah, China will soon outstrip our naval numbers by a large amount within the end out of the decade. We still have better tech but what do we do when they launch, at the same time, 200 "good enough" cruise missiles at each aircraft carrier sitting in the Taiwan Straight?

typical carrier complement has ~300-500 vertical launch tubes and sea sparrows can be quad packed into a tube, and CIWS. not sure i would bet against aegis

US steel and steel production in the USA are not the same thing. The company's name is that of a legal entity, not an accurate description of what it is.

The steel production will still be local... and it's Japan, a close ally. It's not like if war broke out the steel mills would evaporate. If for some crazy reason Japan was antagonistic, they would be nationalized or otherwise forced to behave correctly. We have the Defense Production Act which gives plenty of leeway for the government to change situations when national defense justifies it.

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