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Comment by benced | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain what nefarious things Japan - one of the US’s closest allies by the way - could do by owning 12% of the USA’s steel output in the form of physical factories that are on US soil?

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It's also the only country to ever start a war with the US over steel exports.

Report to other governments the allocation and distribution of government steel purchasing, and thereby provide estimates for the production and maintenance of warships, subs, tanks, and other vehicles.

Japan might be infiltrated by spies that report that to US's enemies, like the US might be infiltrated by spies. But Japan's government isn't going to institutionalize spying the US, what a ridiculous thing to suggest.

The number of ships the US builds and other general quantities of war materiel is public knowledge. Beyond government accountability, US policy is designed around deterrence, where you want your potential adversaries to see just how big a stick you're carrying so as to prevent them attacking you in the first place. With modern satellites, it would be impossible to hide any large scale production even if we tried to keep it secret. The US certainly does have some classified military procurement, but these items are too small to have any critical details revealed by a crude analysis of steel consumption.

Do you genuinely believe that other governments don't already have that information?

Most of it is publicly available, and what isn't can be estimated reliably via satellite imaging

You realize we freely publish a lot of that right? The US has a gigantic military, and showing that off is an important form of deterrence.

Like, most of those tanks are just sitting out in the desert, in full view of global satellites.

YOU can collect that information for like a thousand bucks, by buying satellite imagery. People are doing that right now.

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