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Comment by gds44 | Hacker News Reader

Well US is not dependent on anyone for her Energy needs. Unlike China. Its quite vulnerable on that front if a few pipelines blow up ala nord stream.

This is also why the US has such a large presence in the middle east.

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>Well US is not dependent on anyone for her Energy needs.

China's strength is they have the means of production (and maintenance) of everyone today, including the US. All the energy in the world means jack squat when all the means of using that energy rely on China.

Could the west regain our own means of production? Certainly, but it's going to take far too long at the point China starts pursuing Bigger Gun Diplomacy. We're talking multiple decades to reachieve what we've surrendered, perhaps even the better part of a century because we simply don't have the ambition and political will to do so.

I think China has been very shrewd with how they conducted themselves in the past half century or so. They've already won most wars they might be involved in before they start by seizing the economies of their supposed enemies.

China makes consumer crap not our guns and bombs. In a wartime situation maybe people can’t get iphone cases from temu, big whoop. Not the first time the american population rationed consumer products in wartime. We will still have power and air, sea, and space superiority which is what really matters.

China also makes a huge amount of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, electronic components, and parts for capital equipment. Decoupling from them would be very painful.

Everyone has outsourced all their cheap and low-quality manufacturing to China, therefore China is only capable of manufacturing cheap, low quality items. Is this your argument?

My argument is we have not outsourced bombs and sensitive military technology building to china. It is mostly the stuff we can stand to tighten belt on. Even if there is some demand for things like chinese medicine or whatever, its a market effect and not because only china is capable of making this medicine like how only US defense industry can make some of its secretive military tooling.

This is really out of date thinking, even South Korea is better at making ships than America now. In wartime China would switch from gadgets to bombs and drones and out produce us by an order of magnitude. They already produce 3x more vehicles than America; It’s 2024, not 1956. Review the article called “The return of industrial warfare”.

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/asia/japan-south-korea-naval-...

Look at american shipbuilding in 1938 and compare it to 1944 and understand looking at peacetime warmaking capacity makes zero sense.

looks like a great article. thx for posting.

China makes a lot of electronics on which our infrastructure and logistics run. Much good a gun or a bomb will do you if you suddenly cannot get them from point A where they are made/stored to point B where they need to be used on time.

There is no scenario where the US military cannot move a bomb from point A to B. Everything else would sooner stop than that ability.

Look at the rate at which munitions are expended on the frontlines in Ukraine, for example. Those kinds of amounts need the transportation network to be working in good order. Bring down a single major logistics hub, and bad things happen.

If the US were truly engaged production would scale up like it did in wwii. We can always go back to a centrally planned economy.

I'm not talking about production here, but delivery. For that you need roads and railroads, bridges etc to function. How many of those are susceptible to digital takedowns?

Although factories are also an interesting case if they are not airgapped.

You can convert coal to gas and petrol, and China has a lot of coal. So it can be reduced to an industrial scaling problem which China is very good at.

China imports coal from the United States.

They have huge amounts, but want slightly more. They're the biggest coal producer, producing half the world's coal, and then consuming it too, along with importing an extra 10% which is coking coal for steel making. They have lots of lignite and bituminous coal, which is fine for heat and electricity, and would be fine for turning into gas and liquid hydrocarbon fuel if that was useful.

Am I missing something? This does not seem consistent with what I have seen going out of the harbors. Exports of both thermal and metallurgical coal from the United States to China have increased [0][1].

[0]: https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t9p01p1.pd...

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t11p01p1.p...

Donbas - the part of Ukraine that is presently occupied by Russia - is called that because it's an abbreviation of "DONetsk coal BASin", one of the largest in the world.

Coincidentally, there has been a downturn in coal production there in the past two decades (and the associated closure of mines and processing infrastructure and unemployment) because of reduced demand. But if China were suddenly in dire need of coal, it wouldn't be hard for Russia to scale things up again there.

The Chinese are building solar farms and wind farms at an incredibly fast pace. Have you seen how cheap Chinese solar panels are? It's safe to assume by the time they decide to make a military move on Taiwan, they will have achieved energy independence as well.

Its more that the army, navy airforce world over all are heavy oil guzzlers. Its not going to simple if its a long war.

But you can pretty easily bring down their power grid

Good point. Factories ain’t shit without power.

If we can’t get stuff from China, that hurts, a lot. If China can’t get stuff from China, they’re dead.

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