Anyone else feel like in today's world, China could do this better than the US?
It could, though, and it could do a lot of good. But it doesn't.
See also: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-tibet-xinjiang-border-indi...
In China the entities connected to the CCP are excepted from a lot of laws that slow down processes or make them more expensive.
In the US is that way less the case.
Day-to-day, sure.
In a national mobilization (even without additional action of Congress) when the President’s emergency powers in law are deployed to enable production? Things change radically.
In 1943 the expected average life expectancy of a B-17 (crew and aircraft) was only to survive 11 missions! My Aunt's father was in one that was shotdown, he survived being a POW and came home after the war.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/black-week-da....
China's manufacturing is mainly in the east, while the USAs is spread throughout the country. China's manufacturing is centered around coastal, river, and railway access. The USA has a distributed highway system for wartime variability/survivability.
China is dependant on oil imports. The USA in a net oil exporter.
For reference 3 week Iraqi air campaign had favourable land basing, 5 carriers, doing uncontested runs. Napkin math extrapolate to PRC size and you're looking at 5 years if US can sustain unsustainable tempo and PRC barely shoots back. Double that if US has to operate at standoff range where most of sorties goes to tanking/defensive air. The scale of PRC is massive.
PRC MIC industry is in the EAST far inland, specifically to account for US standoff range, i.e. rapid dragon with even JASSER would have to launch over mainland soil to hit. Can do even more extended AGM156Bs with 1900km range, but still has to be launched within PRC A2D2 1IC bubble, and they weight 5x more, i.e. can only fit lol10 in C17... all of a sudden you have a vunerable platform + missiles worth 400-500m trying to drop ordinances in area PL17 is designed to defeat. This is without mentioning PRC likely has / at least demonstrated to have capability to move MIC underground, see third front.
PRC has enough domestic oil production 4+ million barrels to run military AND industry with transport rationing.
But really what you're missing is if US starts hitting mainland targets, PRC will hit CONUS targets - they're pursuing conventional global strike. Their rocketforce platforms are increasingly dual use for reason. Reality is US is a net oil exporter in the same way Saudi is - i.e. it doesn't matter having resource autarky because extractive infra can be hit by Houthi drones. Era Fortress America is ending/over. PRC hitting 300 refineries and LNG plants cripples US homefront as much as much US trying to blockade PRC energy. And if we get to that point, then it's a matter of who has more distributed energy infra (i.e. renewables), and capital stock, excess construction capacity to survive the attrition game.
China is massive, but their 'strength' of mass production (what is being discussed here, converting a countries capabilities to war time production, and being claimed as uncounterable by the USA) is concentrated in the coastal areas and associated river shipping lanes. USA industry is spread throughout the country.
Again you completely ignore what I said. It wouldn't be 5 carriers of F-18s over five years, it would be our current fleet plus an additional 1500 stand off attack bombers, allowing those F-18s to focus solely on softening air defense sites, etc. China's installed robots have zero to do with any of this. They don't have automated factories 'spawning' units.
China's oil production just hit a record lows even with them putting their 'limitless resources' into it. China's western oil fields and offshore oil fields (like their billion dollar oil platform) would be scrap.
China's current MIC industry doesn't matter, it's converting domestic production to a war footing that is being discussed here. The claim is conversion of their current civilian capacity would overwhelm the USA. Again, China's civil capacity is concentrated in the coastal areas and associated waterways which make it not valuable as a war production capacity, while the USA is spread throughout the country. You don't need to take out every factory, just enough associated infra. But keep moving goal posts, change the subject to try and get a gotcha.
Edit: I have to add I hope none of this happens. I love China. My dad was a communist hippie and our house was filled all kinds of books on China from historical to modern Chinese thinking. My ex was an acupuncturist so we often talked about ancient Chinese thoughts as well. While I understand it's completely different now, 2010's Shanghai was one of my favorite cities. I'm also old enough to have been friends with a lot of students stranded in the USA after the Tiananmen Square massacre so my heart breaks for the Chinese people and I understand that their government is not them and does not care about their interests.
US MiC distribution doesn't matter since stand off range of ICBM global strike basically = other side of world, i.e. existing PLARF icbms can already be conventionally tipped can hit any large infra target in US. That's PLA strategy for CONUS attacks, instead of 100m of munitions on 400m (cargo plane) or (13b carrier) delivery platform which needs vunerable/expensive logistics to operate, they're going for more expensive munitions, because they never committed to expensive force projection platforms, which US has to fulfill global commitments.
VS. US strategy for mainland attacks which is hoping very expensive, legacy, sunk cost platforms like carriers can deliver some standoff sorties, against PLA systems destruction warfare specifically designed to cripple logistics system that sustains them. This doubly true for jerry rigged transport bomb trucks, i.e. rapid dragon - there isn't enough airstrips in/around theatre, tanking to make it work at scale. PRC has host of supersonic drones and long range AA that can spam 1IC and take out lumbering rapid dragon cargo planes before they even have chance to deliver, which is going to be within 1IC, where US carrier defensive air won't have persistent coverage. Hence it's not seriously discussed in strategy writings, because anyone can look at the logistics behind it and realize it's not viable. Not like rushing new capability like B21s to do runs from CONUS/AU, recognizing what PRC recognizes as it builds out launchers and 1000s of tunnels, the only supply chain you can depend on is homeland supply chain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium...
The biggest exception seems to be Vietnam, with a very large reserve of bauxite (and obviously quite geographically close to China).
If the only supplies of bauxite were across an ocean or a whole continent it would be much easier to deny them supplies of bauxite in a conflict.
Even if they could conquer the territory with it, they'd need to transport it back or move manufacturing to it.
Also, general consensus seems to be that economic codependence has failed, with Russia invading Ukraine, humans rights abuses and authoritarianism in China, and China poised to attack Taiwan.
230x ship building advantage, more dry tonnage per year than entire 5 year US ship building program in WW2... US advangage over JP in WW2 aws charitably 20:1. That's just in one "mature" industry, PRC isn't just better in US, it's magnitude better than US ever was relative to peers. Another example is their revelation of _one_ gigafactory for 1k cruise missile components a day. JP is buying 400 tomahawks over next few years for 1.5B. PRC indicating they can do that in one shift. US has 4000 stockpiled, replacing at ~100 per year. Some of the production figures are very lopsidded. Meanwhile they're addding about as industrial robots/automation than RoW, and industry is going to get increasingly cheap renewable inputs. The advantages are snowballing.
US still ahead in aviation due to committing to mature tech, but PRC knocking out their 5th J20 already 100+ per year. SpaceX is next as PRC pursues their mega constellation. I think people are prematurely jerking to SpaceX payload lead, they have a short term competitive advantage in doing high capacity launches on "small/medium scale", read: American scale with ~40 resusable rocket fleet. It the economics justified it, no reason PRC wouldn't have 400 falcon 9s. The TLDR is once indigenize tech matures, PRC can pursue incredible economies of scale, and build up enough production capacity to exceed aggregate production of others in 5-10 years.
I'm sure it can be done eventually by China though, they are just as smart as anyone else. Can they organize their scientific and engineering forces as well? Knowing it can be done is a huge help.
In 1943, the US built more than half as many Fleet carriers as Japan fielded over the entire war (15 vs 28), while also producing an absurd number of escort carriers. In the last year of the war, the US built about as many F6F (Hellcat) fighters as Japan built A6M (Zeros) in the previous 5 years (the F6F is generally considered far superior to the A6M; the F4F is the older contemporary of the A6M).
The economics clearly justify mass production of widebody aircraft, yet China is unable to produce their own.
And you expect China to mass produce Falcon 9 rockets? How about they start with a simple airplane first.
But economics also don't CLEARLY justify domestic wide body when they can focus on electrified HSR without fossil inputs, AND PRC pop density / geographic concentration limits future of civilian air due to air corridor congestion.
I expect PRC to mass produce domestic F9 if the economics clearly justify it. LM5 already estimated at F9 $3000 per kg, so hard to say how much mass producing PRC F9 tier reusable can drive down cost + add capability. If it's there's clear significant demand for more than sustaining mega contestallations past 2035s, I'd expect them to spam F9 for domestic use, before civil wide body that's going to take longer due politics of international aviation.
Again I hope nothing happens. I am quite fond of China, the Chinese people, and historical Chinese culture. The USA made special carveouts to help China industrialize. The USA risked nuclear war with Russia in order to get them to back down against China in 1969. We don't want to be adversaries with China and have demonstrably shown so with fairly large policy choices.
I don't think it's clear that a war would necessarily escalate to attacking industrial targets because there is a kind of MAD at play.
From America's point of view, the problem with escalating the war to industrial targets (which I am sure US military planners realize) is that the US has an Achilles' heel in it's reliance on petrol. Almost all US petrol comes from only 130 domestic plants. If those are disabled, most US supply chains will crumble, including food. No need to disable all the factories when there's no way to transport stuff and workers aren't fed. That weakness might be enough to deter the US from striking Chinese industry.
EVs might be one of the bigger bulwarks the US could pursue toward greater national security.
- Lack of infrastructure investment
- Civic infighting
- Political divisions, distractions, and corruption
- Social regression
- Gender disparity in undergraduate education
- Declining standards of living
Not just America, the world needs younger politicians who don't want to send the whole world to hell when they die. We really have a shitty geriatric crew right now--Putin, Xi, Modi, Biden, Trump.
The people are hurting but the establishment isn't listening, and so conspiracy theorists, cranks, racist nationalists lite, and brash jerks are seen as ways to lash out against a system that doesn't appear to be helping them.
There are a holistic set of overlapping problems:
- Failure of the mainstream left to empathize properly with both working people and small business owners while pushing back against unreasonable demands of the very rich
- Failure to mentor young leaders in 4 domains: academia, industry, political parties, and community orgs
There are no quick or easy solutions, but require sustained, organized, and collaborative efforts to nudge the needle over years. This is quite difficult when a large fraction of the demographic voting for absurd leaders either don't have free time to volunteer, are unable to prioritize civic participation for whatever reason(s), or don't see the value in it.
- Inability of the intellectual and political elites to define and enforce basic rules and norms for a coherent society. Diversity is great, but it ought to be paired with engagement with the country's history, culture. We have citizenry who are increasingly more detached from the society they live in and more connected to groups that transcend borders.
- Rise of religion. We should be done with that thing by now, but its back and growing in strength, undermining democratic institutions. We are making concessions to religion on the grounds of religious freedom.
My favorite example of how good friends the US has is that the primary objective for Norway in Afghanistan was quote:
"The first and most important objective throughout was the Alliance dimension:
to support the US and safeguard NATO’s continued relevance."
You have good friends if their primary war objective is to support you.
I think that these days, a lot of Europeans are being reminded that the US is a friend. So long as US politics can avoid undermining NATO the US won't be short on friends.
The same applies to other countries. Those who subscribe to the democratic principles, rule of law, and individual freedoms will typically align themselves with US interests, at least where it is beneficial to them.
The US needs to adjust with more competitive foreign economic policies because tariffs aren't it. All of those trillions wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq for diesel power plants to nowhere could've been sprinkled around the Global South to advance economic development resulting in greater wealth elsewhere able to afford American goods and services, source raw materials, and develop manufacturing relationship in various countries in, say, Africa... like China is doing.