Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?
It sounds like it is the former.
> If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere.
0: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Securit...
1: https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-...
Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades.
By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years.
It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
Is there really much difference?
And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on.
The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns.
But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes.
The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
Even with the quotes, as a Finn I find this statement rather tasteless.
Or would you also claim that cross-border trade with more nearby nations is "money gone forever"?
On a national level I understand the interest to keep investments within country borders.
For a random person or company I don't get it (except for very specific cases like voting with our wallets against dictatorships like China).
My point was that "internal spending" and "external spending " are not (economically the same thing. Obviously, Finland wants to export - tests a given - but the price tag of a Finnish ship and a US ship are not the same unit.
FTR: I think that the CHIPS act is based on good intentions. US has identified advanced semiconductors as a strategic, critical base. Trying to in-shore the manufacturing and skills is clearly a desirable goal. But in case of something as niche and "bulky", ice-breakers feel more like they'd fall under comparative advantage.
You can look at China. They have had a persistent strategic goal to build up their advanced manufacturing base, and after sustaining that for >30 years, are now at the position where they can start to close off foreign suppliers. That shows roughly how long similar shift of balance could be expected to take if you wanted to counteract.
You can make a deal that US buy icebreaker for 300M from Finland and Finns buy weapons from US for 300M. They need it because of Russia and you boosts US economy in other areas.
In twenty years, the experience retires. In forty, it dies.
Including a couple of Nuclear ones (they fitted the nuclear engine themselves):
I guess that aside from Alaska, the US doesn't have to deal with a lot of sea ice and isn't that dependent on arctic shipping routes. For Russia that's very different. The sea near St Petersburg can freeze over and Murmansk is also hard to reach in winter. And with Svebastopol and the black see fleet out of action, those would be strategically important for Russia. And they rely on the northern arctic route for trade with China as well.
It seems more like a way taking over the industry from the Finns.
Obviously there may be specifics of the deal that makes it acceptable, but the vague text I see seems just terrible for the Finns.
I suppose it might be accepted because of the Canadian ownership of the shipyard in question.
But the combination of foreign ownership together with exporting know-how, this combination is kind of how one loses an industry to some other country; and then upon that there's that you can't even sell to the country that owns the company because of protectionism on their part.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/odd-lots/how-the-white-...
Transcript Notes at 00:17:51
Furthermore, suppose that it actually was something substantial, some kind of deal that NATO icebreakers are to be made by the US, Canada or Finland, then you screw the Aker group in Norway, who also make icebreakers.
The way I see it they expect that since the Canadians have been able to nab the shipyard after the disorder caused by the sanctions they can transfer all the knowledge from the Finns and make the icebreakers themselves, seizing appealing high-tech shipbuilding niche from the Finns, and they offer nothing in return but bullshit.
An integrated supply chain, sure, maybe that can save money, but once you've transferred your knowledge you no longer have your niche.
I think this is very obvious in the talk because of the vagueness in what is offered to the Finns; and my interpretation is that nothing meaningful is offered to the Finns and the the US is just expecting to seize this niche.
I don't think the 'there'll be enough for all of us' talk is plausible either. Surely, there might be an expansion demand, but there's really only the Baltic and the polar area that matters, and maybe US and Canada together do need 40 or so icebreakers to keep the North-West Passage safe and open in case it is to become a major trade route, but they'll last basically for ever, and my understanding is that the US is talking about only nine or so.
"US: cost $800-$900 million per ship ($1.1-$1.3 billion in 2024 dollars) FIN: Finnish shipyard can build a heavy icebreaker for just a few hundred million dollars"
Bill North Americans for $500-600 million per ship? Can give some discount if significant amount of these projections indeed gets built
ODD LOTS: "And our best estimate is that the global total global demand for ice breakers over the next decade from allies and partners is between seventy and ninety vessels."
The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped.
What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
I think Yamamoto Isoroku gave the answer to this challenge: just keep a booming manufacturing industry. When he was trying to convince the Japanese government not to have a war with the US, he said that he saw so many chimneys when flying over Philadelphia. All those factories would turn into a giant war machine if a war ever broke out.
That is, the economy of scale matters. When the US had its entire supply chain domestically, replacing a special screw could cost a few cents. When we were in good terms with China, it would cost a few dollars as we had to order the replacement overseas, but well, it was still cheap. Now that we are trying to cut China off, then what will do if we'd need to get a replacement? Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here.
Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
I don't think it's unclear at all. It's uncomfortable to call out an obvious truth: We couldn't even compare. The only hope we have is basically economic mutually assured destruction. If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
It's unclear if the US could even get production ramped up on the scale of a decade. We simply don't have the people to train the people we need. Much less the people with the skills to do the thing.
Why? There is essentially zero chance that China can mount an invasion of the mainland US or even strike at its heartland enough to disrupt an industrial ramp up, even if it takes a decade (which it won't). The US can literally wait out anyone except Canada and Mexico (which... lol) by defending its coasts, with plenty of domestic natural resources - including agriculture, metals, and oil - to supply not just its military but the entire civilian population.
It's not about "home country". The US doesn't need carrier groups to defend home country. It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
Agreed
> It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two. Assuming they all get destroyed by hypersonic missiles within the first few months, the US still has military bases all over the world. As far as I know, China has zero military presence in the Western hemisphere except some surveillance balloons.
China may have a short term advantage in production and cost but the US has the advantage in every other area of logistics relevant to a military.
> Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Absolutely but it'd be a pyrrhic victory worth little except as domestic propaganda. If the US does help defend Taiwan, the invading Chinese fleet will likely be massacred. There's little room to hide in the 80 mile wide Taiwan strait against modern anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. China's only real advantage will likely be air power, which doesn't win wars without lots of boots on the ground.
> Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I don't think we'd let Japan or Australia slip into war without assistance. (but what do I know? :-))
Today. China is clearly building up their ability. In a few years the situation will look different which is the real worry. Also China may not need to be as big - China isn't patrolling the ocean like the US and so it is their 2 carrier groups near Taiwan against whatever the US can afford to send
circumstantial evidence suggests that, like the usa, china has extensive military presence in western hemisphere telephony and networking equipment
Actual invasions of Japan and Australia are even harder to imagine. How would that even work? And why?
It is unlikely that China will invade Japan and certainly not Australia. I find it extremely more likely that USA will invade Mexico with some fake pretence like war on drugs.
In the most recent US wargame, China succeeded in occupying parts of Taiwan which would make artillery even more important — as attacks from the mountain regions towards Chinese occupation would keep them from establishing a secure foothold.
To be fair NATO wasn’t taking really taking defense that seriously back and maybe they had a point, although considering what happened in Ukraine that seem like a very unlikely outcome (unless Britain/France/Germany decided to stay out and not risk their air forces ..)
I guess overestimating your opponents is usually better than the opposite. OTH had Britain/France not made that mistake in the 30s much of WW2 could have been prevented.
Defending Japan is a reflex action. We have bases and troops there, as well as a mutual defense treaty.
Funny, I don't see China as having any real chance in a hypothetical war. Numbers aren't everything.
Is it? What is the theory that the US could keep up with China? That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy. It doesn't seem plausible that the US can fight a long sustained war.
The plan as far as I can see it is to make use of a large network of allies and partners as well as aiming to finish the war quickly by cutting off materials like food and industrial inputs to stall the manufacturing engine. If it turns into a slugfest where munition reserves start to matter that seems like it would favour China.
One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia. If that is the case it is hard to see it coming out ahead vs China in any plausible conflict.
The US hasn't been fighting Russia - if they'd deployed F35s in 2022 then Moscow would be called West Alaska by now. Don't conflate "doesn't" with "can't".
What we appear to be seeing is they don't really have a lot of tools that can be used against an uncooperative nuclear-armed power; and many of those tools would probably fail against China.
What everyone worries about is being forced to fight China anyway. China is not playing nice with the US on the world stage. They are clearly supporting Russia over Ukraine (while pretending to be neutral). They are siding with Iran in the middle east. They are doing things in Africa that are against US interests (the US doesn't have a good record in Africa, but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators which leaves lots of room for China to be worse though only time will tell). They escalating with Taiwan and the Philippians. Those are the major reasons I'm aware of to be worried about China, there is more that I didn't write.
How will this turn out - we can only guess. But there is reason to worry.
> but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators
In the Middle East the US's #1 ally is indeed a democracy, but is currently fending off various challenges [1, 2] accusing them of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Their #2 ally is an authoritarian regime run by a gentleman who can be identified with phrases like "the bone saw incident" let alone the Kingdom's long record of barbarism and human rights abuses.
The US might win a battle of who supports better causes, but it isn't a can of worms to open either. There is no particular indication that it cares about the government system or actions of the people it supports.
[0] If the US didn't do it directly, they endorsed it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#International_Cr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#International_Co...
Wouldn't it be sad if this were true? Since when US was no longer a "industrial superpower"? Just 25 years ago, Chinese government officials were astound by how wealthy and advanced the US was when they visited the US. They wrote articles after articles to reflect why China was so behind, yet now China is the "globe's industrial superpower". In Oliver Stone's movie Heaven & Earth, Joan Chen's character went to the US and was totally mesmerized by the abundance in a supermarket. That was how Chinese people was amazed by the US too. And now? It's definitely great for China, but isn't it sad for the US to be behind?
>isn't it sad for the US to be behind
Or perhaps it was just inevitable for PRC, also a continental sized land power with 4x population to be ahead once they got shit together. Comparing US industrial stagnation in US lens frequently fails to grasp/comprehend that PRC industrialization at PRC scale brought forth another "weight-class" of industrial output. Last year, PRC ship building launched roughly same amount of tonnage as entire 5year US WW2 ship building program. IMO many people think US industry declined from 10 to 5, and maybe whole of system effort can bring in back to 10. Meanwhile PRC didn't just turn the industrial output dial to 11, it turned it to 20, beyond what US was ever capable of, and likely will be capable of. Same way US didn't so much leave British Empire behind in the industrial race as UK was never capable of running better than a 7 minute mile while US stalled at 5 minute mile (and now de-trained into a 6 minute mile), meanwhile PRC is now running a 3.5 minute mile. IMO ultimately, not about sadness but being realisitic about systemtic potential. Maybe US can AI/automate their way to overcome human capita disadvantage, but PRC playing that game too.
It wouldn't be sustained. The US would cripple China very quickly to ensure it wouldn't be.
> One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia.
How do you come to that conclusion?
Thanks for the specifics. I don't know about guided munitions, but I'd imagine a million dollar a rocket will be quite expensive for a prolonged war. Also, the US debuted a killer zone, Rogue 1, a few months ago, and it cost about $94K. $94K! I'm sure the drone is more advanced than DJI Mavic 3 Pro, but is it really 50 times more advanced even if we take the cost of military-grade into consideration? It looks to me the only explanation is that without a healthy manufacturing sector in the US, the cost of anything would go through the roof because we have lost the economy of scale.
After following the development of drones in Ukraine since 2022 and also listening to people familiar with the US army, I also think there are some not so good ones, one particular nasty one being scope creep.
Recently heard about a US effort to create home built expendable drones for use at the squad level like the ones Ukrainians use and the result was too heavy and a lot more expensive (some of it thanks to the demand that everything be produced in a US controlled supply chain) but also as a result of good old fashioned scope creep.
And this is nothing new: AFAIK there is an old British military saying something like "an elephant is what a mouse would be if specified by a military procurement committee".
US army drones are squad-level, have proper safing/arming, transportable, and shelf-stable. It's not scope creep, it's a very different doctrine and circumstances.
These surveillance drones can absolutely be used at the squad level.
Note that Russia and the US have both guided misstles and artillery. Both have value in different situations. They both have their reasons for their preference, but that is more about how they expect a war they are involved in to look than about thinking one is better.
We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import many components due to them being made much cheaper elsewhere.
>We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
You're totally right. This war is coming very fast as well, and by some accounts has already started. I worry we will all soon find out just how bad of a position we are in, the hard way.
I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that's just $3 a shell, or 0.3% of the cost of a Russian shell, or 0.075% of the cost of a US shell.
What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale. By the way, this is also what Tim Cook said. He said that Chinese labor not cheap anymore, but China has so much scale and expertise so that the output from China is still cheap. Again, economy of scale.
>What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale.
We've lost a lot of things but the reason things are expensive here is NOT that we didn't have economies of scale. That issue came much later. You get to have scale in the first place by being economically competitive. When things are outsourced due to some other country using slave labor or else their workers surviving on a tenth of what you make in the US, that is when you lose economies of scale.
Literally the only way we could compete in an open market with countries that have cheap labor is to use automation. But even with automation, those machines can be set up anywhere in the world, and they will tend to go wherever it is cheapest to run them.
There may be "Slave Labor" in some places, but the vast majority of people doing out-sourcing for US companies are very well paid (by local standards.) They are not "surviving" they are thriving.
living in the US is expensive. So prices go up to match. So wages go up. So materials go up. "National security" is expensive (and the US is obsessed by it.) 13% of the budget goes to the military. Protectionist tarrifs. Security theater like the TSA. All of this comes at a price.
The US has enjoyed a leadership role in world affairs, economic strength, influence etc for 75+ years. But it turns out that "expensive is the head that wears the crown".
I say this not as a criticism, merely as a statement of reality. Of course, whether it changes, or indeed even discussing if it should change is debatable.
You get smarter/more accurate with the constrained supply of shells, adopt drones etc.
In the 80s, expensive Maverick missiles were the primary airborne tank killer. Now the Ukrainians are dropping mortars into tank hatches from cheap drones.
Not really. Most of what Ukraine is getting is things that were on the list to destroy because they are end of life anyway.
Of course the important lesson to take here is that the US doesn't have enough missile defense systems in storage.
Read TFA. Faster, yes. Cheaper, no. Even after fully ramping up, Liberty ships cost considerably more to produce in the US than an equivalent ship elsewhere. In wartime that is acceptable. When you're producing for a global market, it's not.
Maybe. Or a it’s a sign that workers, the environment, or some other factor is being exploited for gain.
unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.
They love including requirements that all but mandates a specific vendor's product because that vendor is a key employer in the district of some rep's who's vote they need or has a good lobbyist or whatever.
Even ignoring nuclear weaponry and mutually assured destruction, ships are expensive and fragile. They are easily destroyed from above or below, which makes them only useful against nations that don’t have modern military technology. If you need a floating platform to fight Houthi rebels they’re useful, if we’re facing an actual invasion they’ll be worse than useless.
As a result there’s not much pressure to get it right. If breaking ice were an activity that our national security relied upon I have no doubt we would be building them quickly.
But if they were useful for national security we’d be building them just fine.
This is true. But it’s not the root cause for our shipbuilding problems. Our dockworkers and shipbuilders are uniquely inefficient.
It’s more likely that US workers (in this sector) expect to get paid $100k to produce $20k of value (relative to other countries)
Episode webpage: https://warontherocks.libsyn.com/can-ice-pact-salvage-americ...
Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/warontherocks/WOTR_-_Icebr...
How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money.
There is no [edit: economic] logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.
We can't. Jones Act.
[0] https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-gu...
"In practice Congress would need to support such a plan by appropriating funds for the project."
It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program. It mandates an absurdly complex manufacturing schedule with thousands of European companies, effectively costing a lot more than just relying on SpaceX. At the same time, though, it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union.
Embezzling is a problem, and politicians funneling money to their cronies too. But it can be done differently.
you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected that this would be no longer needed.
Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.
We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods.
But can the US depend on Europe's, South Korea's, Japan's, Canada's, Australia's? I think so.
Also, efficiency is everything in the competition with China: China, with ~ 4x the population of the US, can outproduce the US with just over 1/4 of the US's productivity. The US must maximize not only volume but productivity. Adding the countries listed above greatly increases volume, and the US can't afford the productivity cost of spending on inefficient manufacturers - the US needs to maximize output per dollar.
If our goal is to be robust against the risks of a great power conflict, we can't necessarily depend on manufacturing from these countries because a great power conflict might either overrun or cut off our supply lines to these countries. In fact, control over East Asian shipping lanes is the central point of the current cold war with China.
Still, it's a risk, not a deal killer. China could bomb US production too.
Anyway, I was thinking of missiles, which China has many of, and which can reach the US (including from submarines and other ships that can maneuver closer to the US).
That’s a real risk, but because neither side of a conflict wants to actually escalate to a nuclear exchange, it is not very likely that China will launch missiles at the mainland US. (Likewise I think the US is unlikely to strike mainland China.)
Conversely, whichever side maintains naval superiority in the western Pacific Ocean can cut off any supply chains to and from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and mainland China itself, without the risk of nuclear escalation. And as I stated, this is the entire issue. If you control the seas of East Asia, you basically control the world.
I do think the US can depend on Europe, Canada and Mexico. South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
I do think China can easily outproduce the US. But I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it. Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
The status quo can't be maintained, that's for sure.
While that was to some degree a concern years ago, before Biden took office, those countries have decisively and openly taken sides with the US and are members of a network of alliances that also includes The Philipines and, to a degree, India. The US has been building and improving bases, military training, etc. in and with those countries and all over the region For example, there is AUKUS, a major agreement between the US, Australia, and also the UK, for Australia to become the only country outside the UK to receive one of the US crown jewels, nuclear submarine technology. Australia also is hosting an expanding number of US bases.
> I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it.
The economics is trickier than that: Production is real economic value; printing money is just a statistic. Productivity = output/dollars. If you increase the dollars in that equation, you don't change the output and you reduce the nominal productivity number (though usually it's measured using inflation-adjusted dollars, so it's really unchanged).
The US can increase output by borrowing more dollars, increasing the volume of investment in shipyards without increasing productivity. But borrowing does cost something - IIRC the debt payments will soon exceed the military budget - and can cause inflation, which eventually negatively impacts output. In the end, China may be able to invest far more.
> Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
What connection is there?
Or perhaps "revanchist", meaning that they want to conquer some territory they believe (or at least pretend) used to be theirs.
Taking Europe as an example, if Trump or someone like him decides to leave Europe to its own devices while facing an aggressive Russia, we could see massive re-militarization. Who can say where a shift like this would lead? It's easy to view these countries as permanent allies when they depend on us for security, but they might not be so cooperative once they can stand up for themselves militarily.
This applies to Japan and South Korea as well vis a vis China/NK.
When you do stupid and unpredictable things? Certainly. But that seems like an internal US problem. Of choice rebuilding local manufacturing might be easier than fixing that in theory. OTH the longterm cost would like be much higher due to lower global stability.
Anything can happen, but that's not rational. Rationally, we need to anticipate what is likely and not treat risk as if it's all random, coin-flip, unpredictable chaos.
And not only plan, as if we are passive victims of history, but make it happen - invest in NATO, etc.
So in terms of long term planning, I think hedging our bets make sense. It might be a good idea to invest in NATO, but we also don't want to be left in a highly vulnerable position in 10-20 years if NATO falls apart and our current allies stop giving us free trade agreements, because that's a real possibility.
> Sure, but assuming we remain a democracy, or some approximation of one, we're always going to be a bit schizophrenic in our policies. Any particular administration can try to go in one direction or the other, but they have to be aware that their successor (or the one after) could very well undo all their actions and take the exact opposite course.
The idea that democracies are less stable and predictable doesn't bear out in reality. They are the most stable and predictable forms of government, because they have many checks on their power: Free press, legislatures, competitive elections, etc. expose fraud and incompetence to their disinfectent, sunlight. The rule of law means that officials serve the law and the people, not a person. Putin is not someone you trust to keep their word in a deal with you.
Government by dictators is less stable: They lack the essential things above, and are subject to one person's whim - a person inevitably corrupted by their power. They change power through violence, which makes them even more unstable.
And to circle back after all to the evidence right in front of us: NATO has lasted 90 years so far. The US has greatly expanded and deepened its alliances in East Asia over the last 4 years. Now name an ally China or Russia has. They don't - dictators don't have allies on that level; nobody actually likes their values and wants them to succeed. China and Russia's current relationship is nothing like the US's with NATO;
You haven't established that it's a 'good thing', but it does exist. I don't suppose Galileo is about economic sovereignty as much as strategic military independence. Modern militaries require satellite PNT systems - they are necessary to precision munitions, without which your military operates on a 1980s level. As close as the EU-US military relationship is, they perhaps don't want to give the POTUS a button to shut down, e.g., a French military operation. The POTUS might like Galileo too - they might not want the pressure to use that power. (I'll skip having another HN SpaceX discussion!)
> it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union
Or it just shifts money and jobs from all people - the taxpayers (including businesses) - to a few, the ones that get those jobs and especially the business owners. It's arguably better to just give people the money and have them do something they can do efficiently. It's make-work welfare, in a way.
The key to this ability really is to keep the knowledge alive and the related industries strong, to be able to tap into it when it's necessary. And that involves having a broad range of companies actively involved into creating critical components.
Given the close economic and cultural ties of these countries, surely some kind of knowledge transfer could happen, if not actual nearshoring the construction. Could NAFTA (or whatever it's called now) be used to get around the Jones Act somehow?
I agree with your economic nationalism comments. But Canada is in a special position here: the US Arctic is contiguous with Canada's much larger Arctic region and a US/Canada icebreaking partnership seems to make sense. The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA, generally close economic ties and the whole "fortress North America" thing. Canada has at least two shipyards capable of building icebreakers and the US has money.
Another example of this close, almost ambiguous economic relationship: the US Department of Defense is funding Canadian mining juniors. I have never heard of this happening before: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/377704...
That's got to be a factor here
Why are nationalists ok with NAFTA, which is just like any other international fre trade agreement? Is it because Trump backed it - meaning, of course, that they aren't nationalists but Trumpists.
Perhaps that's what you meant, but Ally makes it sound like they're friendly with NATO rather than an actual member.
1. cgh's: 'Finland is ok because they are in NATO; Canada, who in contrast are not in NATO, also makes sense.'
2. yours: 'Finland is an ally of NATO, not a member.'
3. mine: 'Canada may have 'close economic and cultural ties' (from the parent comment), but Finland is a member of the NATO alliance. Canada still makes sense (no comment on their NATO membership, which is a fact).'
I think some is context: In what I read, 'NATO ally' is a somewhat common term for members of NATO (an alliance, of course), and I instinctively used it. It's hard to remember that other people read their own materials.
I mean, ideally we could try to not suck at building ships economically, though. But that’s a lot harder to figure out given how it’s a political problem.
The issue with China is that they don't need the US as much as the US needs them.
That was a complaint many years go, but things have changed dramatically: The US now is 'decoupling' its economy from China, and moving production to friendlier countries, and the US encourages and arranges for allies to do the same. The US and its Pacific allies are also intensely preparing for possible warfare with China.
Just because China is not a reliable partner doesn't mean the US should throw out all other partners. Should the US not buy icebreakers from Canada and Finland because of China? That would be greatly hamstrining the US. China's government would love it, I think.
“Nationalism is an infantile disease, it’s the measles of mankind.”
-Albert Einstein
"Everybody for themselves, we're individuals" when there's peace and "We're all in this together, you've got to die for your country" when their wealth is threatened.
Sometimes you need to get together and fight for human rights. But even as WWII was going on, Churchill, for example, was IIRC a harsh critic of nationalism.
This is the meat of the article in my mind. The US has globalized away its maritime industry in general and we now lack the institutional knowledge, infrastructure, and labor force needed to operate even semi-independently on the maritime front. Just look at our domestic shipbuilding capacity vs. China: https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/chinas-shipbuildi...
WA state has the same problem trying to get ferries built for the Puget sound. Every decade the fleet gets more dilapidated and the replacements get more expensive and farther behind schedule. The legislature has ditched the requirements that the boats be built at a WA shipyard and they still can't find builders.
Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).
Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.
I actually don't take it for granted that enough money thrown at a problem can automatically solve it. There's a critical mass of underlying assumptions without which the marginal output of each additional dollar supplied becomes so limited that it just doesn't make sense, even with the government money printer.
...don't we? I'm not sure about the effectiveness or how to measure it, but I know that a lot of cargo - especially long distance cargo - travels by rail.
It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
> and they still can't find builders.
That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years in advance. The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts. So shipyards can't hire temporary workforce for a given project.
With these unions ("Boilermakers")? No chance. They can officially give their jobs to their _children_ upon retiring.
There is a waiting list for apprenticeships. You have to complete 8000 hours of apprenticeship, even if you are already qualified.
> By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.
WA is ordering ferries at $1.5B per item. They cost 20 _times_ less if ordered from Turkey. This is not "wealth extraction from workers", this is "sucking on the teat of taxpayers".
It's about 7x.
> 20x discrepancy in salaries
Not salaries. The end-product costs.
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll...
And cushy contracts mean products that are considerably more expensive. Pretty much the only unionized industries left are those where they are somehow protected from competition. That's because union products cost enough more to drive them out of the market.
But let’s be real, as other countries rise up and we start losing our grip as the top dog, we're gonna feel the pain. It could be a slow burn or maybe a faster crash, but either way, it's gonna suck. We’re gonna have to go through some serious hardship to get back to where we think we should be. Not based on what we think we deserve, but what we actually do.
And it’s kinda mixed messaging too, right? We somehow believe our labor is more valuable than others, but at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to working harder. Longer hours, more back-breaking labor, real work, not just sitting in an office chair all day. We’re not entitled to cushy jobs forever, and things are gonna get a lot harder before they get better.
They've created a market in which a US based company cannot compete economically, because the cost of production elsewhere will be less. There is no margin by which any competition can take place, whether or not the government throws a ton of money and stopgap incentives into the mix.
You can't manufacture chips, small household goods, general purpose clothing, electronics, or a whole slew of other things in the US because our legal regime fundamentally disallows any American participation in those markets through economic disincentivization. If you can't make any profit because you have to pay higher wages or taxes if you manufacture in the US, then you're not going to manufacture in the US, even if you're a patriot.
The US doesn't have a rational system designed to maximize value to citizens, it's a hodgepodge of conflicting regulatory grifts designed to maximally benefit the corporations who paid for the lobby.
> they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
That's exactly what "globalizing" is. You literally cannot, under the current regulatory regime, create a ship building company that can compete with other established interests and competition from other countries. You'd have to relax the arbitrary labor and wage constraints, fix taxes and tariffs for sufficiently long term outlooks that anyone would bother investing. To achieve that, you'd need good faith operators throughout the government willing to rock the boat, and if you think that will ever happen, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya - I'll sell it cheap.
Why? Because efficiency is a tradeoff where you give up security and resiliency.
If you want to be able to build and retain the capability, you have to protect the machine that does the building: people, institutional knowledge and domain expertise, equipment, etc. Otherwise, you forget how to build, the machine evaporates. And here we are.
The US imports steel, and the protectionist regime almost killed the US steel: https://reason.com/2024/01/02/protectionism-ruined-u-s-steel...
> Batteries? Protectionism. Solar? Protectionism.
That's relatively new, and it _will_ lead to disaster. The US is already falling behind in battery tech compared to China and South Korea.
> Autos? Protectionism. Aircraft? Protectionism.
Need I remind you of Detroit and its handling of cheap Japanese imports in 70-s and 80-s?
Aircraft are only slightly protectionist, the US companies can (and do) buy foreign aircraft (Airbuses and Embraers are commonplace).
If the Pharoah wants a fleet of aircraft carriers, the Pharoah will have a fleet of aircraft carriers.
The West plays nice as much as possible. China is playing to win.
I'm not seeing it. Chinese economic power and tech capacity might exceed US capacity in time, but I give it only p = .25 or so. China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely.
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
Emphasis mine.
And the West isn’t? I honestly am not sure whether I prefer Xi Jinping over one of the candidates in the upcoming US elections.
There are still thankfully some checks and balances in place, but if the loudest elements of one of the two major US parties has everything their way, I’d honestly prefer to live in the PRC.
Please, tell us how you came to this conclusion
Investment can (and often is) different from protectionism. Typically, investment provides time-limited grants or other forms of support. If a company misuses them, a global (or local) competitor will outpace it.
Protectionism ensures that companies are indefinitely protected from global competition, so they don't feel as pressed to improve.
I am not a terribly smart person, and I don’t have all the answers, but I would argue it’s clear what we’ve done so far isn’t working, based on all available evidence.
Cheap labor cost typically is only a fraction of a high-tech product. If anything, China was not the world's biggest factory, but the world's biggest assembler. It's changing right now, and China is producing more of its own high-tech components.
So a small amount of protectionism (like a 10-15% tariff) might be OK, and it will compensate for this labor cost discrepancy. But not tariffs that simply make the local industry complacent.
American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU design: all the biggest CPU makers are in America: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. (Many of the CPUs are manufactured elsewhere, usually by TSMC, but all the design work is done in the US.)
That's just not true. As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one. But ticketmaster and live nation should be regulated because they're a middleman monopoly in all of it.
According to the 1st paragraph of the linked article, it is.
>As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one.
That's pretty useless if they all get bought up by resellers.
I'm not talking about original ticket prices, but rather the prices that normal people actually pay. According to the article, it's huge because of scalpers. Maybe that isn't true in your experience, but it seems to be true for enough people that they're writing articles complaining about this.
Similar with Boeing too.
Every country who isn't just getting exploited for their natural resources or labor has built their industry by protecting it.
In any case, the process really got going under Jimmy Carter. If we're talking about airlines, I guess you could point to the Airline Deregulation Act. The airline industry had been built in the first place by what people in this thread would call "protectionist" policies.
Stock buybacks are a big part of the story as well. These were illegal market manipulation I think from the Great Depression until the 80's under Reagan.
US domestic market is much larger. Uncompetitive industries can survive on domestic demand. Especially with some regulations that help. It doesn't even have to be explicitly protectionist regulation. Just regulate things the way Americans consider the best, instead of adopting international standards. That can create sufficient barriers to entry to allow uncompetitive industries and uncooperative unions survive.
"A federal grand jury in Kansas returned an indictment yesterday charging seven defendants, including five current and former high-level officers of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmith, Forgers and Helpers (Boilermakers Union) for their alleged roles in a 15-year, $20 million embezzlement scheme."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-presidents-boilerm...
In other words maybe there's just less corruption in Finland.
I'd bet that's just scratching the surface. The only way any country has been able to develop their productive capacities is through public grants and subsidies. The history of US industry shows the same thing, research in materials, electronics, the internet, etc were all accomplished through publicly funded research.
The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets to command insane prices because they know the US will pony up.
The reason the US was able to make advanced navy ships right up until the 80s is because shipbuilding was done by public industry. Insanely, Clinton and Reagan started the process of privatizing our fleet capabilities and it's landed us exactly where you think it would.
The reason we don't have ice breaker ships being built is because it's a niche market and ship builders are all too happy to say "no" or to charge an exorbitant price so the US military will go away.
But on the other hand, the same stats show a steady decline in the number of companies from 1950 that was only stabilised after the collapse in output, so it is probably arguable that the high-production situation was unsustainable. Economics can be complex.
The most recent classes seem riddled with various problems - see Zumwalt, LCS, Constellation. I suppose the Ford is relatively ok.
Somehow the magical thinking here is that, if you allowed everyone to buy ships from anywhere they would buy more American made ships but because it is mandated that you buy American made ships for certain tasks, suddenly the industry is noncompetitive.
The reality of the situation is that the Jones Act is the only thing keeping the last vestigial of the shipbuilding industry alive. There are some inefficiencies in the industry it's self but for the most part, the primary drivers for the increased costs were related to the regulatory environment of the US(environmental, worker protection, etc), now there are even greater costs due to network effects of related industries having shrunk or died out.
Similar to posts about machine tools or electronic design, everyone talks about how in China its so much easier to get stuff done because the Fab shops are all next door and nothing like that exists in the US, you used to have more steel mills, fabricators and machine shops. Now there are fewer and further apart.
Network effects matter.
The American shipbuilding industry has been allowed to atrophy in an idea that protectionism would lead to good commercial the results.
What little gets built in the US is way behind the global peers in terms of economics and quality.
As usual the end results are that the entire shipping industry works around the Jones act, for example cruise ships from Florida docking in the Bahamas, and for the regions that can’t do it they are tough out of luck.
Why can’t the US build offshore wind? Because there are no jones act compliant vessels and the proposed workaround is staging all the materials in Canada and adding an enormous time waste to the projects.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
We could talk about modify it maybe allowing purchase of specialized ships from overseas friendly countries, like icebreakers from Finland.
What starts with good intentions ends with a bandaid that someday will have to be ripped off at the cost of the people who made a subsidized living based on it.
If you want to be a global power, you require great navy, both civilian and military. That's been true since 1500s and will likely remain true for many years to come.
So question is, do we throw out Jones Act and slowly stop being World Superpower or leave it and pay higher upfront costs in certain places? That's political answer obviously.
The entire US Jones act compliant fleet comprises 60 vessels. It is not a great civilian navy.
https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2021-...
It can, however, make us much better off, by for example allowing US companies to buy foreign ships to do tasks that currently are covered by Jones Act, and as a result are not done at all.
For example, we’d be able to ship gas from American oil fields in the South to consumers in the North, where there missing or insufficient pipeline capacity. Right now, Jones Act forces US consumers in the North to buy foreign gas.
Couple years back, before the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian Gazprom was making nice profit on the following run: 1) sail to Northeastern US, sell it Russian LNG 2) sail to Gulf of Mexico to buy American LNG for cheaper than it sold Russian gas to Americans in the North 3) sail elsewhere in the world to sell them American gas, eg to Europe or Africa.
This was only possible because Jones Act makes it impossible to ship LNG from Southern US to North. There are literally no vessels that can do it. It already cripples our ability to move things around.
Jones Act is not what killed the US Merchant Marine Fleet. Globalization is what killed it.
The Jones Act made sense when it was implemented in the 1920s while America was the world's leading ship builder, the shipping industry was heavily subsidized, and there was no alternative to shipping things by water. But after the subsidies stopped, and shipbuilding in america started to lose its competitiveness, and we built a massive interstate highway system that made transport by truck economical, the Jones Act proved far too restrictive. The more expensive domestic water shipping got, the less demand there was for ships, the less demand there was for ships, the more it cost to build ships domestically, the more it cost to build ships domestically, the more expensive domestic water shipping got.
There are alternative and better ways to keep the us merchant fleet alive, and even make it thrive, than keeping the current status quo which is obviously not working.
"Protectionism isn't what killed the US industry. Having any overseas competition whatsoever is what killed the US industry." This is farcical.
If globalisation is when the market lacks protectionism and as a result the manufacturing all moves to cheaper shores, then this was not globalisation by dint of US shipbuilding having abundant protectionism.
I'm not super sympathetic to arguments that presuppose the absolute requirement that US hegemony continue indefinitely, but certainly if you are trying to make sure your shipbuilders will be roughly as good as foreign ones or better (a reasonable policy goal, even leaving out military reasoning), cutting them off from competition with those foreign shipyards is not going to result in what you want. If there is a ready market for expensive, poor quality ships that take years longer to build than they do abroad, why would I as a shipbuilding executive invest to improve on any of those metrics? It would be wasted money, because my existing capital and workforce are already 100% utilized in high-margin activities, with orders stretching out years into the future.
You'd instead see all domestic shipping be entirely dependant on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third-world crews, and you'd have next to zero recourse against them if they, say, run one of their ships into a bridge, or spill a few million litres of oil.
There are a few good reasons to repeal the Jones Act (reduce shipping and trade costs in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico) and a lot of really bad ones (the domestic shipping industry will be completely killed, and you're inviting unbounded liability from unregulated, fly-by-night international actors who don't give two craps about our laws.)
The way ocean shipping currently works is entirely incompatible with any national rule of law. Flags of convenience and corporations with non-existent liability mean that nobody in the international industry is actually following any of the rules.
The domestic industry has to follow them, which is the reason why it's not cost competitive.
The problem stemming from flags of convenience is well known and the Port State Control system [1] was created to manage it.
In other words: live up to our requirements or we will detain your vessel.
The US is not a signatory to any international port state control scheme but as is usual the US runs its own nearly equivalent scheme through the coast guard. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_state_control
[2]: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/Assistant-Commanda...
The problem is that there is too much to check, too many incentives and reasons to break the rules, and too few consequences for people who do.
You know that the Jones Act only applies to domestic shipping, right? So our ports are still full of ships dependent on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third -world crews who occasionally run their ships into a bridge.
But isn't it the case that national security concerns are being reached, presently, under the effect of the Jones Act? We just don't have the capacity to build the naval vessels that we need for national security.
It's not being fully met. Likely with elimination of Jones Act, it would disappear entirely. So it's one of those, it's bad now, do you want to eliminate it completely?
Only way I could see Jones Act disappearing but Merchant Marine Fleet to remain intact is announce that US is done playing world Navy Police. If it's not US Flagged, US is done giving a shit. Economic worldwide collapse to follow.
Of course there have to be considerations to maintain the capability to build warships. But other than that the Jones Act seems to do a lot of damage for very little benefit. Though ripping off the bandaid would be painful in that moment
I read "economists and other types" as people who understand basic economics. People oppose the Jones Act because it has devastated the US shipping industry, which is obviously bad for national security. It's not just about cheap shipping.
This is most people? National defense and the domestic shipbuilding industry are important, but the value of cheap shipping should not be underestimated. Plus, giving credit to the Jones Act for the current state of US civilian and military shipbuilding is, in my opinion, perhaps the strongest possible argument for repealing the Jones Act. The current state of American shipbuilding is disgraceful.
The goal was to have a globally competitive merchant marine based on a home grown ship building industry to call on in case of war. Trying to balance both sides.
The end result is that that home grown ship building industry has all but disappeared together with the educated population required to crew it.
[1]; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
What economists argue that the Jones Act is suppressing is greater use of domestic sea transport, which could be much cheaper than trains and trucks. Without the Jones Act sea transport would grow, but undoubtedly using foreign ships, perhaps relying on a primarily foreign crew. OTOH, a much larger domestic shipping industry would likely spur demand for downstream services, as well as open up opportunities for growth elsewhere in the economy, so overall jobs for Americans might grow. But deregulation grow the ship building industry domestically? Nobody expects that.
If you want to bring it back, you have to deglobalize. (Good luck with that!)
if you built and registered a ship in the US, wouldn't taxes be much more than say a ship registered in a small tax-advantageous country? (for a ship that basically wasn't in US 99.9% of the time)
Retirees do this with motorhomes - why register in california and pay all those taxes when you will be out of the state traveling all the time. Register in North Dakota or something and still drive the same route. (note taxes could be state income taxes because of residency, or vehicle registration taxes which are a % of vehicle value)
I’d say the “where to register your ship” question is the category of “complicated” - since obviously if we lowered our taxes to be as low as Panama then we’d get more registrations which sounds good - and “low tax” is better than the “zero” taxes we get from them now, but then the other country would just undercut that, and so on, and now nobody can get any tax revenue anymore.
It’s why the global economy doesn’t lend itself to simple sound bite answers like “just build American ships” or “just raise/lower tariffs” etc.
It’s too bad no one on any ballot seems to do anything but useless grandstanding, when it comes to actual problems like this.
So if we haven’t lost capacity but have lost capability doesn’t that imply something about the industries we’ve lost?
I’m not a ship industry expert but the US can make as much stuff as anyone in the world besides China and on a per person basis we are top tier. If ship building is a problem it’s not because of some generalized failing.
For other high income nations the ship building industry has specialized on higher tech vessels while leaving the enormous labor intensive container ships to South Korea and now lately China.
Basically the US wasn’t great at shipbuilding post civil war due to high costs. WWII was an existential threat so cost was no object, and we coasted on that capacity for a long time.
It is a lot of pain for reset of economy for protecting a small industry. If US wants more naval shipyards, then should incentivize building them. I get the impression that there has been much reason for yards to improve protected from competition.
It's worth flipping the question on it's head. China's ambitions are very clearly best carried-out by a Navy that can harass Taiwan and expand their territorial claims in the waters surrounding Japan and eventually even threatening Australia. This is a smart move on their behalf, but they will be contending with unfriendly airspace and ground-based anti-shipping weapons. If you want to look at it from a purely military materiel perspective, I would argue the US has weighed their options and taken a less Naval-dependent route.
the US need a navy to have a presence in the middle east , and Asia. We are down to the bones for force projection and to secure our own shipping. There is no 'less Naval dependent' way to police the worlds waters - the alternative is to give up.
Which is fine, the USA has been struggling with naval force projection for some time.
According to the article he references that talks about the problems with shipbuilding more generally[0], the US has never been competitive in shipbuilding at any point in the post-wooden ships period, long before globalization was the issue.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...
Globalization would have selected the experts rather than whatever random Germans and inexperienced firms present.
This is all about isolationism.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/0...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
This seems like a reoccurring story when talking about anything vaguely infrastructure related in the US.
I'm reminded of this article which explains why elevators cost so much more here in the USA than the rest of the world:
There’s a lot of surprising info in that article. This one section that I actually have passing knowledge of is just blatantly false. The majority of US states use and heavily contribute to the international plumbing code which allows for single stack ventilation as described in their linked article. My house from 1958 has single stack ventilation…
Sections like that with easily verifiable falsehoods bring the rest of the facts presented by the article into question for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075402 https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
VT Halter Marine, the troubled US contractor, went bust and was sold in 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
Bonus answer: melting it with a flamethrower would be incredibly expensive because of enthalpy.
FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further.
All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.
[1] https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-for...
So it’s not like the Arctic is totally empty - a NATO partner has a bigger presence.
Instead the issue is shipping point to point usually saves a lot of overhead compared to ports and the distances involved are rarely enough to offset that overhead. You do see a fair amount of traffic via the Mississippi because that’s actually efficient.
Also, people forget about is how much oil, gasoline, and natural gas gets shipped by pipelines. Without that we’d see more ships going from the gulf to east coast cities.
Now this is a surprise! As soon as I read the headline, I thought "Jones Act."
When I describe the Jones Act to people, the usual response is "That can't be right," or even "I don't believe you," but these days there's usually another person around that can say "Yes, that's actually right!" to back me up.
It's a good example of protectionism, like tariffs, that is completely ineffective. The industrial policy of the IRA and CHIPS acts are in contrast quite effective.
Scaling up shipbuilding in wartime demands skilled labour and construction facilities. To say nothing of the material inputs.
What does since before mean?
>Russia is basically a huge pile of snow
Russia is very diverse and it's a huge oversimplification to reduce it to the cold parts. Just like America is not just California, Russia is not just Siberia.
The author never suggested "the USA is a POS" - they gave a very nuanced breakdown of the factors at play.
We see this in Boeing, where management with an ideology of profit maximization and a structure dependent on a bunch of suppliers has led to a crisis. On the other side of the Pacific, BYD has vertically integrated critical parts of car manufacturing and now is moving extremely quickly and affordably.
Another example; the Federal Government invested billions on banks in 2008, billions into the auto industry in 2009, is now investing billions into Intel, but refuses to take any shares for some reason. It has this ideology of investing billions in the private sector to save industries key to national interest, but "state owning shares is spooky so we want nothing in return". It seems so backwards to me.
If the industry is that important to the country, maybe at least have a seat at the board of directors? You don't have no nationalize anything, but at least be in the same room. Other countries, from China to France, have demonstrated there's a lot of value in this state-private sector joint ownership.
I don't know what the right answer is, but the current status quo seemingly ain't it— not just in execution, but in ideology. Something fundamental is non-ideal.
You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
Possibly George W. Bush. His disastrous illegal invasion of Iraq marks the point, I think, where America really started going down the tubes.
Ideological change was needed.
By contrast, the US system of capitalism + democracy is not only blowing the rest of the world out of the water, it has shown itself to be remarkably resilient and responsive to change.
China has thus far prospered by being great at manufacturing. Can they innovate and change as needed? We’ll see.
The US has thus far prospered by being great at whatever is currently most profitable. Will they change as needed? Yes. Change is how their system works.
Let me put it this way. Everyone has heard of Maoism [1] of course. There's also Dengism, which does claims to not reject Marxism–Leninism or Maoism, but instead adapt them to the times China was going through [2]. Turns out what Mao believed might or might not be true, but it certainly wasn't working. A change in system of government wasn't needed, but a change in philosophy was.
Now Xi'ism [3] has been taking shape, and rightly so. The world, and China's place in it, are very different from where they were two decades ago. It doesn't seem to far-fetched to re-think what the purpose of that government is, what it believes to be true, and to figure out how to shape policy around it.
To give another example closer to the USA, in 2022 Mexican President Obrador held a rally, where outlined the philosophy of his political movement. Inheriting largely from what people had been calling Obradorism, he defined Mexican Humanism, which takes from the general current of mumanism but adapts it to the moral and ethic values, the needs, and other philosophical currents of Mexican politics [4].
It just seems to be there haven't been fundamental "-isms" in the USA in a while. The philosophy is the same. The USA considers its position in the world the same. The game the country is playing, it's purpose in the world, it's goals all seem the same as they did last century. All we get is "Bidenomics" or "Trumponomics", which are not so much philosophies, but just different ways of spending money within the confines of the same set of beliefs— corporatism, neoliberalism, hegemonism in the exterior, political nationalism in the interior.
IMO presidents and candidates here just seem to have so little substance in ideology. Bernie is the most recent one I can think that really talked ideology, and spoke widely about democratic socialism. He wasn't talking about tearing the constitution, just about thinking of different goals within the same framework of government.
I'm not surprised that "identity politics" takes over instead, and people come to worry about where the grandparents of a candidate were born. If candidates give you little philosophy to relate to, I guess you have to assume their philosophy based on their skin color.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maoism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping_Theory
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought
[4]: https://puedjs.unam.mx/revista_tlatelolco/el-concepto-de-hum...
The next crop of leaders will likely be much younger, and you’ll see new ideas.