Why is chip making a critical defense industry?
Go fight a war with 1960s technology against a modern adversary and find out.
I'd suggest you do some of your own research to get up to speed, because your question is akin to "why to people need to eat food?"
Not a great argument considering Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen (read: Houthis), and further back Vietnam and North Korea all wrecked the US military one way or nine anothers.
The US military has historically fucking sucked at fighting underteched enemies.
If we are concerned about national security, I would look into why we can't win wars against bass ackwards goat herders and jungle men instead of silicon that won't even see military applications for at least a few more decades.
In case you missed the memo: The US Navy admits the Houthis are giving them the hardest time since World War II and they don't even fucking have warships. We spent over two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq to end up losing them. China only has to send weather balloons to draw F-22s out. The pullout from Vietnam is still one of the biggest embarrassments in American history.
The moral of picking a fight using 1960s technology is: You will win. End of. Turns out the best way to kill someone is to just fire shit their way and kill them, who knew.
Putting it another way: We're losing wars whether we make our silicon toys here or in Taiwan or if Taiwan gets China'd. I want my tax dollars put to better use than Intel.
I think you should move to China, instead of moving all of us there. If you hand China all the technological cards, because muh tax dollars, that's just what you'll do. The international order will reconfigure around China and its desires, and the US will become increasingly irrelevant as it looses capability and walks down the value chain towards a resource extraction and agriculture economy.
And don't think the market will create a new domestic entry into one of these capital-heavy industries, once the domestic competitor is gone: it'll always be cheaper to buy from China, so the market will buy from China. It'll take a lot more taxpayer money to build a new Intel foundry business than to save the existing one.
They already have all the cards, thinking that we still hold the cards is delusional. The changeover of eras hasn't caught up yet, but it's only a matter of time.
No, rather than mulling over spilt milk that has dried out and stank like death, I would rather we put our tax dollars towards the milk that's still in the glass. Reform our military and politics so we can fucking win wars again if we must wage them at all. Rebuild our fucking crumbling infrastructure. Divest ourselves of all the fucking lard that has accumulated during Pax Americana.
If we can't find a practical reason to have domestic silicon factories then so be fucking it, that's reality. I want to see my tax dollars spent towards something other than against an immovable object.
So how long did the Afghani and Iraqi governments stand up to the US military? Weeks? Maybe a month? They got steamrolled by modern military technology.
> and further back Vietnam and North Korea all wrecked the US military one way or nine anothers.
Those countries had access to then state-of-the-art military technology. A 1960s tech vs 1960s tech war is not a good stand to reason about a 1960s tech vs 2020s tech war.
> If we are concerned about national security, I would look into why we can't win wars against bass ackwards goat herders and jungle men...
The US has qualms about many tactics that could defeat an insurgency (e.g. massacres, attacking hostile civilian organizations), your hypothetical advanced US adversary may not have those qualms, so I wouldn't rely on them. Also its political system doesn't have the attention span to really stay long enough to subdue a population through other means.
> ...instead of silicon that won't even see military applications for at least a few more decades.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is today.
I'm not advocating for war, weapons, defense budgets, etc., but this doesn't seem like a bad thing if it's providing jobs and chip alternatives for the US and the world. It seems like Taiwan is going to cease being independent at some point.