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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Wars are mostly about who has the largest manufacturing capability.

China will win this anytime.

China's last real war was the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. They don't really have any experience in modern wars. How will they perform when real bullets are flying? Will the internal corruption prove to make them ineffective as the Russian military? Remains to be seen.

They supply both sides of the ukraine/russia conflict and massively arming themselves at the same time.

Some time in the near future the west is in for a very rude awakening.

Chinese manufacturing quality isn't great though. They make a lot of stuff incredibly cheap, but they don't hold up great in combat situations where they are exposed to mud, dirt, rain, get thrown around, etc.

Wars can be won on technological sophistication alone.

But does US really have more technological sophistication and will it make a difference?

Some of the smartest people I've encountered in academia were Chinese. One Chinese guy was so smart that it left my professor (and me) puzzled about the speed at which he could absorb complicated concepts. I also see Chinese people and institutions on many research papers these days. Imho, it is foolish to rely on Western military supremacy, as if that were a thing.

> But does US really have more technological sophistication and will it make a difference?

The US dominates in one thing right now: computers, and software in particular. That includes AI's.

Whether that's enough to win a war is anybodies guess. It's like predicting the effect AI will have on the future of work. A few million slaughter bots that rest in the sun in the country side to recharge via their solar panels is a terrifying thought. For now it's science fiction, but if the USA found itself in a war long enough, it would become a reality. Musk's problems with the reliability of AI driven FSD would vanish, so possibly it's a reality coming sooner than you might think. But would any war China found itself in last that long, given their manufacturing capacity?

Lets hope we don't find out.

which wars were won where one side had the greater manufacturing capability and the other side achieved a decisive win with technological advantage?

I cant think of any.

The First Opium War is the best example I could find: a small expeditionary force ran circles around a peer country's army for more than a year and crippled it thanks to total naval superiority and qualitatively better artillery and rifles.

The conquest of Aztecs is another example: Spain annihilated a country with twice the population. Though they cheated with bioweapons of course.

Most of the credit for the conquest of the Aztecs should be given to the hundreds of thousands of native soldiers fighting against the Aztecs, not "bioweapons" (which hurt both sides) or Spanish guns.

These wars predate the industrial revolution and manufacturing.

Moving the goalposts.

? They did not even have a concept for germs?

Smallpox and other germ diseases killed more natives than Spanish bullets did.

They are being jocular. Emit broken sounds of rapid exhalations to signal acceptance of the joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imjin_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_ship

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554633

largest military manufacturing capability. Things are more complicated than your ability to make golf carts, electric cars, plastic molds, etc.

Are they, though?

It wasn't true after Pearl Harbor, when the US turned its factories from making cars and radios and dolls into warships and weapons and combat boots.

Well it's more complicated than that. Modern manufacturing of weapon systems is far more complex than in 1942. Combat boots sure. But switching shipbuilders from civilian to military is a far more complex ordeal nowadays. Survivability now means far more integrated systems.

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