https://original.antiwar.com/Richard_Morchoe/2022/12/05/it-is-time-for-neutralism/

No doubt there is. But what would we find if we scratch the surface?

I keep returning to the time when I needed to replace the spark plugs in my old truck. Went to the auto store and bought a set of mother & apple pie All American OEM AC Delco spark plugs. Solid & beautifully made. Packet in small letters noted “Made in China”.

Go to the hardware store and look at the nuts & bolts, the saws, the hammers. Mostly “Made in China”. Remember the fuss some years back that the US military was paying $800 for a hammer? If someone had to set up a production line in the US to make a few hammers, then $800 would not be an unlikely price. And the steel for the hammer would probably be imported anyway.

If we look at the bolts and the electric motors and sensors inside the machine tools in US factories which build US military jets, we might be surprised to find how many imported parts they contain. In a similar factory in China, I would bet there are very few imported parts.

Military power rests on manufacturing capabilities. And we all can see that much of that former US capability is now in China & Mexico.

Indeed! Fully agree. Apparently, the Biden* MalAdministration does not. Hence their very dangerous continual expansion of the proxy war in the Ukraine. Unless the US “leadership” changes course, nuclear war is tragically inevitable.

Theres a huge amount of effort in DoD to verify that U.S. military gear is made domestically or by approved foreigners. This is much aided by the fact that the U.S. is far and away the global leader of the aerospace industry, unlike with e.g. ships. Are they perfect? Definitely not. But there is a massive effort and it has an effect.

As to things escalating to nuclear conflict, in any U.S./China conflict, preventing it from getting nuclear is going to be the focus of us policy makers. I can see a lot of plausible paths for that to happen, and a lot of ways for them to fuck it up. The goal of U.S. Defense policy should be making sure we never have to find out if they’re up to the challenge.

We should be very careful about extrapolating from Great Power vs Goatherd conflicts to actual direct Great Power conflict. US versus Taliban can (and did) go on for years, resulting in US defeat, and no-one in the US cares. Great Power conflict is different. The US would not be able to shrug it off if China sank a couple of US aircraft carriers, nor could China shrug of an analogous battle loss. Very high probability that whichever side took a serious loss would escalate. Then it would be Goodnight Eileen.

As for US aircraft production superiority, we really have to wonder about the supply chain. How many parts of high-end aircraft are imported? How much of the materials are imported (eg titanium from — oops! — Russia)? What about the tools used, and the sub-components of those tools? In the unlikely event that a Great Power conflict did drag on, there is a high probability that the US would find holes in the supply chain. China might face similar problems, but it would have the advantage of having a much bigger, more modern manufacturing base to co-opt.

Stop…stop…

https://ibb.co/qdrVZwB