China also makes a huge amount of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, electronic components, and parts for capital equipment. Decoupling from them would be very painful.

Everyone has outsourced all their cheap and low-quality manufacturing to China, therefore China is only capable of manufacturing cheap, low quality items. Is this your argument?

My argument is we have not outsourced bombs and sensitive military technology building to china. It is mostly the stuff we can stand to tighten belt on. Even if there is some demand for things like chinese medicine or whatever, its a market effect and not because only china is capable of making this medicine like how only US defense industry can make some of its secretive military tooling.

This is really out of date thinking, even South Korea is better at making ships than America now. In wartime China would switch from gadgets to bombs and drones and out produce us by an order of magnitude. They already produce 3x more vehicles than America; It’s 2024, not 1956. Review the article called “The return of industrial warfare”.

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...

Look at american shipbuilding in 1938 and compare it to 1944 and understand looking at peacetime warmaking capacity makes zero sense.

looks like a great article. thx for posting.

China makes a lot of electronics on which our infrastructure and logistics run. Much good a gun or a bomb will do you if you suddenly cannot get them from point A where they are made/stored to point B where they need to be used on time.

There is no scenario where the US military cannot move a bomb from point A to B. Everything else would sooner stop than that ability.

Look at the rate at which munitions are expended on the frontlines in Ukraine, for example. Those kinds of amounts need the transportation network to be working in good order. Bring down a single major logistics hub, and bad things happen.

If the US were truly engaged production would scale up like it did in wwii. We can always go back to a centrally planned economy.

I'm not talking about production here, but delivery. For that you need roads and railroads, bridges etc to function. How many of those are susceptible to digital takedowns?

Although factories are also an interesting case if they are not airgapped.