> And when we look back at our history, we see that in the 1950s and 1960s — the glorious postwar years of rapid and equitable growth and plentiful jobs — we spent far more on our military than we do now.
Yeah, but two important words in this sentence are no longer true today: equitable growth.
We taxed the ultra wealthy at a much, much higher rate than we do today and individual purchasing power was much higher.
The household median income in the U.S. in 1950 was $2,990 — roughly 40% of the median home value of $7,354 at the time, according to census data. This is no longer true as a median income doesn’t even qualify for 80% of purchasable homes today[0]
> We taxed the ultra wealthy at a much, much higher rate than we do today and individual purchasing power was much higher.
And colleges were free, too. People seem to forget this. But then somebody came along and undid all that, and by the 80s, things were going downhill fast.
We also heavily restricted immigration until the impact of the Immigration Act of 1965 started to accumulate in the 70s, 80s, and beyond. There are lots of correlations one can come up with to explain the change in balance between capital and labor and it is doubtful that any single variable is responsible for the majority of the change.
| equitable growth.
| We taxed the ultra wealthy at a much, much higher rate than we do today and
| individual purchasing power was much higher.
This is so tangential to the article that is borderline off topic. You don't solve the US defense problem by attempting to tackle something as politically challenging as major changes to US tax policy.
It’s not tangential at all. A key argument of the article is that we should spend more on the military like we did in the 50s. It’s important to point out how much the income structure of the government has changed since then.
Where are the dollars that show up on spreadsheets going?
> So anyway, if we’re going to be able to match Chinese military power — even in concert with all our friends and allies — we need to spend a lot more on the military. If you say this in public, someone will inevitably reply that “we spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined”,[1] and call for cutting defense spending in order to fund either social spending or tax cuts, depending on which side of the political aisle they fall. But what does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations when China can build warships at 200 times the rate we can? What does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations if we can’t even keep up enough munitions production to supply Ukraine?
> Nothing. Dollars on paper mean nothing; shells and missiles and ships are real things that can be counted. As with health care and housing and train stations and everything else,[2] Americans have deluded themselves into believing that as long as they allocate dollars to something in a spreadsheet, then valuable and useful real stuff is actually getting built. Again and again, that delusion has been shattered when excess costs and interminable delays block the paper dollars from becoming real tangible goods.
The delusion here is that some Americans believe that they can remain #1 forever. The hard truth is that countries like India and China that have 4x the population will ultimately have much larger economies and will thus be able to have larger military capabilities.
Except the rich and educated Indians and Chinese want to move to the US.
India and China having 4x the US’s population doesn’t mean anything if the top 5-10 productive percentile of their population emigrate to the US.
Further, unlike India and China which literally share a contested border, the U.S. is surrounded by extremely friendly nations and 2 oceans.
Further, the US has a 200+ year history of a relatively stable democracy whereas India is currently turning into whatever clown show Modi is trying to turn it into, and Xi Jinping has turned China into the kind of autocracy where he is telling highly educated Chinese that they should go back to their villages and try their hand at subsistence farming.
I would have thought the last 6 months of Chinese collapse, which should have been a post Zero COVID era of epic growth would have disabused people of the notion that people automatically means growth and success. China is currently beyond their demographic dividend and is now in the payback stage, having f’ed their demographics massively with their 1 child policy.
India is in the peak of their demographic dividend but instead of utilizing it to productive ends is engaged in the promotion of religious infighting and autocratic tendencies all to satisfy the power lust of 1 man and his lackeys.
> India and China having 4x the US’s population doesn’t mean anything if the top 5-10 productive percentile of their population emigrate to the US.
The richest, in India, China, and the US are not the "most productive" by any means. They're the most extractive. If we were immigrating hard workers, we wouldn't have labor shortages. Instead, we're immigrating investors who drive up real estate costs.
According to Zeihan, China, and to a lesser extent India, have a horrible demographics problem looming. The prediction was for a dramatic collapse in manufacturing capacity. China at least might have the central authority to kill all those too old to work or consume, but my understanding is that doesn't fit well with the predominant culture there which highly respects age. Also, the whole killing people thing...
All the nations, especially those that industrialized quickly are facing this problem. As industrialization correlates strongly with smaller families (don't need children to work the farm). But China compounded it with the one child policy. And they industrialized faster than almost anyone. India went straight for a service economy, that may be even worse. Russia... Not sure about Brazil.
The US delayed its demographic collapse via immigration. It might even effect a soft landing relative to the rest of the world if it can ramp back up manufacturing in a way that doesn't destroy shared resources or enforce permanent underclasses leading to revolt. That isn't an easy task.
pretty much everyone else with a public platform in geopolitical analysis has a low opinion of zeihan. this includes shapiro, papic, and other stratfor alumni who i pay attention to.
zeihan's analysis is performative and is designed to make him money, not provide value to anyone in the real world. wow, america's geography makes it invincible and china will collapse any day now because they suck at innovating. that's super insightful and original. i definitely haven't been hearing that repeated ad nauseum for literally 40 years.
It is better for a country to be realistic about it's place on the world. I live in the UK. There are still people here with an exaggerated idea of our importance which helps no one.
But if you're incapable of recognizing your reduced standing in the world, you can end up miscalculating the resistance from other nations as you promote your interests. Being unable to accurately assess the expectations of success of other nations in promoting their interests will just lead to runaway escalation and potentially a world war.
China has geographic and natural resource constraints which will make it quite difficult for them to ever surpass the USA regardless of population. They are deficient in most of the things necessary for a strong industrial economy including iron ore, fossil fuels, productive farmland, fertilizers, and navigable waterways.
The authoritarian dictatorship system they have adopted is also highly unstable. Dictatorships are only stable until some sort of catastrophic "black swan" event occurs, and then everything collapses faster than anyone expected. Their history is full of violent uprisings and civil wars. I wouldn't be surprised to see another one within our lifetimes. Even just maintaining the security apparatus necessary to control the populace is a huge drag on their economy.
> The hard truth is that countries like India and China that have 4x the population will ultimately have much larger economies and will thus be able to have larger military capabilities.
meanwhile they are still fighting with sticks in the Himalayas
Will they necessarily? I would expect culture and system of government to be factors in whether a country can not only support 1 billion plus people, but grow their economy too. Let alone natural resources
Nigeria also has a rapidly growing population that likely will exceed that of the United States in a couple of decades but that alone isn't the secret sauce to passing the US economically and militarily.
Just to put actual number into sight: that’s at least a billion people we are talking about. Even if a war happen 20 years from now and the US double its population while China has a population collapse, it’s still 400 million people++
Need we fear a war of bullets with China? Is this not merely another diabolical plot to kill the remaining Boomers (the last American generation who know how to shoot guns and save money) by engaging them in a war of attrition with China's analogous elderly population?
Location (which includes physical isolation from possible attackers), large population, natural resources (including relatively mild climate in large parts of its territory), available space for building, stable and relatively quick justice system, top notch advanced education, enormous scientific and industrial base. It's not as much as the US should or must be #1, it's just that it's hard not to be #1 given all of this.
China + Russian are also a great combination but have higher barriers (tougher climate, more variegated cultures and languages, separate political system, etc.)than USA.
Most of Russia's territory has hostile, cold weather. It has a ton of resources but also a ton of problems which explains its low population for the size of the territory. China is a closer comparison and no wonder it grew so quickly in the past decades.
Geographic benefits erodes with technology. Technology has compressed the world, global shipping gives actors with money and leverage access to resources around the world. Post war US power projection is based off the fact it has technology to reach others while others cannot reach CONUS. Which has/is going to change shortly. Now techology like precise long range strikes makes CONUS no better than Saudi. Having resource autarky =/= resource security when modern missiles can take out critical infra on CONUS. Geography matters less than ever.
As it happens, China is the same size as the US, has a lot of natural resources, and also large swaths of very fertile land (which partly explains why they have always had a large population) and, for instance, they are the largest producer of both wheat and rice in the world.
I recently heard (on some youtube video) that China has 10% of the world's farmland and 20% of the world's population.
Also, any country that is not extremely poor does mechanized farming, which has been described as "using land to turn petroleum into food", and most of the petroleum China uses comes from the Persian Gulf or even further away. (For example, I'm pretty sure that most of Russia's flow of petroleum to China comes via ports on the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea.) In contrast, (because of the fracking revolution) the US produces all the petroleum it needs domestically. If that changes in the future (for example because of a commitment to reducing carbon emissions cause regulations that discourage petroleum production in the US) then the US can probably make up any shortfall with petroleum from Canada.
And I'm pretty sure China must import most of its needs for 2 of the 3 major fertilizing commodities (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium).
And they get a lot of grain and oilseed for example from Ukraine or at least they did until Russia stopped the flow (according to a Youtube video I recently watched).
I see a lot of statements here to the effect of how screwed the US would be if it suddenly couldn't import things from China, but very little on how much more screwed China would be if it couldn't import things from other continents. At least the US can feed its population, keep the electricity on and keep the trucks moving on its highways without imports.
Cherry picked understanding from conditions 10+ years ago.
PRC agriculture has absolute food security in terms of domestic calorie production and was net fertilizer exporter via coal gasification in 2010s but turn importer after coal crack down due to green initiatives. Coal back on menu due to recent geopolitics that prioritize energy/good security
PRC can feed herself with domestic inputs worst case scenario. With surplus if she moves to mechanical farming - current 200m farm household basically make job programs with lots of farmers pursuing cash crop instead of efficient calories.
Finally discussion on import dependency is really dog whistle for what happens if US tries to cut off PRC SLOCs in which case it's really a discussion on resource security not autarky. And reality is US is as vulnerable as PRC now - we are in era of advanced rocketry where 150 blown up refineries sets US energy and agriculture into stone age, highly automated ag especially vulnerable. In a peer war where homeland critical infra is being degraded, US can feed population as much as PRC, which is to say not at all. All that shale and blessed farm land means nothing if you can't process what you extract. Blocking shipping is just down the logistics chain than hitting production facilities themselves. The entire fortress america narrative collapsed once US adversaries like PRC gained global strike and now US is vulnerable like everyone else.
I've read that it is estimated that China has the largest recoverable shale gas reserves in the world and some think that its oil shale reserves may exceed those of the US.
So it's not that China hasn't got the natural resources, it's that at the moment it isn't exploiting them as much as the US do.
Interesting. Peter Zeihan says (or said about 2 years ago) that the US is currently the only country with the engineering expertise to exploit shale deposits, so Washington could probably prevent China from exploiting that resource for a decade or 2 if it wanted to (i.e., by making it illegal for petroleum engineers and experts in the US to work in China).
US manufacturing is an all time high and the population is still growing. China has been below replacement levels for birth rate long enough that their population is actually shrinking.
This is absurdly incorrect in the context of the article. As just one example - the US shuttered more than half of its ship building capacity after the Soviet Union fell. You cannot convert a foreign owned Toyota auto assembly plant into a shipyard. And, it would be nice if US economic stats made a distinction between manufacturing and assembly. A lot of what you call manufacturing is simply the low skilled combining of parts made overseas.
The US government coming in and forcibly taking control of a Toyota auto assembly plant located on US soil won't do anything to move it 320 miles down 65 from Huntsville, Alabama to the (gulf) coast. I'm no shipbuilder, but I get the impression that shipyards are typically near the ocean.
Oh, if the issue at hand is because of its physical location, then you're right, although it could still manufacture parts. I thought the GP was emphasizing the fact that it was owned by a non-US company.
The US makes almost nothing on its own and I expect you know that, and the US population would be shrinking at a suicidal rate if not for mass human labor trafficking from the 3rd world.
The U.S. imports children. It doesn’t need to make any.
And this is particularly hilarious in the context of China which has already gone beyond its demographic dividend further worsened by their one child policy.
Also, the U.S. has a birth rate or 1.2, whereas China has a birth rate of 1.1 and dropping.
The DoD requires a significant percentage of war materials to be manufactured in the US for strategic reasons. You don’t to be unable to make bullets/boots/etc in a war because all the factories that manufacture that stuff are in the country you’re fighting. But that also extends to the components to manufacture that stuff like shoes laces, optical cables, screws etc etc.
However having small scale manufacturing in the US inherently means less automation and high labor costs. Meanwhile China which is already manufacturing most things at scale doesn’t need to pay a premium for this stuff.
It’s debatable how much this is necessary, but war is more about logistics than most people assume.
As an engineer, I would like to see improvements in efficiency:
> Americans have deluded themselves into believing that as long as they allocate dollars to something in a spreadsheet, then valuable and useful real stuff is actually getting built. Again and again, that delusion has been shattered when excess costs and interminable delays block the paper dollars from becoming real tangible goods.
From construction of transportation to housing to energy infrastructure, things seem to take forever to build. California's high speed rail may never be completed.
> California's high speed rail may never be completed.
It will be, but only because it's not really optional in the long term. It's super-expensive, but the alternatives are even more expensive in the very long term.
Zoom is much less expensive. Though not a replacement for all use cases, the best 'bang for the buck' for transportation infrastructure comes from demand destruction. Of course, there are many ways to destroy demand, some with unacceptable side effects, but more emphasis on structuring business in ways that can lessen the demand for business travel is going to be much more valuable with less cost than building more ways of moving ugly bags of mostly water long distances.
I love the bizarre class biases you get on forums like these. I hate to break it to you, but the majority of jobs still require physical presence -- over 70%, in fact. And business travel is already way down -- it now represents only 12% of US air travel. And people still move far from family for various reasons. Are they supposed to maintain all of their relationships via Zoom?
Sorry, the solution is not going to be "everybody stay home".
So what? No one is going to commute to work on the California HSR routes. Much of the original business case was based on business travel. Now it seems the passenger demand may be lower than expected.
I doubt it. The alternative to high speed rail is adding more lanes to I-5, and perhaps expanding capacity at some of the major airports. Those upgrades would be cheaper than HSR.
It doesn’t help that there’s a historic shortage of construction labor[0]. Efforts to improve throughput are meaningless if the most important resource, labor, cannot be procured.
Exactly. You know Bill Burr's joke about how every racist conversation begins with "I'm not racist, but..."?
I feel like these "labor shortage" statements should preface themselves with "I don't believe in forced labor, but..." There's no acknowledgement of the rights and agency of the workers themselves.
Anyway, carrying on with the discussion, there's plenty of those positions that pay better than average, or even way better than average, but the skilled people just aren't in the area yet.
Obviously you can pay a million dollars an hour to get people to come from anywhere.
My point is: pay is only one of many market forces impacting this specific industry. Markets are inefficient.
Sometimes, it's just not knowing how to do hiring! How to properly advertise roles, without leaving out signals that make or break employees calling you.
If all out war breaks out between two nuclear powers I don’t think 155mm production/stockpiles are going to be quite as impactful as these folks say.
A lot of these screeching hawks are the same who were warning about the capabilities of Russia. China is still well behind technologically, and is also highly dependent on key imports for a lot of military components.
> If all out war breaks out between two nuclear powers I don’t think 155mm production/stockpiles are going to be quite as impactful as these folks say
Yes they are. Traditional war will occur right up to the point where one of the two sides begins to lose particularly badly and throws down the nuclear card as a fail safe. The nuclear card would not be thrown in the beginning in a war between two major powers, that would only happen early on in a situation where eg Iran had nukes and got into a war with the US (weaker power vs superpower, early nuke card).
What do you think the US will reach for if it cant make ordinary supplies? The nukes. We don’t want that. And even if we did who says China can’t shoot our nukes down? All our eggs in the nukes basket is not a good strategy. It doesn't work in Civ either fwiw.
"But what does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations when China can build warships at 200 times the rate we can?"
Nothing - Physical attacks are becoming increasingly uninteresting, and our ability to target areas and kill everyone in an area don't need hundreds of warships anyway. That's only necessary if you want to be careful.
But much more importantly, taking out useful infrastructure no longer requires bombing literally all of it. Increasingly, you can render large swaths of civilian infrastructure totally unusable (and cause many many casualties) without firing many bullets or bombs.
As a result, being able to outgun China is becoming increasingly useless as a measure of whether you can "win".
(and this assumes nobody wants to just obliterate each other, but instead wants people left standing or land left usable)
This isn't to say there is no transition period, but this article definitely doesn't make an argument for skating to where the puck will be in the future, only skating to where the puck might be in the past.
> Nothing - Physical attacks are becoming increasingly uninteresting, and our ability to target areas and kill everyone in an area don't need hundreds of warships anyway. That's only necessary if you want to be careful.
It does if you want to ship raw materials and goods to and fro, especially via sea lanes. It is if you want to get access to the sources of raw materials and can place troops in those areas to prevent someone else from getting access to them.
That was a large part of the context of WW2 in the Pacific.
When push comes to shove, the bigger stick wins. You can’t win a war today on just the cyber front, either. The military isn't blind, they have cyber offense and defense programs, bio programs, even a freaking space force. I don’t think the puck has really moved much at all and we haven’t had a war to “skate to” anyway so nothing you say comes from any experience with war. I think the article is simply arguing that we need to get back in shape, and we have to do that based on the programs and exercises that we know work.
If you aren't familiar with Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order, I can't recommend it enough (both the book and the YouTube video). You'll understand a lot better where the U.S. is in it's history and why so much is the way it is.
> The United States is in big trouble militarily. That’s the upshot of a new RAND publication…
So the defense think tank says we need to spend more on defense. Stop the presses!
Listen, if China literally attacks the US directly, the whole world has already lost. You might as well worry about how well-prepared we are for a direct comet strike.
I’m surprised that that the Ukraine war wasn’t talked about more. Not only did we go through a significant number of shells, but it also shows that the traditional warfare that large countries like the USA and Russia are geared for is out of touch. It’s like bringing a knife to a metaverse fight. Drones, portable missiles, and small groups have proven incredibly effective. Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy and Russian ships are wary of coming within a few dozen miles of the shore. Not only do we need to refactor our military for productivity, but we need to rethink what we want to build.
I once gave a presentation to a group of Senior Department of Defense managers on the role that management must play in the transition to modern software engineering. After I introduced risk-driven iterative development and it's ability to reduce waste and improve predictability by identifying and resolving big risks before making large investments, one of them suddenly rose and exclaimed
"If I had a nickel for every time we flushed $50M down the toilet, I'd be a rich man!"
There is enormous waste in the Department of Defense. Eliminating it would provide all of the funding needed - and then some.
military expansion into real territory and economic territory have some similarities; civilian economic activity produces goods and services (and culture) while military simply consumes, at least.
cage the beast
edit in fairness, some technology from dot-mil is quite good, and this forum is an indirect descendant of that. Dot-mil, in return for ample budgets and long timelines, brings tech back to civilian purposes, including addressing Climate and related. So, partnering with good limits, not blank checks, seems productive and appropriate. Dot-mil can pay society for producing and enriching them.
Last I checked, the USA spends more on military than the next nine nations, combined. Do we need to spend _more_, or do we need to change how we spend the vast amounts already collected?
Does a weaker US conventional military make nuclear war more or less likely? Does it make the world more or less stable. Does it cause alliances of democratic nations to strengthen or weaken, particularly in countries like South Korea?
These are questions worth asking as one considers priorities.
@dang Does this need to be flagged? Increased defense spending or changing defense spending priorities is an interesting topic that dovetails with both entrepreneurship and emerging technologies.
The U.S. military has turned into little more than a glorified but lethal jobs program.
Since the U.S. doesn’t do “socialism” but some degree of socialism is very useful to keep your population productive, the US government has decided to hide its socialism in the guise of the military instead of just having a normal jobs program and/or industrial policy.
If the U.S. were to actually run the military for defensive purposes right now half the states in the country would go bankrupt and it would hit a massive recession.
Fortunately within the past year or so the US has begun returning to actual industrial policy so hopefully it can now start shifting its military to focus on actual military ends rather than as a job works program.
I'm coming at this from the technical publications side of things, but the same story is true for literally everything in MIL-STD acquisitions / procurement.
Let's say I'm a single-digit-headcount business and I have an amazing cupholder for the US Army. It's absolutely bulletproof, it fits all their vehicles, it's got a printed circuit thing in it that does all sorts of stuff, and it's maintenance-free (only needing to be tossed into the return bin when it goes bad).
I go to sell it to the army.
"But wait!" they say. "You need to provide MIL-STD-3031 documentation!".
OK. Where do I learn how to make documents in 3031 format?
"Ah, here is the standard implementation from LDAC. Pretty sweet, huh? Off you go!"
I page through 3031's LDAC implementation, and, lo-and-behold, the only spec files are for PTC Styler, an inordinately priced (and terrible) piece of software.
"Just add it to the contract!" says the Army. My LRIP charges go up by almost double, and now I have an entirely separate doc toolchain that needs to be sustained basically forever.
I float a review of the documentation, but it finds its way beyond the Procurement guys to the actual Program Office. The Program Office says, "3031?! No one uses 3031. It's faggy Euro S1000D crap. Use 38784 (MIL-STD-38784)."
38784 comes from where? "Oh, call these guys. Five Old Ex-Officers, Incorporated. They'll set you straight. Add 'em to the contract. They'll know how to do it. They're old buddies."
But wait, I say. What about 3031?
"Oh, just do a 3031 release for the requirement, and do rev service in 38784."
Needless to say, Five Old Ex Officers has me on a whole different toolchain, with no overlap whatsoever. The 3031 toolchain is running parallel. Needless to say, neither of these doc formats is parseable by any software written in the last two decades.
Do you want to know the running tab for documentation on this goddamn cupholder, before a single document has been put to paper? Assuming one writer and two reviewers, we're up to more than 150k annually, just for license costs and basic "maintenance" (which you can't opt out of - that's in the spec too)- not including styler, initialization, or whatever else, which will also include paying to bring a vendor team on-prem because you can't do cloud anything (due to ITAR and other requirements).
That's going to be, over five years, well over a million dollars. A million dollar cupholder manual - not even including the charges for doing any of the actual work (charges which will, themselves, be inflated because of the toolchain idiocy).
Now, repeat this for literally everything in the US Military.
Yeah.
These shenanigans need the world's biggest sledgehammer, yesterday, because I guarantee the PLAN doesn't do this bullshit. They need a manual, they find the best way to do a manual for the mission. You screw with that, you get re-educated.
Of course, "mission" is a big part of our problem here - the damage done to procurement over the period of the aughts was awesome, and can't be overstated. The GWOT was a farce. The Obama-era "drone war" was horribly counterproductive. The fact that we had only "acting" executive leadership from 2016-2020 didn't help things either; there are a lot of things that "Acting" SecDefs can't sign off on or force. Anyway. It's nothing a determined polity can't overcome. It all depends on how "determined" we want to be. I suspect that, as with 1941, "determination" will be fueled by dead and dying sailors in far off ports.
Yeah, but two important words in this sentence are no longer true today: equitable growth.
We taxed the ultra wealthy at a much, much higher rate than we do today and individual purchasing power was much higher.
The household median income in the U.S. in 1950 was $2,990 — roughly 40% of the median home value of $7,354 at the time, according to census data. This is no longer true as a median income doesn’t even qualify for 80% of purchasable homes today[0]
0: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/eighty-percent-homes-market...