At what point does the national security of our country become threatened if we farm out all of our manufacturing? How long does it take to build factories and train workers in the event we get cut off by major countries we currently buy from. Do we have sufficient redundancy of supplying countries that this isn’t much of an issue?
You can farm out manufacturing of toys, dishwashers, pinatas, clothes, furniture, cars, and many other goods all you want and it probably won’t make a difference to our national security, ever.
There is no current issue with losing manufacturing of defense articles (guns, missiles, etc) to overseas companies. These jobs are not moving overseas. There is a problem with fewer domestic sources of some high-tech weapons (e.g., there’s only two shipyards capable of making destroyers, only two companies capable of making an advanced fighter, etc).
There’s a lot of stuff in-between that makes it hard to answer. For example, microelectronics: we generally want to have a domestic source of microelectronics so that when we build an advanced weapon, we will be assured that they won’t fail if we get into a war with China because East Wind Manufacturing Concern #9 messed with the chips in some way. This is a very important issue for national security.
In Ted Koppel’s book “Lights Out”, he claims one of our biggest security risks is the brittle nature of our electrical grid. According to him, the risk is mainly concentrated in a group of huge (as in too big for roads) transformers that are no longer in production, have no backups, and could only be made by a few Asian firms.
According to him, the loss of one of these could leave millions without power, possibly for many months. The problems with designing, and manufacturing just one new one would be daunting. To add to the risk, many of these one-off designs are not only far too big for any roads, but they were placed in their locations using special rail cars. The rail cars necessary to move them no longer exist, and the track itself was taken up long ago. (Again, according to his book) We no longer have a way to manufacture one, or to move it into place if we could. But it’s probably OK since many have been working just fine since the 50’s. They’re only around 60 years old.
My wine consumption actually went up for awhile after reading that book. 
Taken in the context that we spend more money on national defense than the next dozen countries combined and most of them are our allies?
How many countries buy American weapons, military vehicles and aircraft?
I’m not sure if that’s as big a problem as you think. It’s not like wars have been won or lost over the past 30 years because we couldn’t build enough destroyers, tanks and aircraft.
The Lima Army Tank plant in Ohio literally produces more tanks than the Army needs. The Army told Congress this. Congress didn’t believe/care so they made a couple hundred more tanks that are going to go sit in storage somewhere. Presumably to fight some future war they will be obsolete for.
Offhand, I would say “many dozens.” The US is responsible for about a third of all international arms sales, probably roughly the amount of all European arms sales.
Out of curiousity, did you think it was a small number of countries that buy US weapons?
That is true, but it is also true that Americans have died because of limitations of US defense industrial capacity. (I’m not saying “insufficient” capacity; I’m using the word “limitations” very specifically.) When the US started sending heavy armored vehicles to Iraq and Afghanistan to protect troops against IEDs, there was a huge increase in production of those vehicles. But like any other product, they can only be built so quickly, and it took something like three years to field the required number of vehicles, known as MRAPs. Now the mobilization of industry to produce these MRAPs was extremely well done, and I am not alledging that industry didn’t do everything it could do to produce them very rapidly indeed. But it is a simple fact that it took quite a long time to build and field them, and that there were bottlenecks in the supply chain (for armor plate), production, kitting them with the proper radios, and transporting them overseas.
And the problem I meanly mean is that if DOD wants to buy something, the ability to have defense contractors compete against each other is declining. If we want to buy, say, a new fighter, it is now a duopoly for who can build one.
I’d like to ad that the idea that the US is losing a ton of manufacturing capacity is pretty much a myth. What we lost were manufacturing jobs because of increased automation of the manufacturing that is done here.
I’m more worried about food imports. The lessons of WWI are pretty stark.
Extremely unlikely to happen. A lot of people get the impression that there’s hardly any manufacturing in the US. There is but it’s not the sort of manufactured goods that the average person buys; it’s largely B2B rather than B2C. It also has very high productivity per worker and so employs comparatively few people. Advanced economies tend to have a comparative advantage for manufacturing high-end capital goods, not manufacturing cheap consumer goods.
Absolutely the loss of industrial capacity has national security implications. However, those tend to be increased costs, complexity and delay. To use Ravenman’s examples, the US would be absolutely right to not want to buy chips from the East Wind plant; at least for its weapon systems. However said East Wind plant makes most of the world’s supply.
Which means the US has to either setup its own plant and supply chain, or at least maintain one, a plant which is uneconomical, and cannot sell its product on the open market because it’s non competitive. So, it costs a lot more to source the chips and will take longer. Multiply that across dozens of components and finished product and you have a serious problem.
You see it in shipbuilding, the US does not really build large commercial vessels anymore so they have to keep these shipyards open to build large vessels (like carriers and LPHs), which means far more costs, operating at a much reduced rate (to ensure works don’t remain idle in between orders) and complexity, a lot more has the be made to order rather than employing commercial sources.
That’s not a problem with manufacturing, but with planning.
Nava - it is very clearly both.
So all the military weapons and aircraft etc. that the US is selling to other countries have self-destruct chips in them that the US can activate at any time, right?
Whether they do or whether they don’t, you can be sure that feature isn’t in the US’s advertising brochures.
So when somebody considers buying either a US or a Chinese weapon system they have to ask themselves “Who do you trust?”
The other issue is the prevalence of commercial components in military systems. There may not be many consumer chips in an F-35. But there are standard industrial chips in standard industrial networking gear used on the base and in the logistics systems, etc. Some of which come from suppliers that might have an incentive to install well-hidden backdoors. For simple commercial espionage if not for war-fighting.
Whether a putative back-doored router ends up installed at GM or at DoD or at Pizza Hut is luck of the draw. But two of those three possibilities would be valuable to a totalitarian / mercantilist regime. (Like Trump’s perhaps :eek:)
The US already knows everything they need to about their own weapon, specifically their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And if they install a chip in their export weapon there are two major potential complications
- It works when its not supposed to.
- The enemy figures out a way to activate it.
Since most US Weapon systems are sold in theory at least, in order for the receiving nation to be able to fight alongside US forces or at least for US interests it would be rather embarrassing if SACEUR in the middle of a Russian invasion gets a call saying “er sir all Turkish F16’s just simultaneously exploded”
Interestingly, perhaps the most effective counter-proliferation method has been export control lists. By making components and components of machines needed to fabricate nuclear components difficult to acquire, the would be nuclear power need to source all of them itself. Which makes a programme economically unfeasible long before it technicale feasibility is even considered.
Agreed. But …
It’s very helpful that nuclear engineering has little consumer / commercial applicability. So the business foregone by not selling e.g. ultracentrifuge parts to foreigners is minimal.
There’s a never-ending wail in the US from various medium-high tech manufacturers that various security-based US export control systems just leave the market for high tech thingies free for the Japanese, French, & Germans to exploit. Not to mention those perfidious mercantilist Brits. 
I’m talking things like NC lathes, design software, encryption, satellite parts, etc.
I’m not suggesting which side is right. Merely that political opposition from business is roughly exponential on the size of the market foregone. With nil concern for any other consequences. If the US did still have a large-scale consumer IC manufacturing sector there’s no way we wouldn’t be selling them en masse to the Chinese. Regardless of how many got installed in Chinese missiles.
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