I was watching Band of Brothers again, and one of the most memorable scenes isn't a battle. It's after Germany has surrendered. A column of German POWs is marching down the road, and an American GI yells at them:

quote:

You thought you were gonna beat us? You had horses. We had trucks. You went to war against General F$&@#* Motors and Ford.

It's also one of the best explanations for why the Allies won World War II. Population and industrial capacity beats engineering brilliance over time. The United States built roughly 310,000 military aircraft to Germany's about 120,000, over 60,000 tanks to Germany's roughly 20,000, and nearly three million trucks while the Wehrmacht still relied on more than a million horses to move much of its army.

By 1944, American factories were producing more war material than the entire Axis combined. Germany didn't lose because it lacked technology. It lost because it went to war against the largest manufacturing machine in history.

The uncomfortable truth is that we've spent the last thirty years dismantling that advantage. Today, China produces roughly half of the world's steel, dominates commercial shipbuilding, leads the world in batteries, drones, electronics, machine tools, and rare-earth processing, and has a manufacturing sector that is larger than the United States' by a wide margin. This isn't just about GDP or cheap consumer goods. It's about the ability to build things, millions of them, quickly and continuously.

The warning signs are here. The wars in Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated that modern warfare consumes equipment at a staggering rate. Drones are lost by the thousands. Artillery shells by the millions. Precision weapons disappear from inventories far faster than anyone expected. Replenishing stocks of advanced interceptors and long-range precision munitions isn't measured in weeks or months, it's measured in years. The bottleneck isn't money. It's factories.

In a prolonged war against China, people picture carrier battles and fifth-generation fighters. If your industrial base is large enough, you don't need every weapon to be “exquisite” (I hate this Pentagon buzzword…). You can overwhelm an opponent with mass. Tens of thousands of cheap airborne drones. Vast numbers of unmanned surface vessels like the ones Ukraine and the US have recently used. Missiles produced faster than they can be intercepted. Losses replaced faster than the other side can inflict them. Quantity becomes a weapon in its own right.

That's what the GI understood instinctively. He wasn't bragging about the M1 Garand or the Sherman tank. He was bragging about Ford and General Motors. He understood that wars between great powers are ultimately won by industrial capacity. For most of the twentieth century, America was the country with Ford and General Motors. Today, China is.

I don't think we've fully grasped what that means. We are literally the Roman Empire in the waning days, beset by internal problems and militarily dominant, but not realizing that success and survival hinges on a very few factors.

The hollowing out of the US is treason on the highest scale, and the tariffs were just a tiny attempt to rectify it. Belgium, Madagascar, and Canada are not threats to the US… China is, and should be the only recipient of tariffs at a scale that reverses the trend until this is solved.

EDIT: I realize this came across like an article, that wasn’t my intention; started writing it, and it spiraled from there.

In parallel to your ‘article’, and thank you for writing it, is this piece from Conservative Treehouse. . .

“Mike Steger (Promethean Action) Explains Why U.S-Canada Trade Conflict Represents Much More”

https://theconservativetreehou...ch-more/#more-285519

. . .which delves into China’s aggressive action to dismantle the EU’s / U.K.’s domestic and export automotive sector, and is now moving in on Canada to do the same, which also serves as a foothold to enter the U.S. automotive manufacturing sector.

Europe is hosed, and the same cannot be allowed to happen to the USA.

The fatal flaw in your argument is that China lacks the natural resources to produce the energy to fuel its manufacturing. Energy fuels both manufacturing and militarizes.

One of the reasons Germany lost WW2 is that the US had absolute energy dominance over Germany as we produced 1000x more oil and 1.25x more coal. We were able to power our manufacturing plants with good ole American oil & gas while simultaneously supplying long range naval logistics to our air force, army, and navy.

One of the reasons Japan lost WW2 is that the US had absolute energy dominance over Japan as we produced 200x more oil and 11x more coal. We were able to power our manufacturing plants with good ole American oil & gas while simultaneously supplying long range naval logistics.

Let's compare the US and China right now in terms of energy:

the US has 3x more domestic crude oil production capability than China

the two countries refine nearly the identical amount of crude oil into refined products (e.g. gasoline, diesel, jet, etc).

The above means that China's manufacturing capability is very susceptible to the US navy starving them of crude oil.

To offset this somewhat China has done better than us with their version of the strategic petroleum reserve. They currently are sitting on a whopping 1.4 billion barrels of crude oil and we've drawn ours down to 311 million. China actually has approx a billion more storage capacity unused, and the US has 400 to 500 million more storage capacity unused.

Now let's look at nuclear powered navies:

US has 11 nuclear powered carriers; China has zero

US is building nuclear powered guided missile destroyers; no known plans for China to build

US has 65 nuclear powered submarines, china has 12.

In other words, China's navy is very dependent on petroleum

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Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity

DISCLAIMER: These are the author's own personal views and do not represent the views of the author's employer.

“I remember in Italy in 1946, when I was detailed to guard German prisoners of war. One of the prisoners was a tough lieutenant captured at Salerno. He spoke English, so I whiled away my duty hours giving him a hard time. Once I asked why, if he and all he Kraut friends were such brilliant soldiers and supermen, was a 15 year old me the one holding the weapon and he was a prisoner of war? He answered me with a story. “I was an 88-mm anti-tank battery commander,” he said. “We were on a hill and the Americans kept sending tanks down the road below. Every time they sent a tank, we knocked it out. They kept sending tanks, and we kept knocking them out, until we finally ran out of ammunition. The reason I’m here,” he finished his story, “is the Americans didn’t run out of tanks.” - David Hackworth

tatortodd, very well said. I worked in O&G myself, China is 70% powered by coal. Factories don’t really run on oil, and they produce (along with Russia and Central Asia pipelines) roughly 7 mbpd, or about 50% of current needs in a non wartime scenario.

Given their strategic reserve, and assuming a 7 mbpd drawdown, China can go an entire year without a single crude delivery via ship if they top up their reserves.

Also, their oil consumption would drop drastically in wartime, as they would limit much of the logistics/commercial usage.

We have about a dozen carriers; once those are gone, our ability to project power is greatly diminished. China has 50% of the world’s shipbuilding capacity, we have less than 1%. Similar to armor in Ukraine, the future of naval combat may be thousands upon thousands of small unmanned naval vessels, China can churn those out at a scale we cannot comprehend.

I’m not talking about today, this instant; I’m talking about 3, 6, 9, 12 years in the future. We are at the tipping point.

doom and gloom because your pants are on fire over iran. And of course its trumps fault. Yeah I know you say you supposedly voted for him.

Please address the subject matter of this thread, if you have a problem in another thread, continue the discussion there.

NONE of this, literally none, is Trump’s fault. In fact, he’s the only president who is making an effort to reverse this.

And I did vote for him, whether you chose to believe that or not.

This could of been discussed in the iran thread. But addressing it here, sure. It is bullshit. How's that?

What does the subject of this thread, China manufacturing and industrial power, have to do with Iran?

Because you think this dust up in the ME is china's and russia's doing. Which it is to a large degree for sure. Will china attack Tiwan. Most likely they will. Will the war in ukraine have an impact on this iran conflict. Most likely so. All of this is tied together and we will have to see how it plays out. Delaying this conflict was ultimately going to make us weaker and them and their alliance stronger. This was inevitable as one major step to keep the USA viable well in to the future. There is another major one and that is restoring our country from within.

I see what you are saying, but the ME has nothing to do with this. This started with Nixon, accelerated by Clinton.

It’s been decades in the making, no wars or skirmishes have altered that. I agree with everything you wrote, but this is a deep, systemic issue that has resulted in suffering in the US (the hollowing out of our industrial base), and it really has zero to do with what is happening in Ukraine or Iran.

It does. This has been brewing for decades. What you are talking about is exactly what I am talking about also. But it is a deep dive if you go back to the beginning which is what you are eluding to.

Great thread and topic — this harkens back to one of my tours in Newport, RI and earning a Masters Degree at the Naval War College. I won’t attempt to provide commentary on the politics or arbitrate positions between Reloader and Ole Rugged Cross. Instead, I will opine on something I personally spent many years at sea and ashore contemplating — war with the PRC.

First, however, some historical perspective — Notwithstanding the relatively supremacy in our manpower, industrial, and logistical base, once the German U-Boat threat was effectively eliminated from the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, the ultimate defense was the unscalable (by the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine) distance of the U.S from the front lines. Important to consider when contemplating the much larger and more vast scale of the Pacific than the Atlantic.

In addition to your well articulated hypothesis, I submit one of the greatest challenges in a potential or likely war with the PRC is the societal and cultural divides of the citizenry and how that would manifest into a conviction of finality in what would be extremely costly in both blood and treasure. What is the CCP’s ability to influence and coerce their populace versus our government? Today, in a relatively benign but very contentious domestic environment, coalescing a unified approach on any issues of consequence has proven impossible.

Although we would likely be fighting an away game, one must postulate the adversary has planned for both kinetic and non kinetic strikes on our own citizens and critical infrastructure to include cyber, drones, missiles, and SOF direct action against military as well as industrial, agricultural, and economic targets, etc. These actions would certainly upend the nature of that benign environment and potentially further fracture any consensus.

Presuming it didn’t escalate to a nuclear conflict, I suspect conventional exchanges would be relatively short in duration (weeks to months) between the U.S. and PRC. However, the resulting losses (referring back to aforementioned cost in blood and treasure) could be on a scale comparable to WWII with the potential for rivaling our Civil War — we aren’t prepared for either scenario.

I am not a defeatist but before entertaining modern combat with a peer (combat power, manufacturing base, and ability to exercise mobility as an offensive or defensive weapon) you had better damned well be convicted to utterly defeat the adversary’s FUTURE ability to wage kinetic, non kinetic, and economic warfare against you. If not, as paraphrased from
King of the Hill, “You will be on the ass end of the pyramid old top!”

Again not to say we couldn’t expend all of our conventional ordnance, kill much of the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force and Navy…but the enemy gets a vote and this one ain’t driving camels in the desert!

Godspeed and Good Hunting, Always

The 13 colonies did not have the privilege and benefit of privilege of population and industrial capacity.

They had balls and "enough of their shit".

Same thing in WWII, that was added to the benefit of privilege of population and industrial capacity.

We no longer prevail since WWII, because we cashed in our balls for the "love of the spoils of war", that led to complacency, disconnect, and the importance of the image in the mirror, over the face of the never ending number of those who desire to take no matter the cost or time.

While the person looking upon his reflection, imagines his morals, ideals and desires are ingrained upon all others, simply because it seems to be the logical thing.

Balls men, do you have them?

There is another tipping point in play in China- the population there seems genuinely tired of a communist regime that does nothing to enrich its own citizens lives. The next generation isn’t interested in being slave labor as a form of national pride.

Add in that recent conflicts have exposed the fact that Chinese weapons are absolute trash compared to more advanced weapon systems to the point that they don’t dare even try to take a far smaller and numerically less armed Taiwan defended by superior weapons and the threat of loss of the microchip industry they covet gaining control over.

Chinas numerical advantage will be nullified by their own shitty hardware in anything but a nuclear exchange.

Gee. All the that above is certainly true and will be hardest to overcome but the big part of our lack of being able make things is the paralysis brought on by endless meetings, discussions, regulations, safety measures, environmental concern, etc.
Nothing gets accomplished because of endless “what if”.

An attack on our soil will motivate a large portion of the population. But foreign battles are too abstract for a lot of people, and domestic politics undermine the ability to fight away from home.

We see how within just weeks even conservative Trump supporters complain about lack of a definitive victory in Iran. Convincing the population to support a war with China over Taiwan would be nearly impossible.

A Christian perspective on the matter of the OP title "The United States has been led to ruin since WWII" is...

We began to worship the blessings, rather than the blesser.

Sigmonkey got it right with his mention of our "love of the spoils of war".

In anguish and desperation, starting in the Great Depression, and culminating in WWII, we turned toward God. We temporarily praised Him in the wake of the war, but eventually a young generation living in an age of unprecedented prosperity shifted their focus away from God. The effect was compounded by the previous generations dying. With those generations that had the broader and deeper perspective gone, the new generations turned toward the world.

It's a recurring topic in preaching: The decline of Godliness in America starting in the mid 20th century.

I do not think the quote from the movie was quite accurate. Germany had some great technology but could not manufacture it. That is why we stole their rocket scientists after the war. That is a far cry from arguing we have trucks and they had horses.

Technology will be what wins wars, look at the simple things Ukraine used to battle Russia. I Would have never thought that simple drones would be so effective. Any world war in the future with major powers will end with nuclear weapons. At least that is my view.

Our stuff is great...until we run out of it. We had years to prep for WWI...and WWII. Start up factories, switch the ones we had from cars to planes and tanks, expand steel mills, open new shipyards in time to pump out new ships while the war's still going, etc.

With all our overseas commitments, and boots on ground in bases, we aren't likely to have years to prep for the next bit of fun.

Our current high-tech stuff is designed to do its job and spare American lives doing it. Well and good, and it's great stuff. It is *not* designed to be easy to build, cheap, made from materials readily available from domestic sources, or quick to expand the build capacity. Its best feature is that our having this fancy stuff deters most folks from trying us. A sane strategy would have us stockpiling the crap out of our high-tech armaments.

The nuclear deterrent, with our 'no first use' policy makes it only a backup deterrent. The nukes are great at deterring WWIII-level threats from major players, so long as it's credible to the people calling the shots on the other sides that a) they still work, b) we'd use it if push came to shove. That said, time has shown it doesn't deter the 'little things' such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc.

This has nothing to do with any current conflicts, other than they highlight and demonstrate the shortcomings of our readiness to fight conventional warfare at scale for any extended duration.

Successful military actions need bodies, weapons and logistical support of both in prodigious quantities. The Romans knew this - Si vis pacem, para bellum - and IMO the point of the OP seems to be that we are not 'para bellum'-ing like we should be, and in that I completely concur.