The Sino-Capitalist Hollowing Out of the U.S.

In a recent blog post, BadTux discussed the Chinese long-term hollowing out of the American economy. He mentioned that a hollowed-out economy can't maintain a first-rate military, at least for very long.

But it's more than that. American military strategy in the 20th Century was, at its core, pretty basic. The US would let the Europeans kill each other while American companies would make weapons that the US would sell (or lend) to the favored side. Remember that the premier American pursuit aircraft of World War Two was initially designed and built to meet a British RFP. The rifle that the vast majority of Doughboys carried in World War One was first built for the British Army and then rechambered for the American cartridge.

The strategy of allowing the Europeans to bleed each other out before the Americans would intervene in force also allowed to the mobilization and equipping of a large American army consisting mostly of draftees. This avoided the cost of having to maintain a significant standing army, but enabled the fielding of millions of soldiers. But it required an industrial base capable of rapidly equipping such an army.

That industrial base has been hollowed out, both by Pentagon/Government/Administration mismanagement over decades.

A case in point: CDR Salamander has noted that the Navy has commissioned four littoral combat ships in just under six years. The LCS is a small, lightly armed ship.[1] In that span of time, as the good Commander has noted, the Navy commissioned 32 Perry-class FFGs. If you go back another decade or so, within that 5.75 year time window, the Navy commissioned all forty of the Knox-class frigates (1969-1974) and initial series production of 30 of the Spruance class (1975-1980).

This country has apparently lost the ability to simply design, procure and build complex weapon systems.[2]

But it goes deeper than that. Being able to rapidly equip an army required an industrial base that could shift to making military materiel. Any cursory perusal of the industrial history of the Second World War will show that companies that made consumer goods and industrial equipment transitioned to making military goods. Whether car plants or washing machine factories, they made stuff for the armed forces.

Over the last few decades, the bright boys of American industry, the capitalists and the banksters, have been actively engaged in closing American industrial plants and relocating production to nations as close as Mexico and as far as China. Go into any sporting goods shop and you will likely find that for anything other than firearms, everything that you may want to buy was made in a foreign nation.

How secure does this make us? In the First World War, Mexico was wooed by the Germans. In the Second, while the Mexicans declared war on Germany in 1942 after U-boats sank Mexican ships. Their combat contribution was one squadron of US-built P-47s that saw service beginning two months before Japan was nuked.[3]

As for China, well, they have either at times been an active enemy or a serious hindrance. The Chinese have been more-or-less complicit in the nuclearization of North Korea. It is not too big of a stretch to see China as the principal strategic adversary of the West in this Century. And yet, we keep selling them our industrial base.

Which makes one wonder about the patriotism of the capitalists and the banksters who are complicit in this. Oh, they probably salute the Flag and wear flag pins and other symbolic nonsense, but when it comes down to money, those fuckers would sell their daughters into whorehouses and sell their grandparents' carcasses to rendering plants if they could make a buck on the deal.

Lenin probably really didn't say that "capitalists will sell us the rope that we use to hang them all." But it is nonetheless true.
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[1] I kind of hesitate to refer to it as a "warship", as it's pretty much a fast-moving target.
[2] Other than maybe submarines.
[3] Contrast that to the efforts of Brazil, if you like.