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Since when did not being cost-competitive become a concern for the US military?

• roenxi 3y ago
  At the highest of levels, if two parties are at war the one with the most resources wins. That is obviously a gross oversimplification as millennia of tactics demonstrate, but for the sake of argument just hold the thought for a moment. If the US supply chain isn't cost effective, then it'll have to commit multiple times the resources of the adversary to win. If the US supply chain becomes inefficient enough, at some point the US becomes unable to win. The US doesn't have multiple times the resources of China when it comes to overall manufacturing, so under that oversimplified model the US just loses any direct war - and apparently their military budgets are similarly sized right now [0], so if China is much more efficient at manufacturing (more than about 2x) they might have an edge even at present spending without being on war footing. Ok, so now we snap back to reality where there are other factors than just manufacturing efficiency and the US military is presumably in better shape than China's. But you can hopefully see now how without overwhelming manufacturing the US needs to maintain big strategic, organisational and technological advantages over the Chinese military to compete with them. They can't outresource someone with similar resources (for which we have GDP and manufacturing output as proxies) and much more efficient processes. [0] https://chinapower.csis.org/military-spending/ https://chinapower.csis.org/military-spending/