Palmer Luckey, founder of the U.S. emerging defense company Anduril, said that the real advantage of the Chinese military is not "black technology," but rather China's strong manufacturing system. The key is not how advanced a single weapon is, but rather its extremely low cost, massive production, and rapid delivery. Similar weapons may be one order of magnitude cheaper and two orders of magnitude higher in production than those of the United States. This advantage of China's manufacturing comes from an integrated and efficient industrial ecosystem, including high-quality engineers, a regulatory environment friendly to production, mature supply chains, logistics, and raw material systems.
The problem in the U.S. is too low capacity. Without sufficient quantity, even the best weapon performance is useless, because the opponent can overwhelm the U.S.'s quality advantage with a scale advantage. The root cause of the U.S.'s low production capacity lies in long-term deindustrialization. The elite class has exchanged manufacturing outsourcing for cheap goods and financial prosperity, at the cost of the most core foundation of national security - large-scale industrial production capacity.
The points are all on point, and the cognition is correct. However, there are many Americans who have this cognition, but none can come up with a solution to the problem. Revitalizing American manufacturing has been shouted by everyone from Obama to the current Trump, but what about the results? Nothing has changed, and even American manufacturing continues to shrink.
Original: toutiao.com/article/1854217438865408/
Statement: The article represents the views of the author himself.