The Foolishness of Buying Our Military Uniforms From China

 A theme I have been advocating for since...well...since I graduated from college during the Carter administration has been that America should not give up its industrial base as the globalists desired.  Companies need to make a reasonable profit, but there are goals that matter more than the bottom line.  America won WWII only because it could out build the Axis powers.  On this I have felt like a lone voice shouting against a hurricane.  Thus, it was good to read at The Federalist a piece by Nathaniel Blake entitled The Decline Of American Manufacturing Inevitably Means An Empty Wartime Arsenal. When I was with the Navy, I pondered the idea that the Army had to buy its uniforms from China. We couldn't even make our own uniforms! But it seems that the war in Ukraine has spotlighted the fact that we can not keep up with Russia in terms of artillery shells. Russia!

It is hard to be the arsenal of democracy if you can’t make anything anymore. The war in Ukraine has deranged many people — Michael Rubin, a lunatic and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wants to give Ukraine nukes — but it may also teach us some hard but necessary lessons. For instance, as the tides of war turn against Ukraine, it seems that globalist economics is defeating globalist foreign policy interventionism.

...snip...

The war has become one of attrition, and regardless of our sympathies, this favors Russia. Foreign policy realist John Mearsheimer recently observed, “The Russians have had the upper hand this year, mainly because they have a substantial advantage in artillery, which is the most important weapon in attrition warfare.” For all of the billions in aid the West has sent to the Ukrainians, they are still short of munitions; they don’t need F-16s and precision weapons nearly as much as they need a mountain of old-fashioned shells.

There has been a steady stream of stories warning that Ukraine’s forces are low on munitions and outgunned by their Russian enemies. Russia’s rate of fire is perhaps 10 times that of Ukraine. Worse still, the United States and its allies are depleting their own supplies, as well as struggling to provide weapons to other clients such as Taiwan. Though there is some overlap between the weapons systems that Ukraine and Taiwan each need, the fundamental problem is the limited industrial capacity of the United States.

Trump was right that we need to bring more of our manufacturing home. We need it home because our security demands it. We need to bring it home because we need a techologically advanced workforce to make things and to feed families. We are not at the moment prepared to fight a near peer enemy, and we need to be. We will not have the luxury of time to build up our manufacturing base the next time, so we need to prepare now.