Here’s one perhaps relevant portion of an incredibly interesting discussion between Balaji Srinivasan and Tim Ferriss. Balaji remarks that the AUKUS deal in which the US was to provide Australia nuclear submarines was (1) a reaction to the failed Afghanistan exit, looking for a photo-op and to show a “pivot” to Asia; (2) did more damage than good by showing divisions within the Five Eyes as well as with France, India, and Japan; and (3) was never serious in the first place. Here’s Balaji on that last part:
Then what did Australia get? Australia got subs, but you know what the fine print is, the first nuclear submarine that Australia builds is going to appear? Do you know what the date that they’ve got is? 20 years. 20 years!
The thing is, this is not a serious thing. This is basically something — it reminds me of the San Francisco $300 million bus lane that took almost two decades. Patrick Collison has a website called Fast. I’ll give you the exact URL. It is patrickcollison.com/fast. He shows that stuff in the past was built way faster. Just as one example… The first nuclear submarine was built [in less than five] years, relative to this one which is to take 20. How is that possible the first sub that’s built 40 [actually, more than 60] years ago is faster than this one? Or like The Empire State Building was started and finished in 410 days.
The Eiffel Tower was built in two years and two months, this type of stuff. The thing about this is, we know that it is physically possible to do that today because China does it. China built a hospital in 10 days during COVID, there’s videos you can see of them building a subway station in nine hours or a building in 10 days. Then of course what people say is, oh, and this is cope by the way, they’ll be like, oh, that’s all, Chinese construction, It sucks. It’s just going to fall down. It’s plastic crap. We have good stuff. I’m like, have you seen the Millennium Tower in SF? Have you seen the SF transit center in SF? Those are also cracking and going to fall over. Even NYT actually did a thing on how SF isn’t actually earthquake proofed and all the building codes don’t mean anything.
It’s not like the US is getting high quality structures for all of that money in time. Moreover, even if you granted and people have seen the photo of a building in China, even if some tiny, tiny percentage of the time, you have some structural issue. When you go from many years to being able to build a hospital in 10 days, or being able to build a subway station in nine hours, it’s like a 100-1000X. The amount of money you save is so dramatic that you can slash rents and crucially, also enable military victories because the military is about the physical world. If China, as a subroutine, can contemplate building a hospital in 10 days, they can also contemplate building a blockade or a bridge or something else in the physical world. And if the US can only build a sub in 20 years, it’s like an older man whose bones don’t heal as fast anymore. Who can’t do the things they used to do anymore. And yet still think of themselves — that’s the dangerous part.
If you’re 80 and you think of yourself as 20, okay, young at heart is one thing. But going and trying to knock out 300 for reps, you might hurt yourself. If you’re trying to bench that much after not doing something in a while. You might never be able to get there again, as that man, you might need your son to be able to do it. That might be the last time you bench that amount of weight, so it might need a new nation to be able to do these things. Like a rebirth of some kind. I’m going a little further, but China, the AUKUS thing, that just made them mad, it didn’t give any results. The US is acting, China is taking actions because — did you see this recent hypersonic missile launch?
I think that analogy of the old man is pretty good. The US used to “get things done” but seems to have lost that. No where is this more obvious than construction, but that’s only because most people don’t see what happens on weapons programs. People seem to take for granted that, in a “real emergency,” DoD will turn things on again and the nation will rapidly pour out advanced weapons of all kinds.
I think that belief is a severe mistake. Some of the urgent operational needs in Afghanistan like MRAPs are tinker-toys compared to what would be needed against a great power. Even in Afghanistan, the military was running out of munitions. This is why major reform is needed in defense acquisition today, because it’s impossible to turn that culture on a dime and get commercial industry participation to scale up. That pain has to happen now to build muscles back up, or when an existential crisis hits, it will be like an 80-year old man trying to bench 300 pounds again.
(My colleague Jim Hasik likes to point out that a future hot war will not look like WWII, where there was a great reserve of unemployed people and capital to be absorbed by the effort. I would add that modern technology requires a lot more ramp-up in terms of skill to be useful — labor isn’t as routine and interchangeable as it once was on assembly lines.)
One of Balaji’s controversial points on this is that US politicians are elected for being good actors. “Hollywood explains more of America than I had realized… they basically become like actors reading scripts. And there’s no follow through. There’s no follow-up. Of course, this trend has been going on for a while.”
Perhaps that’s one reason the US seems to be deciding not to train Australia on older Los Angeles-class subs immediately and loan them in short order. The US will already be retiring some Los Angeles class subs and extending the life of others. I’m sure there’s something under the covers here why 20 years is the right timeframe.
Consolidation, risk-averse culture, technological sophistication, etc. GEN Sullivan, Vice Chief of Staff, Army, during the Gulf War and then CSA 91-95, told the story about how the 25mm round for the Bradley chain gun takes about 80 different manufacturing steps. He also related how, right after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when Patriot missiles for Saudi and Israel were in high demand, he went up to Raytheon with “the government checkbook” in his back pocket. The Raytheon execs told him they were working three shifts with every qualified worker they could bring in. More money thrown at the problem would not speed up the process. We have one tank plant, only a few shipyards, and few civilian corporations that are willing to put up with government/defense contracting. Those are “industrial age” warfare examples, but I’d argue that information-age warfare procurement suffers from the same problems. The quest for certainty in all environments and the increases in capability that create their own vulnerabilities slow software and hardware development
I don’t disagree with you on the need for reform, but a lot of the delay is not due to us inability, but the desire of the Australians to build the submarines domestically. And it’s worth remembering that while the first nuclear sub was built in 5 years it was 1/2 the size of a virginia, had 1/3 the horsepower, and shook so badly that its sonar was mostly useless when she was moving and she risked serious structural damage if she went more than 16 knots. the culture that needs to be fought here is the idea that smaller countries like canada and australia can and should maintain their own shipbuilding industries despite the massive costs and delays that imposes.