Specifically the Defense Industrial Base.
From The American Mind, February 14:
Saving America’s Future from the Blob"How to understand—and rectify—the foreign policy disaster of 2024"
Never believe what bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks say about China and Russia. They don’t believe what they say, either. The Blob (as Obama aide Ben Rhodes called it) learned through generations of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will survive a strategic disaster of any magnitude with their careers intact. The same principle explains why not a single American banker went to jail after the subprime collapse of 2008, the biggest fraud in all financial history. The Blob’s logic is simple: If you go after one of us, then you have to go after all of us, and who will be left to put things back together?
Whether it was right for America to go abroad seeking monsters to destroy in Moscow and Beijing, the way we went about it was abominably stupid. “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared,” Machiavelli advised. Washington has wounded Russia and China but not disabled them, setting in motion a tragic sequence of responses that in the worst case will lead to war, but more likely will leave the United States with vastly diminished strategic standing.
The rise of China and the resilience of Russia have persisted through serried waves of tech restrictions, $125 billion of NATO support for Ukraine, and an unprecedented sanctions regime against Russia, including the seizure of $300 billion in reserves, among other measures.
The Black Legend propounded by the Blob states that China is on the verge of invading Taiwan because its Communist leaders hate democracy, and because it wants to distract its citizens from their economic misery. It claims that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and invaded Ukraine because it “is a country that for decades has enjoyed freedom and democracy and the right to choose its own destiny.”
In fact China has bracing economic challenges, but no crisis, and no widespread popular discontent. It wants to preserve the status quo, barring a Taiwanese move toward sovereignty, which is all but ruled out by the results of Taiwan’s national elections this January. China is a formidable strategic competitor, but its global plan centers on dominating key industries and export markets rather than military deployments—and that plan is proceeding at a rapid clip, despite American efforts to hobble it.
Russia made clear for a decade that it would not tolerate the extension of NATO’s boundaries to its border with Ukraine, as the late Henry Kissinger, former Ambassador to Moscow and now CIA Director William Burns, and others repeatedly warned. Vladimir Putin declared on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, February 23, 2022: “If deployed in Ukraine, [NATO weapons] will be able to hit targets in Russia’s entire European part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat.”
The Biden Administration believed the Russian economy would collapse under U.S. sanctions. In March 2022 President Biden declared, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half.” Russia’s economy is not only larger today than it was two years ago, but has increased production of weapons up to tenfold, producing seven times more artillery shells than the combined West, by Estonian Intelligence estimates. Some 70 percent of casualties are inflicted by artillery, and Russia has an overwhelming advantage, as well as superior tactical air support and offensive missiles and drones. Russia also produces 100 main battle tanks a month, while Germany produces 50 per year. With five times Ukraine’s population, Russia will win a war of attrition barring some catastrophic blunder.
How did Russia do this? China, India, Turkey, and other countries transformed their trade and financing profiles to support the Russian market. China’s exports to Russia nearly tripled from prewar levels. India became Russia’s top customer for oil and doubled its exports of machinery to Russia during 2023. Turkey and the former Soviet republics became conduits for unreported exports to Russia.
Ukraine is short of artillery ammunition and air defense systems. Russia’s cheap, Iranian-designed Shaheed drones are now penetrating Ukraine’s air defenses and hitting military installations and critical infrastructure. The United States doesn’t have enough inventory to keep Ukraine supplied. Russia is gradually achieving its stated objective, namely to de-militarize Ukraine. Ukraine’s manpower resources are thin, and the military is putting 50-year-old soldiers into the front lines. Last October, a Zelensky aide told Time Magazine that even if the West provided more weapons, “We don’t have the men to use them.”
None of these facts are contested, but the Blob’s enthusiasm for the Ukraine War increases in inverse proportion to its prospects for success. It is considered downright dangerous to question the wisdom of the war: Bill Kristol proposed to bar Tucker Carlson from returning to the United States after his projected interview with Putin. Having called out the bear and gotten mauled, the Blob knows what consequences it may face. Germany is in recession after the cutoff of cheap Russian gas supplies pushed up the cost of energy, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has an approval rating of 17 percent. France’s President Macron polls at 23 percent. Having exacted Nibelungentreue (absolute, unquestioning loyalty) from reluctant NATO allies to pursue the war, Washington faces a populist revolt led by Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and the National Rally in France.
Heads should roll, or at least careers should abort. But the greater its blunders, the stronger the Blob’s solidarity. They have a story, and they will stick to it.
Ukraine, to be sure, is a warm-up act for the main strategic event of the next decade, namely America’s contention with China. China now buys more oil from Russia than from Saudi Arabia, and has nearly tripled exports to Russia by official count (and probably much more through third parties), but it has stayed on the sidelines, allowing Russia to do the bleeding. With three times more manufacturing capacity than the United States, and a significant lead in automated manufacturing, China has made itself a fortress bristling with thousands of satellite-guided anti-ship missiles, perhaps a thousand modern aircraft, formidable electronic warfare capabilities, and other means of dominating its home theater. Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute wrote on January 4:
While select munitions stockpiles do exist, the war in Ukraine has shown that past munitions requirements based on rosy war assumptions have vastly underestimated the need for volume in modern warfare. According to RTX, the prime contractor for the SM-6, the existing SM-6 stockpile sits somewhere north of 500 missiles. This is not nearly enough for a drawn-out conflict with any peer adversary and potentially any sub-par one, too.
Beijing is well aware of our own shortfalls as evident by China’s rapid expansion and investment in its missile forces. China’s ground-based missile forces have nearly doubled in the last decade, and the Pentagon estimates that the PRC has stockpiles of thousands of missiles in reserve, all as part of a strategy to mass fire and overwhelm U.S. warships in a potential conflict.
The ongoing skirmish between Houthi guerrillas and the U.S. Navy in the Red Sea was a spectacle that allowed Beijing to watch and assess U.S. anti-missile capabilities. The outcome is alarming. The destroyer USS Gravely resorted to its Phalanx Gatling guns to destroy an incoming cruise missile only four seconds from hitting the ship, implying that its missiles failed to intercept the attacker. An American destroyer carries about 100 anti-ship missiles. China claims to have an automated factory that can produce 1,000 cruise missiles per day. That’s unverified, but China has plants that assemble more than 1,000 electric vehicles a day; I visited a Chinese facility that produced 2,400 5G base stations a day with just 45 workers.....
....MUCH MORE
Regarding President Biden's boast that Russia would drop out of the twenty largest economies, it now appears that Russia may have ended 2023 as the 8th largest economy in the world. More on that as the final numbers are tabulated.
