One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should.
So, if there is a bubble in the chip supply pipeline, auto manufacture doesn't happen. If there is undersupply of precursor chemicals it takes a while to make vaccines at scale...
What you are talking about makes me think of the very long lead product that is skilled people. A significant proportion of fab employees are genuinely highly skilled workers who need a specialised physics degree and then additional training in order to optimize yields and things like that.
I think they can build the buildings and buy the machines but unless a lot of Taiwanese are willing to get on a plane and move to the US, it is going to take a long time to be able to replace their labour at the required scale.
This is explicitly why Boise State University, an otherwise middle-to-low-tier research university boasts such a high-quality materials engineering department. BSU actually hold some of their intro-to-materials-science courses at the Boise Micron fab so Micron employees can work towards said degrees without missing as much work to commute between the two locations.
Edit to add:
I've met a few people who are aware of US military supply chain rules, and assume it means "oh, chinese $doodad must be crap, that's why we don't give them to our troops", when the reality is just as you said. Supply chain bubbles can be massively disruptive, so its a real strategic blunder to outsource critical components to the country we have designated as our number one rival. I'm not saying we're set up for a trade war, but we are well past due to calculate the cost of increasing short-term profits. Is a quarterly decrease in operating costs from consolidating fabs worth risking a massive disruption when that single fab is knocked out? Given the volumes that even small fabs do, I argue that quarterly increase is not at all worth it.
Current analysis projects US semi to face shortage of ~80k talent in next few years, ~300k+ in by decades end. This is reality pretty much in every semi producer countries, SKR and TW both have 50k-100k+ shortage with pretty developed talent pipeline. From everything I've read, current US+co short/medium term talent production won't be enough fill all the new fabs being proposed. Unviable due to operating costs which can always be subsidized, unviable due to lack of talent is much harder to address. Apart from training more, only way to plug gap is to poach talent from CHIP4 partners, which US has the money for. But I surmise it will get geopolitically ugly.
For reference PRC after elevating semi to first-level dicipline in 2018 is pumping out about 30k IC graduates per year. They're still about 200k short, ~520k/720k out of what IC talent 2018 white paper estimated PRC needed for complete semi industry. This is PRC that graduates ~5M STEM with huge population to draw from that bias towards S&T in tertiary. Which leads to the other uncomfortable point that a complete semi industry is more than just fabs, there's a lot of critical semi supply chain stuck in TW / East Asia (SKR/JP) that's going to get disrupted anyway in event of conflict. I don't see any indication US is resolving to reshore the entire semi chain.
This could be an opportunity for low-cost, educational groups to scale or partner up. Is there a list of degree or course requirements fabs are looking for? What programs would be necessary to meet that demand?
There's not much prestige as a BSU alumni (and someone doing a masters part-time there), but I do distinctly remember chatting with materials graduate students and them mentioning that they chose BSU because of the ease of availability for equipment required for research and having Micron right there.
There's a few good things that the university offers which is surprisingly strong. When i went back to prepare for a CS masters (military, self-taught) I was surprised at the quality of the undergraduate degree in preparing students for industry, and how quickly the security program was invested in (INL does a lot of investment here).
All that to say: it's a pretty good school, especially for it's price. I only ever had one bad professor, and it was in the supply chain management department. And it was (is still?) the only raptor biology masters in the country.
Good thing there's a university only a couple of miles away from the Richardson fab that specializes in training semiconductor and nano-fabrication which has quite a large international reach which has been massively expanding every year for the last few decades.
>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should.
I would say exactly the opposite, the vaccines were made quite quickly and there weren't major supply issues.
The Defense Production Act (er... central planning as you put it) was used to say what was going to happen when with money to back it up and... things happened quickly.
DPA wasn't invoked to build you new cars or supply you toilet paper so... those things had their supply issues.
The US actually can do logistics very well, especially when there's somebody willing to foot the bill for big asks. The lack of corruption and general merit-based placement here compared to so many other places combined with a large degree of vertical integration means that we can accomplish quite a lot and is one of the underappreciated cornerstones of our ability to make war (and why nobody wants to fight us).
We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.
This would have been categorically true circa-1970s.
Unfortunately, US industrial vertical integration now includes foundations placed in global low-labor-cost countries.
The crash vaccine manufacturing scaling program was possible because we were rich enough to throw mountains of money (of which we have the most) at any international supply problems.
If the Atlantic or Pacific had been hostile to commercial shipping, or countries hadn't cooperated, it would have had a very different result.
> We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.
"We" are not. Ukrainians are dying and holding their own against a much larger country, with the help of NATO surplus equipment.
20,000-50,000 Ukrainians now have at least one limb amputated as a result of the war. [0] [1]
And Russia's military is not being decimated. It's holding its own with an elastic defense, that's making progress difficult and costly for a Ukrainian army that's trained halfway between Soviet mass doctrine and Western maneuver warfare.
At some point the Ukrainians will hopefully manage to exhaust Russia's logistics sufficient to break through their defense, but that's in no way a sure thing.
Russia's military is being decimated, just not at the line of contact currently. You're watching a protracted battle play out all across the world right now between Russian interests and Western interests. Some of these include:
1. Russian/Wagner (now admitted to be the same) neocolonialism in African states, most recently Niger. Within days Niger stopped trading Uranium to France. Conveniently, France is the least dependent on Russia for energy and will force the French to buy outside of Niger and then refocus on Russia.
2. The latest naval drone hit on a Russian oil tanker in the Black Sea took place well beyond the expected range of Ukrainian capability, which likely means someone else (Turkey?) helped at least get it into launch range. This coupled with the Ukrainian position that all russian ships, and all ships trading with russia are now targets in the Black Sea is also big for the area.
Currently Russians may not be dying in droves defending their positions. However, the knock on effects for russian military capacity, industrial capacity, and naval capacity are incredible. The longer they flounder and the more they commit to Ukraine, the more their traditional enemies are able to take advantage of their weakness.
If russian gas and oil cannot flow out of the black sea safely, their PMC backed interests in Africa and South American become less effective, and the corresponding governments will look elsewhere for influence/protection/trade.
It'll be fascinating to learn whatever grey/black ops details come out after the war hopefully ends.
The naval drone question is especially fascinating.
IMHO, they have to be transported closer to impact site by some other vessel.
Ukraine doesn't have submarines, and Russia has 6(?) Kilo's in the Black Sea, so traditional submarines would be insane in that environment anyway.
And whatever transport method would need to be stealthy with respect to Russia's sensing methods: acoustic, radar, to a lesser degree visual.
Given Ukraine's technical capabilities and traditional shipbuilding expertise, I'd hazard there's a somewhat-stealthy drone carrier boat (probably also unmanned).
They could also be hiding/launching the drones directly from commercial shipping, but that's an awfully big risk for the flag country/ship owner with respect to Russia boarding and searching, or even back tracing launch points.
> The lack of corruption and general merit-based placement here compared to so many other places combined with a large degree of vertical integration means that we can accomplish quite a lot and is one of the underappreciated cornerstones of our ability to make war (and why nobody wants to fight us).
First of all, other countries managed to develop and produce large amounts of vaccine in very short timeframe during the pandemic. Second of all, the reason nobody wants to fight the US is that the US spends as much on its military as the next ten or so countries. The US makes up 40% of all global military spending.
> We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine
The total value of NATO aid to Ukraine is on a similar scale as Russia's entire military budget. NATO is not just giving away second-tier equipment. It's giving Ukraine what it thinks Ukraine can use most effectively right away (such as upgraded T-72 tanks, man-portable air-defense and anti-tank systems early on), and some of that is cutting-edge gear (such as the Storm Shadow missile).
Whilst I agree with some of your post I think the following is incorrect.
> and some of that is cutting-edge gear (such as the Storm Shadow missile).
Storm shadow is 20 years old from first deployment and 29 years since development started. Its replacement is being actively developed since 2017, it’s hardly “cutting edge”.
It’s just new enough that the Russians have trouble countering it.
>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should.
The dominant ideology in the US, at least until recently, is that there should be no central planning. The invisible hand of the market was all-knowing and would allocate resources far more efficiently than any human planner.
I wouldn't blame central planning, I'd blame the lack of it.
That was just a lot of talk. The federal government has been shaping the US economy and its industries since the start. Things like agriculture and energy has always been subsidized. E.g. the offshoring of manufacturing and the newer cultivation of green energy tech are entirely the result of tax and subsidy policies designed to result in these things.
So, if there is a bubble in the chip supply pipeline, auto manufacture doesn't happen. If there is undersupply of precursor chemicals it takes a while to make vaccines at scale...
What you are talking about makes me think of the very long lead product that is skilled people. A significant proportion of fab employees are genuinely highly skilled workers who need a specialised physics degree and then additional training in order to optimize yields and things like that.
I think they can build the buildings and buy the machines but unless a lot of Taiwanese are willing to get on a plane and move to the US, it is going to take a long time to be able to replace their labour at the required scale.