There is little doubt at this point that the media has quite oversold the progress of automation in our era. (Exemplary is the misrepresentation of the Frey-Osborne study on automation, to the degree that it caused a panic at the time and commentators, still repeating what it did not actually say as if it did, now sneer at the study as having got it wrong on those grounds.)
Yet there is the other end of the discourse, with its sneering dismissal of automation. This takes different forms--for instance, the blithe dismissal of the very idea of technological unemployment as if it were some logical impossibility by economists who "function like the caricature of the physicist whose every inquiry begins with 'imagine a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless plane'" (with the fact that this enables them to not worry about unemployment, and the remedies for it they find so deeply distasteful, not irrelevant to their prejudices).
However, what has interested me as of late is the way some react to the incomplete or imperfect implementation of automation in places with humans "backing up" the bots--filling in gaps, offering corrections, etc.--or simply the machine taking over parts of the work process as humans see to others. (For instance, one hears of the fast-food chains operating experimental outlets where the customer never deals face to face with a human, but humans are "in the back," preparing the food.)
One can plausibly see these situations as a matter of experimentation and refinement on the way to, at least some of the time, producing a more thoroughly automated process. But these commentators commonly react dismissively, pointing to such as evidence of some function being inherently "unautomatable." Frankly, they often do so in a heckling manner that reminds me of the idiots in The Magnificent Ambersons who, whenever they saw a car broken down by the side of the road, oafishly taunted its driver with the yell "Git a hoss!"
Well, those cars broke down less and less often, giving them less opportunity to yell "Git a hoss!" Instead the taunters found themselves having to "Git a car!" instead. And so it may go here in many a case--with the taunting helping no one at all.
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
What if it's Actually the Other Way Around? What if it's the "Higher-Skill" Jobs That Are Getting Automated First?
The title of this item may seem counterintuitive--not only to those who adhere to the conventional wisdom, but those who actually know something of the history of technology. The Industrial Revolution, after all, appeared to be about economizing the use of "muscle" rather than "brain," in part through the mobilization of more brain workers to design and build and operate the machines that replaced the earlier workers, as with, for example, the carding, spinning, weaving machinery of the eighteenth century that revolutionized textile production. However, the appearance is deceptive. The machinery replaced not just the physical effort but the mental effort--the mental skills--the learning--that the human workers put into the carding, the spinning, the weaving.
The latter may well have been the more important, and the trend more evident in this age of computer intelligence. As analysts of automation have long observed, down to Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, "perception and manipulation," "finger" and "manual" dexterity, the ability to work in "cramped" spaces and "awkward" positions, have been significant bottlenecks to automation--while we take utterly for granted computers' capacity to perform vast quantities of complex calculations with a speed and accuracy far, far beyond that of the most able human. The result has been that the armies of mathematicians who served as "human computers" (like those brought to public attention by the film Hidden Figures) have been easily and quietly replaced by electronic computers in contrast with, for example, the janitors that keep the offices clean, and their less appreciated skills.
So it goes with the more recent wave of automation. The imminence of the self-driving car was oversold in the mid-'10s, such that in 2023 few expect to see them anytime soon. But there is great excitement over the capacity of chatbots like GPT-3 to, among much else, write code, to the point that there is much argument over whether coders will not become obsolete in the manner of human computers (while still more advanced and capable versions of the bot are expected before even the end of this year). If true this will mean that, in line with the bottlenecks previously discussed, artificial intelligence will have "learned to code" before it has "learned to drive"--fitting the aforementioned pattern all too well.
Granted, in all of these cases this elimination of "skilled" workers only went so far. If human computers were replaced, and coders might be replaced, this depended on persons with other skills conventionally regarded as higher still--the computer scientists who created the electronic computers (while in the latter case the rocket scientists the human computers supported remain very much with us). Likewise it is one thing to replace coders, another to replace "higher level" software engineers.
Yet even allowing for all of this the reality still complicates the conveniently hierarchical view so many take of these matters, enough that some rethinking of some widespread assumptions seems warranted. One is just what really should be thought of as constituting "high-level" skills--and the way in which our ideas about the intelligence required for particular forms of work reflects social prejudices (for instance, the tendency to denigrate those who have to move and "use their hands" as against persons in more stationary and less manual jobs). Another is that matter of which jobs will continue to be done longest by humans in an automating world--with the answer the exact opposite of the clichès. "Learn to code," the stereotypical, callous elitist sneers at truck drivers fearful they will be put out of a job--but it may well be that the pool of coding jobs will dry up before the pool of truck driving jobs does. Indeed, those really pessimistic about automated driving may expect that not just the coders but the software engineers will increasingly be put out of a job by improvements in AI even as humans go on driving those trucks. And of course, anyone who takes all this at all seriously should think long and hard about what all this means for glib talk about sending more people to college and more STEM, STEM, STEM! as the pseudo-thinking person's answer to all the woes of the work force.
The latter may well have been the more important, and the trend more evident in this age of computer intelligence. As analysts of automation have long observed, down to Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, "perception and manipulation," "finger" and "manual" dexterity, the ability to work in "cramped" spaces and "awkward" positions, have been significant bottlenecks to automation--while we take utterly for granted computers' capacity to perform vast quantities of complex calculations with a speed and accuracy far, far beyond that of the most able human. The result has been that the armies of mathematicians who served as "human computers" (like those brought to public attention by the film Hidden Figures) have been easily and quietly replaced by electronic computers in contrast with, for example, the janitors that keep the offices clean, and their less appreciated skills.
So it goes with the more recent wave of automation. The imminence of the self-driving car was oversold in the mid-'10s, such that in 2023 few expect to see them anytime soon. But there is great excitement over the capacity of chatbots like GPT-3 to, among much else, write code, to the point that there is much argument over whether coders will not become obsolete in the manner of human computers (while still more advanced and capable versions of the bot are expected before even the end of this year). If true this will mean that, in line with the bottlenecks previously discussed, artificial intelligence will have "learned to code" before it has "learned to drive"--fitting the aforementioned pattern all too well.
Granted, in all of these cases this elimination of "skilled" workers only went so far. If human computers were replaced, and coders might be replaced, this depended on persons with other skills conventionally regarded as higher still--the computer scientists who created the electronic computers (while in the latter case the rocket scientists the human computers supported remain very much with us). Likewise it is one thing to replace coders, another to replace "higher level" software engineers.
Yet even allowing for all of this the reality still complicates the conveniently hierarchical view so many take of these matters, enough that some rethinking of some widespread assumptions seems warranted. One is just what really should be thought of as constituting "high-level" skills--and the way in which our ideas about the intelligence required for particular forms of work reflects social prejudices (for instance, the tendency to denigrate those who have to move and "use their hands" as against persons in more stationary and less manual jobs). Another is that matter of which jobs will continue to be done longest by humans in an automating world--with the answer the exact opposite of the clichès. "Learn to code," the stereotypical, callous elitist sneers at truck drivers fearful they will be put out of a job--but it may well be that the pool of coding jobs will dry up before the pool of truck driving jobs does. Indeed, those really pessimistic about automated driving may expect that not just the coders but the software engineers will increasingly be put out of a job by improvements in AI even as humans go on driving those trucks. And of course, anyone who takes all this at all seriously should think long and hard about what all this means for glib talk about sending more people to college and more STEM, STEM, STEM! as the pseudo-thinking person's answer to all the woes of the work force.
Will China Follow Japan's Demographic--and Economic--Trajectory?
In 2022 China's population fell for the first time in at least six decades, by 850,000 persons from 1.42 billion the year before.
However, it is worth remembering that China's working-age population (if defined as the 15-64 age category) had already been falling for many years before that--from its peak of 988.3 million in 2015 to 977.1 million by 2021 according to World Bank figures.* A drop of over 11 million, the reduction alone is equal to the entire working population of the seventeenth largest economy in the world, that of the Netherlands.
Moreover, significant as this is in itself still more significant is what it seems to portend, especially given the obvious point of comparison provided by Japan. That nation saw its own working-age population top out at a bit over 87.1 million in 1994-1995--and then steadily fall. A quarter of a century on, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, it was down to 74.3 million--and as of 2021 down almost another million, to 73.4 million.
In short, the country's working-age population shrank about 15 percent in 25 years--a fact that has had significant, if generally poorly understood, economic consequences. We have heard much about the country's "lost decades" since the 1990s (to much shameful gloating in certain circles disapproving of its manufacturing orientation and its statist inclinations). But the truth is that, if Japan's economic growth during this period has been a far cry from what it was its boom decades, when we adjust the numbers for the contraction of its population we find that it actually grew about as fast as the other advanced industrialized countries with which it may properly be compared. That is to say that when we consider how Japan did per-worker it did as well as they--and perhaps better when we consider the country's continued run of manufacturing success in critical fields like the inputs required for microchip production, or robotics. However, the dwindling of the numbers of those workers (and one might add, the vagaries of currency values) were sufficient to significantly offset its growth at the aggregate level. And so even as Japan succeeded by some measures, its profile receded in others.
Not only is it easy to picture China broadly traveling down Japan's path, but some are predicting exactly that, with China's demographic contraction no less dramatic. As China's overall population falls (perhaps by a hundred million between now and mid-century) its working-age population will likely fall more sharply--with an official Chinese government estimate in 2016 anticipating a fall of nearly a quarter by mid-century, while I would not be surprised to find more recent estimates more aggressive still.
Meanwhile the economic consequences would be even more dramatic. After all, when Japan's demographic contraction got underway the country was not only already solidly "First World," but on its "cutting edge" technologically. By contrast China, with a per capita GDP between a quarter and a third that of the "high income" countries, remains a developing nation. That same fact means that the country, still playing "catch up," can expect to make headway relatively easily for a time, further narrowing the gap with the more industrialized countries, but with that contracting force (and the economic demands of an aging population) increasingly offsetting that progress, which was already slowing even before the disruptions of the pandemic. (In the 1978-2011 period China managed a 9 percent a year per capita growth rate, doubling per capita GDP every eight years--with the country managing a 10 percent a year in that last decade of 2002-2011. Since then it has not done much better than 6 percent, even when we exclude the pandemic. A comparable drop in the growth rate over the next decade would, of course, see China's progress slow to the weak rates of the more developed countries while, again, still well short of their income.)
Of course, what one is talking about (in China's case, at least) is a projection, rather than something that has already happened, and China's government is anxious to alter the country's demographic trajectory--with the conventional wisdom going that Sweden provides a model for how this could be done by making work and other aspects of social life more hospitable for working mothers. However, as Elizabeth Bauer observed, this thinking slights the reality. Apart from the fact that Sweden's fertility rate has been pretty consistently below "replacement level" (2-2.1) these past three decades (the average over 1990-2019 was 1.8, and the 2019 figure actually closer to 1.7), Sweden's rate was never so low as China's is now reported to be (1.3 as of 2020). The result is that the distance between where China is and where China's leaders want it to be is greater--while one might add, too, that Sweden never had China's skewed sex ratio to contend with (China still, as of 2019, seeing the birth of 113 males for every 100 females).
Moreover, to the extent that Sweden's social provision was effective it was provided by a society far richer than China's happens to be now.
Thus, along with the gap to be made up being greater, the resources for any sort of effort of this kind are smaller--and I suspect the politics less conducive. China's young people, like their counterparts elsewhere, if in particularly sharp fashion, are caught between the slave-driving work culture celebrated by a Jack Ma (darling of the business press, likely less beloved by China's working people), and the spread of a counter-culture of "lying flat" by young people balking at the absurdity of the rat race. The result is that it will take a lot more than the kind of band-aids that so-called "pragmatic" policymakers and their media cheer-leaders so prefer to stabilize the country's working-age population--enough so that a sharp contraction along some lines seems much more likely, and figuring out how to manage it perhaps a more appropriate object of their attention than fantasies of avoiding it altogether.
* The Chinese government defines "working-age" in terms of the 15-59 category, reflecting its having set a retirement age of 60, but I am using 15-64 because of its greater convenience for international comparison (while it should be remembered that China's government is openly discussing raising the retirement age, possibly making the 15-59 category less relevant).
However, it is worth remembering that China's working-age population (if defined as the 15-64 age category) had already been falling for many years before that--from its peak of 988.3 million in 2015 to 977.1 million by 2021 according to World Bank figures.* A drop of over 11 million, the reduction alone is equal to the entire working population of the seventeenth largest economy in the world, that of the Netherlands.
Moreover, significant as this is in itself still more significant is what it seems to portend, especially given the obvious point of comparison provided by Japan. That nation saw its own working-age population top out at a bit over 87.1 million in 1994-1995--and then steadily fall. A quarter of a century on, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, it was down to 74.3 million--and as of 2021 down almost another million, to 73.4 million.
In short, the country's working-age population shrank about 15 percent in 25 years--a fact that has had significant, if generally poorly understood, economic consequences. We have heard much about the country's "lost decades" since the 1990s (to much shameful gloating in certain circles disapproving of its manufacturing orientation and its statist inclinations). But the truth is that, if Japan's economic growth during this period has been a far cry from what it was its boom decades, when we adjust the numbers for the contraction of its population we find that it actually grew about as fast as the other advanced industrialized countries with which it may properly be compared. That is to say that when we consider how Japan did per-worker it did as well as they--and perhaps better when we consider the country's continued run of manufacturing success in critical fields like the inputs required for microchip production, or robotics. However, the dwindling of the numbers of those workers (and one might add, the vagaries of currency values) were sufficient to significantly offset its growth at the aggregate level. And so even as Japan succeeded by some measures, its profile receded in others.
Not only is it easy to picture China broadly traveling down Japan's path, but some are predicting exactly that, with China's demographic contraction no less dramatic. As China's overall population falls (perhaps by a hundred million between now and mid-century) its working-age population will likely fall more sharply--with an official Chinese government estimate in 2016 anticipating a fall of nearly a quarter by mid-century, while I would not be surprised to find more recent estimates more aggressive still.
Meanwhile the economic consequences would be even more dramatic. After all, when Japan's demographic contraction got underway the country was not only already solidly "First World," but on its "cutting edge" technologically. By contrast China, with a per capita GDP between a quarter and a third that of the "high income" countries, remains a developing nation. That same fact means that the country, still playing "catch up," can expect to make headway relatively easily for a time, further narrowing the gap with the more industrialized countries, but with that contracting force (and the economic demands of an aging population) increasingly offsetting that progress, which was already slowing even before the disruptions of the pandemic. (In the 1978-2011 period China managed a 9 percent a year per capita growth rate, doubling per capita GDP every eight years--with the country managing a 10 percent a year in that last decade of 2002-2011. Since then it has not done much better than 6 percent, even when we exclude the pandemic. A comparable drop in the growth rate over the next decade would, of course, see China's progress slow to the weak rates of the more developed countries while, again, still well short of their income.)
Of course, what one is talking about (in China's case, at least) is a projection, rather than something that has already happened, and China's government is anxious to alter the country's demographic trajectory--with the conventional wisdom going that Sweden provides a model for how this could be done by making work and other aspects of social life more hospitable for working mothers. However, as Elizabeth Bauer observed, this thinking slights the reality. Apart from the fact that Sweden's fertility rate has been pretty consistently below "replacement level" (2-2.1) these past three decades (the average over 1990-2019 was 1.8, and the 2019 figure actually closer to 1.7), Sweden's rate was never so low as China's is now reported to be (1.3 as of 2020). The result is that the distance between where China is and where China's leaders want it to be is greater--while one might add, too, that Sweden never had China's skewed sex ratio to contend with (China still, as of 2019, seeing the birth of 113 males for every 100 females).
Moreover, to the extent that Sweden's social provision was effective it was provided by a society far richer than China's happens to be now.
Thus, along with the gap to be made up being greater, the resources for any sort of effort of this kind are smaller--and I suspect the politics less conducive. China's young people, like their counterparts elsewhere, if in particularly sharp fashion, are caught between the slave-driving work culture celebrated by a Jack Ma (darling of the business press, likely less beloved by China's working people), and the spread of a counter-culture of "lying flat" by young people balking at the absurdity of the rat race. The result is that it will take a lot more than the kind of band-aids that so-called "pragmatic" policymakers and their media cheer-leaders so prefer to stabilize the country's working-age population--enough so that a sharp contraction along some lines seems much more likely, and figuring out how to manage it perhaps a more appropriate object of their attention than fantasies of avoiding it altogether.
* The Chinese government defines "working-age" in terms of the 15-59 category, reflecting its having set a retirement age of 60, but I am using 15-64 because of its greater convenience for international comparison (while it should be remembered that China's government is openly discussing raising the retirement age, possibly making the 15-59 category less relevant).
Will the Chinese Renminbi Replace the U.S. Dollar as the World's Favored Reserve Currency?
As China's economic development has progressed by leaps and bounds many have, time and again over the years, wondered just how far it would go, how fast. Much of the talk has been pessimistic, ever predicting the stagnation or even collapse of China (George Friedman, for example, back in 2009's The Next 100 Years, picturing this happening in the '10s). However, others have been more bullish, anticipating China's ascent to a position of world economic leadership, and even speculating in detail about its achieving particular milestones along such a trajectory at particular points. Naturally they have raised the question of whether the Chinese currency (the renminbi, or yuan) will replace the American dollar as the world's favored reserve currency--and the chatter about this prospect appearing to be picking up yet again these days.
Considering this it seems worth looking to past precedent. The modern era has seen a succession of global reserve currencies, though the most recent and most relevant examples would seem to be the U.S. dollar post-1945, and before it the British pound sterling. In each case the country in question was, at the moment of its currency's rise to that status, the world's largest economy by a long way, with this reflecting a "full-spectrum" superiority by a significant margin. That included the country's being the world's leading manufacturing power, not just in terms of aggregate output but in pushing forward the "production frontier," and the leading financial power as well, because of what it meant for the strength of the economy whose currency they would be holding, and what its policies seemed likely to be.
As it happens China is the world's largest economy when measured in Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted terms--but not by very much (perhaps a fifth larger than the U.S.), while in nominal terms it remains well behind the U.S. (about three-quarters as big as the U.S.). If "number one" it is so only imperfectly, with this underlined by the gap between the PPP and nominal calculations. As these remind one, China is not the technological and commercial leader of the advanced industrialized world, or even an advanced industrialized country, but still a developing nation in which the super-city of Shanghai looks "First World," but much of the country remains in the "Third"--making progress that by the standards of the rest of the world is enviable, but not all the way there.
One sees all this confirmed not only in China's per capita income (still just a third or even just a quarter that of the high income states, depending, again, on whether one goes by PPP-adjusted or nominal), but China's manufacturing output when approached in the same manner. China is, beyond doubt, the world's largest manufacturer, with an output approaching twice that of the U.S.. However, in per capita terms it is again less impressive, with China's output just 70 percent or so of the least industrialized member of the Group of Seven nations, Britain, while being not much more than two-fifths of U.S. output, and a third that of Japan--with this partly a matter of its still playing "catch-up" in critical areas like machine tools and microchips.
Again, the result is that if China is "number one" in manufacturing it is only in a fairly qualified way, while it is far from being number one in the financial realm by any measure. Where Chinese holdings of financial assets were concerned in 2021 the country commanded about a fourth of the global proportion of the U.S. according to the latest Allianz Global Wealth Report, while the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicates that it is the same with the country's "inward" and "outward" stocks of foreign investment (what others hold inside China, what Chinese investors hold outside their country)--China's profile, again, about one-fourth that of the U.S. here.*
Moreover, the difference between China's position in manufacturing, and its position in finance, themselves matter. They mean that relative to the country's output and income manufacturing is that much greater, finance that much smaller, a factor than in the case of the U.S. (where the ratio of financial assets-to-GDP is three times what it is in China's case). And it has its reflection in policymaking, monetary policy included. Manufacturing-minded nations favor an undervalued currency for the sake of making their exports more attractive (and imports less attractive), finance-minded nations a "strong" currency for the sake of attracting foreign savings and advantaging their own investors in relation to others abroad--and so has it gone with the U.S. and China. And that matter of a currency's strength counts greatly in the minds of others when they decide which currency they want to hold--to the advantage of the U.S., and the disadvantage of China.
The result is that, to go by the precedents of Britain and the U.S., China--a developing nation, whose financial rise, as is usually the case, is lagging an industrial ascent that is itself incomplete in key ways--remains a long way from being the kind of all-sided superpower, and especially the financial superpower, whose currency is a natural for the rest of the world's reserves when one looks at the hard economic facts--and the orientation of its policy that goes with them. Moreover, with China's economic slowdown these past many years, and the headwinds its continued progress faces in the coming years (from trade war with the U.S. to demographic slowdown to the pandemic's raging through the country now with uncertain outcome) it is far from being a foregone conclusion that it will become such a power within any meaningful time frame.
Moreover, China's attractiveness does not become much clearer when one looks to other, less quantifiable factors. These states were, again, attractive because of their economic might and weight. However, there was also what that comparative prosperity and strength gave them--the stability of their position in the world, and at home, and confidence on the part of others that their policies would be predictable. Certainly the U.S. looked like an island of such power and stability to investors the world over after 1945, with Eurasia in ruins and opposition to empires, and to capitalism, on the march everywhere; while amid the turmoil of post-Napoleonic Europe Britain similarly looked like an island of stability. (Even if less than perfectly quiescent, just compare its record of internal unrest with the succession of revolutions, uprisings, and other such episodes in the then-second economic power in the Western world, France, over 1830-1873.)
China's situation here is, again, more questionable. There is the uncertainty about China's ability to defend its interests amid global stresses--and, able or not, what it would mean to hold China's currency in a world where the trade war against it has been escalating and spreading for years (reaching a new height with the U.S. enlisting Japan and the Netherlands in its campaign to curb export of essential chip-making equipment to China). Even were one somehow to discount such realities there is also the combination of its half-developed state, with all its implications for stability (looming the larger with even the oldest, richest democracies themselves looking less stable), and leeriness on the part of investors about its statist economic model, under a government whose nominally Communist character may bother some more now than it did before to go by the ferocity of the denunciations of an ideology so many had recently treated as unquestionably relegated to the dustbin of history forever, and the more general unraveling of the blithe optimism about "globalization" that prevailed for so long.
Indeed, it is not for nothing that the last great change in the world's reserve currency occurred with the resolution of the conflict over the international order, not before such a conflict, such as so many fear we are headed for now (the Bretton Woods Agreement concluded in July 1944, not in the 1930s).
The result is that the world will likely go on favoring the dollar for a long time to come--albeit with a not insignificant qualification, namely that China's desire to see other states hold more of its currency seen in 2022's Renminbi Liquidity Arrangement, the amenability of those economies most closely linked to its own to doing so, and the way in which geopolitical tensions are further fracturing a damaged world-economic system (e.g. the sanctions the U.S. has applied to Russia), will encourage some to hold more renminbi. However, this will be in spite of, rather than because of, the factors discussed here, and seems unlikely to threaten the dollar's dominance any time soon, the more in as that dominance remains so great. The dollar as yet used for 87 percent of international transactions, as against the 3 percent in which the renminbi is used, underlining what a long way both currencies would have to shift in relation to each other for the Chinese currency to become the foundation of global reserves.
* As of the end of 2021 the stock of inward Foreign Direct Investment in the U.S. amounted to $13.6 trillion, versus $3.6 trillion for China according to the OECD. The stock of outward investment was $9.8 trillion in the U.S. case, and $2.6 trillion in the Chinese case.
Considering this it seems worth looking to past precedent. The modern era has seen a succession of global reserve currencies, though the most recent and most relevant examples would seem to be the U.S. dollar post-1945, and before it the British pound sterling. In each case the country in question was, at the moment of its currency's rise to that status, the world's largest economy by a long way, with this reflecting a "full-spectrum" superiority by a significant margin. That included the country's being the world's leading manufacturing power, not just in terms of aggregate output but in pushing forward the "production frontier," and the leading financial power as well, because of what it meant for the strength of the economy whose currency they would be holding, and what its policies seemed likely to be.
As it happens China is the world's largest economy when measured in Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted terms--but not by very much (perhaps a fifth larger than the U.S.), while in nominal terms it remains well behind the U.S. (about three-quarters as big as the U.S.). If "number one" it is so only imperfectly, with this underlined by the gap between the PPP and nominal calculations. As these remind one, China is not the technological and commercial leader of the advanced industrialized world, or even an advanced industrialized country, but still a developing nation in which the super-city of Shanghai looks "First World," but much of the country remains in the "Third"--making progress that by the standards of the rest of the world is enviable, but not all the way there.
One sees all this confirmed not only in China's per capita income (still just a third or even just a quarter that of the high income states, depending, again, on whether one goes by PPP-adjusted or nominal), but China's manufacturing output when approached in the same manner. China is, beyond doubt, the world's largest manufacturer, with an output approaching twice that of the U.S.. However, in per capita terms it is again less impressive, with China's output just 70 percent or so of the least industrialized member of the Group of Seven nations, Britain, while being not much more than two-fifths of U.S. output, and a third that of Japan--with this partly a matter of its still playing "catch-up" in critical areas like machine tools and microchips.
Again, the result is that if China is "number one" in manufacturing it is only in a fairly qualified way, while it is far from being number one in the financial realm by any measure. Where Chinese holdings of financial assets were concerned in 2021 the country commanded about a fourth of the global proportion of the U.S. according to the latest Allianz Global Wealth Report, while the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicates that it is the same with the country's "inward" and "outward" stocks of foreign investment (what others hold inside China, what Chinese investors hold outside their country)--China's profile, again, about one-fourth that of the U.S. here.*
Moreover, the difference between China's position in manufacturing, and its position in finance, themselves matter. They mean that relative to the country's output and income manufacturing is that much greater, finance that much smaller, a factor than in the case of the U.S. (where the ratio of financial assets-to-GDP is three times what it is in China's case). And it has its reflection in policymaking, monetary policy included. Manufacturing-minded nations favor an undervalued currency for the sake of making their exports more attractive (and imports less attractive), finance-minded nations a "strong" currency for the sake of attracting foreign savings and advantaging their own investors in relation to others abroad--and so has it gone with the U.S. and China. And that matter of a currency's strength counts greatly in the minds of others when they decide which currency they want to hold--to the advantage of the U.S., and the disadvantage of China.
The result is that, to go by the precedents of Britain and the U.S., China--a developing nation, whose financial rise, as is usually the case, is lagging an industrial ascent that is itself incomplete in key ways--remains a long way from being the kind of all-sided superpower, and especially the financial superpower, whose currency is a natural for the rest of the world's reserves when one looks at the hard economic facts--and the orientation of its policy that goes with them. Moreover, with China's economic slowdown these past many years, and the headwinds its continued progress faces in the coming years (from trade war with the U.S. to demographic slowdown to the pandemic's raging through the country now with uncertain outcome) it is far from being a foregone conclusion that it will become such a power within any meaningful time frame.
Moreover, China's attractiveness does not become much clearer when one looks to other, less quantifiable factors. These states were, again, attractive because of their economic might and weight. However, there was also what that comparative prosperity and strength gave them--the stability of their position in the world, and at home, and confidence on the part of others that their policies would be predictable. Certainly the U.S. looked like an island of such power and stability to investors the world over after 1945, with Eurasia in ruins and opposition to empires, and to capitalism, on the march everywhere; while amid the turmoil of post-Napoleonic Europe Britain similarly looked like an island of stability. (Even if less than perfectly quiescent, just compare its record of internal unrest with the succession of revolutions, uprisings, and other such episodes in the then-second economic power in the Western world, France, over 1830-1873.)
China's situation here is, again, more questionable. There is the uncertainty about China's ability to defend its interests amid global stresses--and, able or not, what it would mean to hold China's currency in a world where the trade war against it has been escalating and spreading for years (reaching a new height with the U.S. enlisting Japan and the Netherlands in its campaign to curb export of essential chip-making equipment to China). Even were one somehow to discount such realities there is also the combination of its half-developed state, with all its implications for stability (looming the larger with even the oldest, richest democracies themselves looking less stable), and leeriness on the part of investors about its statist economic model, under a government whose nominally Communist character may bother some more now than it did before to go by the ferocity of the denunciations of an ideology so many had recently treated as unquestionably relegated to the dustbin of history forever, and the more general unraveling of the blithe optimism about "globalization" that prevailed for so long.
Indeed, it is not for nothing that the last great change in the world's reserve currency occurred with the resolution of the conflict over the international order, not before such a conflict, such as so many fear we are headed for now (the Bretton Woods Agreement concluded in July 1944, not in the 1930s).
The result is that the world will likely go on favoring the dollar for a long time to come--albeit with a not insignificant qualification, namely that China's desire to see other states hold more of its currency seen in 2022's Renminbi Liquidity Arrangement, the amenability of those economies most closely linked to its own to doing so, and the way in which geopolitical tensions are further fracturing a damaged world-economic system (e.g. the sanctions the U.S. has applied to Russia), will encourage some to hold more renminbi. However, this will be in spite of, rather than because of, the factors discussed here, and seems unlikely to threaten the dollar's dominance any time soon, the more in as that dominance remains so great. The dollar as yet used for 87 percent of international transactions, as against the 3 percent in which the renminbi is used, underlining what a long way both currencies would have to shift in relation to each other for the Chinese currency to become the foundation of global reserves.
* As of the end of 2021 the stock of inward Foreign Direct Investment in the U.S. amounted to $13.6 trillion, versus $3.6 trillion for China according to the OECD. The stock of outward investment was $9.8 trillion in the U.S. case, and $2.6 trillion in the Chinese case.
What the Zircon Missile May Tell Us About the Future of Naval Warfare
Back in 2008 the Russian government spoke publicly about ambitions for a vast blue-water navy with perhaps a half dozen carrier battle groups sailing the seas.
It was an extravagant vision--going far beyond anything the Soviet Union attempted in the Cold War.
Of course, the Russian government never realized that vision.
In wondering what happened to it one might wonder where it came from. Simply put, when the announcement was made Russia was growing fast--with per capita Gross Domestic Product growth in the vicinity of over 7 percent between 1999 and 2008. This was in large part a matter of recovery from the horrid rock bottom of its '90s collapse, and the surging of oil prices (hitting $150 a barrel that summer, which is more like $200 a barrel in today's dollars). All this could not go on forever, but had it somehow maintained that growth rate (optimally, through the development of its manufacturing base picking up as oil prices stabilized or declined) the mid-2020s one would have seen a Russian economy with a solidly First World income level in nominal terms, bringing together affluence and scale in a combination without peer save for the U.S..*
The fact that Russia, if not doing so badly as those ever-eager to predict its collapse suggest, did not enjoy such a run of growth, and so did not enjoy the resources it would have provided, would seem quite enough to have led to a change of plans.
Still, it seems possible to imagine that this was not the only factor, especially if one considers the trend in Russia's naval construction. Basically coming to a halt with the Soviet collapse, it revived in the mid-2000s--and emphasized smaller, mostly coastally-oriented, surface warships and submarines. To some extent this seems merely a continuation of the norm with the preceding, Soviet, navy, which had always invested heavily in such forces. However, it seems to have gone further in that direction than before. While modernizing its big cruisers, and continuing to operate the one Kuznetsov-class carrier it retained, the biggest surface ship it produced was a 5,000-ton frigate, the Admiral Gorshkov-class ships. And now the biggest it seems to have planned is a somewhat bigger version of those ships (the "Super Gorshkovs").
In short, Russia stopped building big surface ships--even as it pursued an increasingly vigorous program of construction of high-tech smaller ships, and submarines, including large, advanced, nuclear-powered vessels.
Considering this one factor that seems relevant is the advance in cruise missile development we are hearing about, epitomized by Russian claims to not only have developed, but to be actually deploying, hypersonic cruise missiles in the form of the Zircon. The Russian navy, while having its advocates of a blue-water force, has also long had those who regarded big ships as having been rendered less useful by advances in anti-ship weaponry--like the large, supersonic anti-ship missiles they built during the Cold War as the U.S. and other Western countries refrained (like the AS-4 Kitchen, or AS-16 Kickback).
For the time being, of course, it seems that little is independently known about the operability, let alone the actual performance, of the Zircon--every press report of successful tests of the weapon apparently emanating from Russian government sources rather than any independent assessments. Still, one could easily imagine Russian naval planners, having had reason to expect the technology would actually be realized (in contrast with so many of those that prove "vaporware"), the more easily deciding against large warships as a poor investment from the standpoint of plain and simple sea power.
* With the Russian economy, which had a per capita GDP of $11,600 in 2008 (or $15,800 in 2022 terms if one goes by the U.S. Consumer Price Index), growing at the 7.3 percent a year average for 1999-2008 for the next fourteen years would have worked out to a per capita GDP of $42,000 for the country of 146 million--and a GDP of over $6 trillion, versus Germany's $4.5 trillion today. Were one to use Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted figures Russia would have done better still. With Russia's 2008 PPP-adjusted per capita GDP in the $20,000 range the same growth rate would have raised that GDP to a still more impressive $54,000, and the country's aggregate figure to the vicinity of $8 trillion.
It was an extravagant vision--going far beyond anything the Soviet Union attempted in the Cold War.
Of course, the Russian government never realized that vision.
In wondering what happened to it one might wonder where it came from. Simply put, when the announcement was made Russia was growing fast--with per capita Gross Domestic Product growth in the vicinity of over 7 percent between 1999 and 2008. This was in large part a matter of recovery from the horrid rock bottom of its '90s collapse, and the surging of oil prices (hitting $150 a barrel that summer, which is more like $200 a barrel in today's dollars). All this could not go on forever, but had it somehow maintained that growth rate (optimally, through the development of its manufacturing base picking up as oil prices stabilized or declined) the mid-2020s one would have seen a Russian economy with a solidly First World income level in nominal terms, bringing together affluence and scale in a combination without peer save for the U.S..*
The fact that Russia, if not doing so badly as those ever-eager to predict its collapse suggest, did not enjoy such a run of growth, and so did not enjoy the resources it would have provided, would seem quite enough to have led to a change of plans.
Still, it seems possible to imagine that this was not the only factor, especially if one considers the trend in Russia's naval construction. Basically coming to a halt with the Soviet collapse, it revived in the mid-2000s--and emphasized smaller, mostly coastally-oriented, surface warships and submarines. To some extent this seems merely a continuation of the norm with the preceding, Soviet, navy, which had always invested heavily in such forces. However, it seems to have gone further in that direction than before. While modernizing its big cruisers, and continuing to operate the one Kuznetsov-class carrier it retained, the biggest surface ship it produced was a 5,000-ton frigate, the Admiral Gorshkov-class ships. And now the biggest it seems to have planned is a somewhat bigger version of those ships (the "Super Gorshkovs").
In short, Russia stopped building big surface ships--even as it pursued an increasingly vigorous program of construction of high-tech smaller ships, and submarines, including large, advanced, nuclear-powered vessels.
Considering this one factor that seems relevant is the advance in cruise missile development we are hearing about, epitomized by Russian claims to not only have developed, but to be actually deploying, hypersonic cruise missiles in the form of the Zircon. The Russian navy, while having its advocates of a blue-water force, has also long had those who regarded big ships as having been rendered less useful by advances in anti-ship weaponry--like the large, supersonic anti-ship missiles they built during the Cold War as the U.S. and other Western countries refrained (like the AS-4 Kitchen, or AS-16 Kickback).
For the time being, of course, it seems that little is independently known about the operability, let alone the actual performance, of the Zircon--every press report of successful tests of the weapon apparently emanating from Russian government sources rather than any independent assessments. Still, one could easily imagine Russian naval planners, having had reason to expect the technology would actually be realized (in contrast with so many of those that prove "vaporware"), the more easily deciding against large warships as a poor investment from the standpoint of plain and simple sea power.
* With the Russian economy, which had a per capita GDP of $11,600 in 2008 (or $15,800 in 2022 terms if one goes by the U.S. Consumer Price Index), growing at the 7.3 percent a year average for 1999-2008 for the next fourteen years would have worked out to a per capita GDP of $42,000 for the country of 146 million--and a GDP of over $6 trillion, versus Germany's $4.5 trillion today. Were one to use Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted figures Russia would have done better still. With Russia's 2008 PPP-adjusted per capita GDP in the $20,000 range the same growth rate would have raised that GDP to a still more impressive $54,000, and the country's aggregate figure to the vicinity of $8 trillion.
Sunday, February 5, 2023
The B-21 Bomber and a Semi-Superpower Status for Australia
What Might a Fourth-Generation Main Battle Tank Look Like?
Third-generation main battle tanks emerged in the 1970s, and are still what the world's armies field--as the respect commanded by tanks like the M1 Abrams, the Leopard 2, the British Challenger, the Soviet T-80 all demonstrate.
Of course, they have all seen numerous upgrades--sharper sensors, more computers, and most conspicuously, "active protection systems" that respond to incoming projectiles by detecting and shooting a projectile back at them.
Such a detail as the last can seem next-generation-ish. Yet a full-blown next-generation tank would be something else. Thus far the best claimant to that title would seem to be the Russian T-14, with its crew riding in a capsule inside a very thickly armored hull, leaving an unmanned turret up top, while that crew is aided in its work not only by advanced sensors but a high level of automation extending beyond the now-familiar auto-loaded gun to a computerized control system supposed to monitor the vehicle's systems, assess the combat situation, and recommend action to the crew (like a tank equivalent of KITT, I suppose). The vehicle is also supposed to incorporate stealth technology.
Of course, given that production T-14s have yet to actually be seen it is uncertain just how much of this they will actually have--how much of this has been claimed prematurely, and even if it does appear, how much it would matter. (It is one thing to make a fighter plane stealthy at beyond visual range, another to make a 50-ton tank stealthy at the ranges at which armor actually engages its opponents, especially with its engine running and its gun firing.) Meanwhile, even if the T-14 incorporates all the changes discussed in the commentary so far there would still be a great deal that would not have changed. The T-14 has a crew of three, performing the same functions as their counterparts in other Russian tanks. Powered by yet another diesel engine it presents no great improvement in speed or range over its predecessors. Where we heard once of 140 mm Soviet tank guns (this was, in fact, the reason for the depleted uranium armor of the M1A1 version of the Abrams), the T-14 still uses a 125 mm gun, the same caliber Soviet and Russian tanks have been using for a half century now.
In a previous item I remarked the slightness of changes in tank design--but did not discuss its causes. One argument I think worth raising is that, given the existing technology, and the technology that appeared plausible and was actually developed, the tank has not had much further to go for long a time with respect to becoming more mobile, better-protected, or more powerfully gunned. The active protection system would seem to testify to that--simply keeping them viable on a battlefield ever-denser with man-portable anti-tank weapons, tank-killing aircraft and other such threats to the point that tank designers think it worthwhile to equip each tank with the equivalent of its own tiny Ballistic Missile Defense system, which has helped raise the cost of the latest upgrade for these current-generation tanks to more than the cost of the original purchase of the vehicle.
Of course, we have seen speculation about a shift to radical alternatives--like the tank as a network of manned and unmanned vehicles; or even the replacement of armor by "armored infantry" of the Starship Troopers-type. Still, all of this seems hardly less fantastic now than it did a generation ago in yet another reminder of the tendency of hype to outrun reality in military technology as well as technology of other kinds. The result is that I now suspect we will see the continued, incremental, modification of heavy armor, perhaps ever more costly and even wasteful--as if the navies that quickly shifted away from battleships in the wake of the experience of World War II just went on building dreadnoughts instead for lack of confidence that anything else could fill their niche.
Of course, they have all seen numerous upgrades--sharper sensors, more computers, and most conspicuously, "active protection systems" that respond to incoming projectiles by detecting and shooting a projectile back at them.
Such a detail as the last can seem next-generation-ish. Yet a full-blown next-generation tank would be something else. Thus far the best claimant to that title would seem to be the Russian T-14, with its crew riding in a capsule inside a very thickly armored hull, leaving an unmanned turret up top, while that crew is aided in its work not only by advanced sensors but a high level of automation extending beyond the now-familiar auto-loaded gun to a computerized control system supposed to monitor the vehicle's systems, assess the combat situation, and recommend action to the crew (like a tank equivalent of KITT, I suppose). The vehicle is also supposed to incorporate stealth technology.
Of course, given that production T-14s have yet to actually be seen it is uncertain just how much of this they will actually have--how much of this has been claimed prematurely, and even if it does appear, how much it would matter. (It is one thing to make a fighter plane stealthy at beyond visual range, another to make a 50-ton tank stealthy at the ranges at which armor actually engages its opponents, especially with its engine running and its gun firing.) Meanwhile, even if the T-14 incorporates all the changes discussed in the commentary so far there would still be a great deal that would not have changed. The T-14 has a crew of three, performing the same functions as their counterparts in other Russian tanks. Powered by yet another diesel engine it presents no great improvement in speed or range over its predecessors. Where we heard once of 140 mm Soviet tank guns (this was, in fact, the reason for the depleted uranium armor of the M1A1 version of the Abrams), the T-14 still uses a 125 mm gun, the same caliber Soviet and Russian tanks have been using for a half century now.
In a previous item I remarked the slightness of changes in tank design--but did not discuss its causes. One argument I think worth raising is that, given the existing technology, and the technology that appeared plausible and was actually developed, the tank has not had much further to go for long a time with respect to becoming more mobile, better-protected, or more powerfully gunned. The active protection system would seem to testify to that--simply keeping them viable on a battlefield ever-denser with man-portable anti-tank weapons, tank-killing aircraft and other such threats to the point that tank designers think it worthwhile to equip each tank with the equivalent of its own tiny Ballistic Missile Defense system, which has helped raise the cost of the latest upgrade for these current-generation tanks to more than the cost of the original purchase of the vehicle.
Of course, we have seen speculation about a shift to radical alternatives--like the tank as a network of manned and unmanned vehicles; or even the replacement of armor by "armored infantry" of the Starship Troopers-type. Still, all of this seems hardly less fantastic now than it did a generation ago in yet another reminder of the tendency of hype to outrun reality in military technology as well as technology of other kinds. The result is that I now suspect we will see the continued, incremental, modification of heavy armor, perhaps ever more costly and even wasteful--as if the navies that quickly shifted away from battleships in the wake of the experience of World War II just went on building dreadnoughts instead for lack of confidence that anything else could fill their niche.
What is a Third-Generation Main Battle Tank?
Those following the news these days--and its repleteness with reference to tanks as the war in Ukraine continues to escalate--may have noticed the term "main battle tank," and along with it, reference to "third-generation main battle tank."
They may also have been left unclear as to what "third-generation" means in this context--even after trying to research the matter online.
As it happens this is not without reason. Consider the generations, and some of their better-known examples:
1st generation: M47 Patton, Centurion, T-54
2nd generation: M60 Patton, Chieftain, AMX-30, Leopard 1, T-62
3rd-generation: M1 Abrams, Challenger, Leclerc, Leopard 2, T-80
Looking from the tanks in one generation to those in the next one easily notices quantitative changes--the later tanks tending to have more powerful engines and tougher armor and bigger guns than their predecessors. (For example, the M47 had a 90 mm gun, the M60 a 105 mm gun, the M1 a 120 mm gun.) Still, these tell one only so much. (The original edition of the third-generation M1 did have a 105 mm, while the second-generation Chieftain had a 120 mm weapon too.)
Moreover, the qualitative changes are not terribly easy to discern--in part because the changes in propulsion and fire control and firepower were less profound than in, for example, jet fighters during the same period, nothing that happened with tanks between the '40s and '90s as dramatic as the shift in design features, and performance in the design of those aircraft. Aerial combat, after all, saw a shift from subsonic turbojet-powered planes armed with fixed machine guns the pilot aimed by pointing their plane at their target to stealthy supercruise-capable turbofan-powered planes able to engage several at once with internally carried radar-guided air-to-air missiles with hundred mile ranges. By contrast tanks went from being internal combustion engine-powered, metal-hulled vehicles firing shaped-charge and "sabot" shells from the big gun on their turret to punch through a particular thickness of steel from a kilometer or two or three away to fifty years later . . . being somewhat larger and heavier internal combustion engine-powered, metal-hulled vehicles still firing shaped-charge and sabot shells to punch through a somewhat greater thickness of steel from a slightly greater distance somewhat more accurately. (Indeed, even the caliber of guns did not change so much, with World War II and early post-war-era heavy tanks like the Soviet IS-2 and IS-3, and British Conqueror, packing guns of 120 mm+, while some "tank destroyers" packed adapted heavy artillery to the anti-armor role, with one version of the IS-3 having a 152 mm caliber far larger than anything any main battle tank uses today.)
Indeed, where between the '40s and the '90s there were five generations of jet fighters (the last taking to the air with the F-22), in the 2020s third-generation main battle tanks remain the standard in the world's armies.
In fairness this slowness of change in the state of the art was not for lack of trying on the part of tank designers, who did try out a good many new concepts. However, those they did experiment with were rarely embraced in a wide and consistent way, as with an automatic loader for the tank's gun, or missiles to be fired from the tank's launch tube. Some armies embraced them--with the Soviet army making auto-loaded, missile-launching guns the norm for their main battle tanks from the T-64 forward. Others generally eschewed these technologies, with (after its experience with the Shillelagh missile) the U.S. an example, the M1A1 Abrams still having a human loader for a gun that fires only shells, not missiles. Thus did it also go in the area of propulsion, with some embracing more powerful gas turbines, but others sticking with more fuel-efficient and easier-to-maintain diesel engines (the M1A1 using the gas turbine, the Leopard 2 a diesel, and Soviet/Russian tanks using one or the other, with T-64s and T-80s using the turbine, the T-72 the diesel). And so on and so forth.
All of this makes generalization from one generation to another unsatisfying on many a point. Still, one can point to a few developments that are associated with each crop.
The replacement of the earlier division into light, medium and heavy tanks with one balanced, do-it-all type of main battle tank itself was itself the big innovation in the first generation.
The second generation saw some improvements in what was still basically analog fire control (like the first image-intensifying night vision sights, the first laser-range finders, the increasingly standard use of at least a mechanical ballistic computer), and "NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) protection"--specifically the design of the tank so that the crew could be sealed up in it and supplied with purified air if the tank is in an area subject to nuclear, biological or chemical attack.
The third generation retained the NBC protection, of course, but saw fire control go digital (with ballistic computers increasingly electronic rather than mechanical, and advances like thermal imaging). Armor also saw a significant change, with the earlier reliance on rolled homogenous steel armor giving way to "composite" armor combining plates of different material (so that there were layers of steel mixed with layers of ceramic material to provide more "stopping power"). And for what it is worth one certainly finds all these in the Abrams, the Challenger and the other tanks to which the label is presently being applied.
They may also have been left unclear as to what "third-generation" means in this context--even after trying to research the matter online.
As it happens this is not without reason. Consider the generations, and some of their better-known examples:
1st generation: M47 Patton, Centurion, T-54
2nd generation: M60 Patton, Chieftain, AMX-30, Leopard 1, T-62
3rd-generation: M1 Abrams, Challenger, Leclerc, Leopard 2, T-80
Looking from the tanks in one generation to those in the next one easily notices quantitative changes--the later tanks tending to have more powerful engines and tougher armor and bigger guns than their predecessors. (For example, the M47 had a 90 mm gun, the M60 a 105 mm gun, the M1 a 120 mm gun.) Still, these tell one only so much. (The original edition of the third-generation M1 did have a 105 mm, while the second-generation Chieftain had a 120 mm weapon too.)
Moreover, the qualitative changes are not terribly easy to discern--in part because the changes in propulsion and fire control and firepower were less profound than in, for example, jet fighters during the same period, nothing that happened with tanks between the '40s and '90s as dramatic as the shift in design features, and performance in the design of those aircraft. Aerial combat, after all, saw a shift from subsonic turbojet-powered planes armed with fixed machine guns the pilot aimed by pointing their plane at their target to stealthy supercruise-capable turbofan-powered planes able to engage several at once with internally carried radar-guided air-to-air missiles with hundred mile ranges. By contrast tanks went from being internal combustion engine-powered, metal-hulled vehicles firing shaped-charge and "sabot" shells from the big gun on their turret to punch through a particular thickness of steel from a kilometer or two or three away to fifty years later . . . being somewhat larger and heavier internal combustion engine-powered, metal-hulled vehicles still firing shaped-charge and sabot shells to punch through a somewhat greater thickness of steel from a slightly greater distance somewhat more accurately. (Indeed, even the caliber of guns did not change so much, with World War II and early post-war-era heavy tanks like the Soviet IS-2 and IS-3, and British Conqueror, packing guns of 120 mm+, while some "tank destroyers" packed adapted heavy artillery to the anti-armor role, with one version of the IS-3 having a 152 mm caliber far larger than anything any main battle tank uses today.)
Indeed, where between the '40s and the '90s there were five generations of jet fighters (the last taking to the air with the F-22), in the 2020s third-generation main battle tanks remain the standard in the world's armies.
In fairness this slowness of change in the state of the art was not for lack of trying on the part of tank designers, who did try out a good many new concepts. However, those they did experiment with were rarely embraced in a wide and consistent way, as with an automatic loader for the tank's gun, or missiles to be fired from the tank's launch tube. Some armies embraced them--with the Soviet army making auto-loaded, missile-launching guns the norm for their main battle tanks from the T-64 forward. Others generally eschewed these technologies, with (after its experience with the Shillelagh missile) the U.S. an example, the M1A1 Abrams still having a human loader for a gun that fires only shells, not missiles. Thus did it also go in the area of propulsion, with some embracing more powerful gas turbines, but others sticking with more fuel-efficient and easier-to-maintain diesel engines (the M1A1 using the gas turbine, the Leopard 2 a diesel, and Soviet/Russian tanks using one or the other, with T-64s and T-80s using the turbine, the T-72 the diesel). And so on and so forth.
All of this makes generalization from one generation to another unsatisfying on many a point. Still, one can point to a few developments that are associated with each crop.
The replacement of the earlier division into light, medium and heavy tanks with one balanced, do-it-all type of main battle tank itself was itself the big innovation in the first generation.
The second generation saw some improvements in what was still basically analog fire control (like the first image-intensifying night vision sights, the first laser-range finders, the increasingly standard use of at least a mechanical ballistic computer), and "NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) protection"--specifically the design of the tank so that the crew could be sealed up in it and supplied with purified air if the tank is in an area subject to nuclear, biological or chemical attack.
The third generation retained the NBC protection, of course, but saw fire control go digital (with ballistic computers increasingly electronic rather than mechanical, and advances like thermal imaging). Armor also saw a significant change, with the earlier reliance on rolled homogenous steel armor giving way to "composite" armor combining plates of different material (so that there were layers of steel mixed with layers of ceramic material to provide more "stopping power"). And for what it is worth one certainly finds all these in the Abrams, the Challenger and the other tanks to which the label is presently being applied.
What is a Main Battle Tank?
With a major war on ithat seems to be escalating all the time a great deal of military terminology is being tossed about with little or no explanation--and often great inaccuracy. One hears of "armored fighting vehicles, "tanks," "main battle tanks"--and unless they have some knowledge of their own are not sure whether these things are synonymous or not (the more in as some use them interchangeably).
One should start with the most general category--"armored fighting vehicle." As the name indicates this refers to just about any kind of armored vehicle used in combat.
The term "tank" is much more specific. It specifically refers to tracked vehicles with a large gun used for direct fire (shooting straight at targets the crew can see) as their main armament (in contrast with self-propelled artillery where the crew rides in an armored cabin, which can look a lot like a tank, as with the M109 Paladin, but are used for indirect fire, firing its bigger gun at targets outside the crew's line of sight). Unlike an armored personnel carrier (like the M113) or infantry fighting vehicle (like the M2 Bradley) tanks also do not carry troops. They also tend to be much more thickly armored (where a personnel carrier or infantry fighting vehicle has the equivalent of an inch or so of steel in its best-protected areas, current-generation tanks have the equivalent of two feet or more), have a bigger gun (the M2 Bradley having a gun, but just a 25 mm auto-cannon not intended for fighting a full-blown tank the way that an Abrams can), and be heavier than those vehicles (a Bradley weighing about 28 tons, an Abrams as much as 70+ depending on the model).
The term "main battle tank" refers to how the tank developed after World War II. In the preceding period, extending through that conflict, armies tended to use a combination of tank types specialized for different roles. There were light tanks, heavy tanks and medium tanks--with the schematic explanation that the lightly armored and gunned but highly mobile light tanks used for scouting, heavily armored and gunned but not so mobile heavy tanks called up to make the big breakthroughs, and medium tanks striking a balance between the two were used for exploiting those breakthroughs.* (In the World War II-era American army the M2s were the light tanks, the M26 Pershings the heavy tanks, the M4 Shermans the medium tanks.)
By contrast the "main battle tank" (whose potential was displayed by relatively balanced wartime designs like the Soviet T34) replaced the three types with a single, "universal" tank from the late 1940s on.** It did not do so immediately and completely, many countries continuing to produce light tanks long after adopting the main battle tank--the Soviets, for instance, continuing to use PT-76s they introduced the T-54 and later main battle tanks, while at an even later date Britain produced the Scorpion light tank alongside its heavier Chieftain main battle tanks. Some interest also remained in light tanks for the purpose of equipping light forces, like the M551 Sheridan used by the U.S. 82nd airborne division (and the M8 Armored Gun System intended to replace it, but ultimately canceled). Additionally even after the light tank was generally set aside the major armies still produced light, reconnaissance-oriented armored vehicles, some of them with big guns (as with France's AMX-10RC reconnaissance vehicles, which are frequently being referred to as "tanks" these days, in spite of their having wheels and not tracks). Still, the main battle tank filled more of the niches than any of the earlier types did, and if lighter armored vehicles were still part of the mix, those performing the scout role tend to not be of the light tank type (the U.S., for example, using the M3 version of the Bradley), while they tend to not field anything heavier (no super-heavy counterpart to the Abrams existing). All of this has some reflection in the fact that the term "tank," to the extent that the term is not simply used to refer to any old armored vehicle, is synonymous with main battle tanks now.
* In practice it was not always so clear-cut--some armies making little use of light tanks (like the British, who preferred armored cars for scouting), others little use of heavy tanks (like the U.S. Army, the Pershing coming in fairly light as the medium Shermans proved the workhorse of the war). The reader may also note that light tanks were sometimes called "infantry tanks," medium tanks "cruiser tanks"--the latter reflecting their being thought of like "land warships," with cruisers relatively agile, medium-sized vehicles operating independently from a larger fleet (with light tanks the "scout cruisers" and the heavy tanks the "battleships" of the fleet).
** The T-34 owed its success in part to its mass-reproducibility, but also that balance of mobility, protection and firepower, in which it was helped by the innovations it incorporated--among them the then-novel use of a diesel engine and Christie suspension, and "sloped armor," which by putting an armor plate at an angle to the likely direction from which fire would come, forced an incoming shell to pass through a greater thickness of steel.
One should start with the most general category--"armored fighting vehicle." As the name indicates this refers to just about any kind of armored vehicle used in combat.
The term "tank" is much more specific. It specifically refers to tracked vehicles with a large gun used for direct fire (shooting straight at targets the crew can see) as their main armament (in contrast with self-propelled artillery where the crew rides in an armored cabin, which can look a lot like a tank, as with the M109 Paladin, but are used for indirect fire, firing its bigger gun at targets outside the crew's line of sight). Unlike an armored personnel carrier (like the M113) or infantry fighting vehicle (like the M2 Bradley) tanks also do not carry troops. They also tend to be much more thickly armored (where a personnel carrier or infantry fighting vehicle has the equivalent of an inch or so of steel in its best-protected areas, current-generation tanks have the equivalent of two feet or more), have a bigger gun (the M2 Bradley having a gun, but just a 25 mm auto-cannon not intended for fighting a full-blown tank the way that an Abrams can), and be heavier than those vehicles (a Bradley weighing about 28 tons, an Abrams as much as 70+ depending on the model).
The term "main battle tank" refers to how the tank developed after World War II. In the preceding period, extending through that conflict, armies tended to use a combination of tank types specialized for different roles. There were light tanks, heavy tanks and medium tanks--with the schematic explanation that the lightly armored and gunned but highly mobile light tanks used for scouting, heavily armored and gunned but not so mobile heavy tanks called up to make the big breakthroughs, and medium tanks striking a balance between the two were used for exploiting those breakthroughs.* (In the World War II-era American army the M2s were the light tanks, the M26 Pershings the heavy tanks, the M4 Shermans the medium tanks.)
By contrast the "main battle tank" (whose potential was displayed by relatively balanced wartime designs like the Soviet T34) replaced the three types with a single, "universal" tank from the late 1940s on.** It did not do so immediately and completely, many countries continuing to produce light tanks long after adopting the main battle tank--the Soviets, for instance, continuing to use PT-76s they introduced the T-54 and later main battle tanks, while at an even later date Britain produced the Scorpion light tank alongside its heavier Chieftain main battle tanks. Some interest also remained in light tanks for the purpose of equipping light forces, like the M551 Sheridan used by the U.S. 82nd airborne division (and the M8 Armored Gun System intended to replace it, but ultimately canceled). Additionally even after the light tank was generally set aside the major armies still produced light, reconnaissance-oriented armored vehicles, some of them with big guns (as with France's AMX-10RC reconnaissance vehicles, which are frequently being referred to as "tanks" these days, in spite of their having wheels and not tracks). Still, the main battle tank filled more of the niches than any of the earlier types did, and if lighter armored vehicles were still part of the mix, those performing the scout role tend to not be of the light tank type (the U.S., for example, using the M3 version of the Bradley), while they tend to not field anything heavier (no super-heavy counterpart to the Abrams existing). All of this has some reflection in the fact that the term "tank," to the extent that the term is not simply used to refer to any old armored vehicle, is synonymous with main battle tanks now.
* In practice it was not always so clear-cut--some armies making little use of light tanks (like the British, who preferred armored cars for scouting), others little use of heavy tanks (like the U.S. Army, the Pershing coming in fairly light as the medium Shermans proved the workhorse of the war). The reader may also note that light tanks were sometimes called "infantry tanks," medium tanks "cruiser tanks"--the latter reflecting their being thought of like "land warships," with cruisers relatively agile, medium-sized vehicles operating independently from a larger fleet (with light tanks the "scout cruisers" and the heavy tanks the "battleships" of the fleet).
** The T-34 owed its success in part to its mass-reproducibility, but also that balance of mobility, protection and firepower, in which it was helped by the innovations it incorporated--among them the then-novel use of a diesel engine and Christie suspension, and "sloped armor," which by putting an armor plate at an angle to the likely direction from which fire would come, forced an incoming shell to pass through a greater thickness of steel.
Saturday, February 4, 2023
On the Prospect of World War Three. (Emmanuel Todd Tells Us it's Already Begun.)
As Emmanuel Todd has remarked in recent interviews he finds that his views are less and less welcome in his native France--such that those looking for his recent commentary (his occasional Marianne pieces apart) are more likely to find it in Japanese publications than anywhere else.
Last year this went a step further with Todd publishing a book in Japan that, so far as I know, is not available in any other language (French included), but the title of which has been translated into French as La Troisième Guerre Mondiale a Commencé--and in English may be read as The Third World War Has Begun.
Still, Todd recently spoke to the French newspaper Le Figaro about the book. Even a considerably longer interview than the one that paper published can give only so much of the argument of a whole book, but the essentials (once one gets beyond the causes of the conflict, in regard to Todd shares John Mearsheimer's position, actually citing Mearsheimer by name) may be summed up as follows:
The clash between Russia and Ukraine saw both states prove more resilient under duress than expected.
Ukraine proved surprisingly resilient in the face of military attack--mainly because of the stiffening effect of massive material support from NATO and its allies.
Meanwhile Russia has been more resilient than expected in the face of the Western sanctions applied against it--to the point that time and again the West has underestimated its ability to keep its artillerists in shells, and its air force in missiles. Significant to this underestimation has been the tendency to view the Russian economy as very small next to the economies of the U.S. and of NATO. However, Todd sees the Western economies as having hollowed out significantly in contrast with a Russia with more capacity than others realize as testified by its status as a key supplier of goods from wheat to nuclear reactors. Critical to this has been its having an extremely large corps of what we these days call "STEM graduates" for its size, providing it with exceptional industrial and military adaptability, the benefits of which have been evident in the country's making progress even in the years of sanctions preceding 2022.* (Indeed, Todd--first and foremost a demographer whose past work has relied heavily on data such as infant mortality, to the degree that it was central to his ultimately correct prediction about the Soviet collapse--points out that Russia now has a lower rate of infant mortality than the United States.) Todd also questions the image of Russia as "isolated," instead arguing for the country as possessing, besides the advantages of its economic importance, very considerable "soft power" resources, not least in the country appearing to be both an "anti-colonial" power and champion of cultural conservatism against a West militantly championing feminist/LGBTQ+ politics (Russia thus presentable as opposing both cultural and economic imperialism together).
The resulting resilience of both a NATO-backed Ukraine at one end, and a Russia Todd regards as (in contrast with the tendency of the press to downplay Chinese attachment to Russia) backed by China, has meant a conflict that is wide as well as protracted. Moreover, he sees neither side accepting defeat--in the case of the U.S. because its broader geopolitical position may be at stake, this in Todd's view being centered on a dominance of Western Europe and Japan, a key benefit of which has been America's capacity to run colossal trade deficits virtually without consequence for decades (and without which capacity the U.S. would be forced to retrench geopolitically). This would seem underlined by the dynamics within the NATO alliance itself, with a less hawkish France and German "sidelined" as strategically situated Poland has emerged as the key U.S. partner.
The result has been to make the conflict not potentially a world war, but already a world war.
Considering Todd's analysis I find myself looking at much that is familiar, not only from his earlier writing on the conflict but his work going back decades--for instance, to his 2003 book After the Empire. The vision of the "American empire" he presents in the interview is the same as what that earlier book offers, down to the hollowed-out American economy and trade deficit-dependent geopolitical position. Familiar from that book also is his expectation that Russia, the decline of which he argued then had already bottomed out, would play a critical part in undermining the U.S. position by linking up with another power center in the world (if Europe rather than China); his stress on U.S. disagreement with Germany and France; and his characterization of a political cleavage between Germany and closely associated but more "Russophobic" states, with Poland specifically cited. And at least methodologically familiar is his stress on family structures, values, educational levels, which is so critical to his reading of Russia's hard and soft power.
Indeed, so much is familiar that one may wonder if Todd has not adapted his old vision to new circumstances--the more in as key aspects of his thinking strike me as unpersuasive, especially when we get away from the clearer-cut facts (that Ukraine and Russia both proved more resilient than expected, etc.) toward the more interpretive portion of the discussion. Personally I have long thought that Todd sets too much store by relatively narrow aspects of family structure as a determinant of broad societal values, and by the role of values in international conflict as against hard material interest. The reality is that while Russia today claims the anti-colonial mantle, apparently with some resonance in many parts of the world (with, to show how far this seems to extend geographically, Haitians waving Russian flags in anti-government protests), and its cultural conservatism finds a response even in the U.S. (such that the media tells us of American conservatives converting to Russian Orthodoxy), I am not so sure how deep the significance of such things goes (a Russian government which never ceases to put down the Bolsheviks claiming their anti-colonial mantle is undeniably awkward), let alone that it will mean very much in the geopolitical arena even if it did, and none of this evidently causing Western governments significant inconvenience thus far (for instance, by way of right-wing politicians in the West obstructing support for Ukraine).
This matters all the more because I have my doubts regarding his reading of the material balance of power in the conflict. While Todd acknowledges that the combined GDP of Russia and Belarus amounts to about 3 percent that of the U.S. and its principal European and East Asian allies, he notes that much of the U.S. GDP (which accounts for by far the largest part of the West's combined resources), consists of a bloated health sector and dubious "services." This leaves much of it, in his words, "water vapor," implying a radically smaller distance between the real resources of the U.S. and its allies and Russia in this respect--which may be all the greater when one remembers how the "relocation" of so much production has called into question the capacity to mobilize industry for military purposes.
For my part I certainly do not disagree about the ways in which calculations of GDP can be misleading (indeed, the deficiencies of GDP calculations and the hollowing out of the U.S. economy have both been longtime research subjects for me)--and I accordingly made a point of considering manufacturing output when I took up the issue of the NATO-Russian balance some time ago. Specifically I crunched the United Nations-supplied numbers regarding manufacturing output ("value added"), and the shares of medium and high-tech manufacturing and that telling category, machinery and transport equipment, in that total; while looking at the production and consumption of such key inputs as steel, machine tools and semiconductors. However, in spite of the very real trend of deindustrialization of the U.S., which has seen the country's per capita manufacturing output fall by a fifth altogether since the 1970s and much more in certain key lines like primary metals, autos, machinery, etc. (offset, in the main, by the shale boom and the world's biggest defense budget), the U.S. still out-produces Russia at least 10-to-1 in manufacturing overall, and about 20-to-1 in the medium and high-tech manufacturing category, specifically including the critical area of "machinery and transport equipment." The disproportion becomes more than twice that when one counts in the rest of North America and Western Europe (and worse still for Russia in areas like machine tools, and microchips, where NATO may enjoy an advantage not of one but two orders of magnitude).
The result is that these numbers could be way off, and still leave NATO with a vast advantage over Russia in the military-industrial arena (even before, again, one counts in allied states like Japan or South Korea). Moreover, even granting Russia's educational system and labor force punching "above their weight class" in the engineering realm it is difficult to picture it compensating wholly for the lacks in its industrial system relative to others in the face of sanctions, even with the help of a China which, if supportive of Russia, and unlikely to sit idly by in the event of the Russian state's coherence, or even the stability of the regime, being endangered, has shown little sign of throwing its weight behind Russia the way that NATO has behind Ukraine thus far.
Equally, if overestimating Russian strength Todd would seem to be (again, granting the reality of many of the weaknesses to which he points) underestimating that of NATO. Again, there is no question of the U.S.' "consequence-free" running of massive merchandise trade deficits year in, year out, and the reality that there must be limits to it. Yet Todd has in the past underestimated how long this can go on (certainly, to go by his 2003 book, giving no expectation that it could still be ongoing in 2023), in part because he seems fuzzy on how this works. It is not a matter of "tribute" such as Todd describes, but of the legacies of the U.S.' past far more overwhelming strength, and the weaknesses of the neoliberal order today that make "least-worst" options different from what one might expect. While it is far from making things right by itself (indeed, it is a longtime cause of significant, worsening problems), it matters that this has been an age of "creditist" expansion of the monetary supply--enabling governments and countries to run once unthinkable imbalances. It matters that those countries that are manufacturing-oriented prefer their currencies undervalued for the sake of their exports, giving them reason to not want to see the U.S. dollar devalued (the more in as it has been such a critical market for the biggest manufacturer of all, China). It matters that the U.S. has Wall Street. It matters that the dollar continues to lack a proper rival, as the floundering of the European project (in which one must remember that Todd was once a great believer) shows--and that in an uncertain world where really profitable investment opportunities are few foreign investors are desirous of U.S. dollars, and U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds, giving them yet more reason to not want to see the dollar devalued. It matters that, as was demonstrated not so long ago when the financial crisis of 2007 hit, there was simply no substitute for the bailout powers of the U.S. Federal Reserve--around which, it might be added, European elites rallied and can still be expected to rally in time of crisis to go by their past and present conduct. (Indeed, it is relevant that Britain, with a much smaller and much less secure but not wholly dissimilar base of financial power--and which certainly cannot be described as exacting "tribute"--has likewise run chronic trade deficits through the same period without the trouble one would ordinarily expect, in its way displaying the existence of the pattern described above.) Admittedly where all this is concerned the trend appears untoward--given the turmoil in the Treasury market in March 2020, and the Reserve's shifting in reverse in regard to the policies propping up the system (the need for which is, again, no testament to the health of the neoliberal order without which it is unthinkable). Yet Todd's error, hugely significant in itself, would easily translate to his underestimating the capacity of the U.S. to keep running such deficits.
However, these faults in Todd's analysis pale next to an issue he scarcely discusses at all. Save for Todd's reference to Russian nuclear superiority being an accomplished fact on the basis of (apparently) nothing more than the Russian government's claims to have fielded working hypersonic missiles he does not acknowledge the reality that this is an escalating military confrontation between nuclear powers--and indeed he seems to slight the nuclear danger when he remarks in rather casual fashion that Russia has "five years in which to win the war, or lose it, a normal duration for a world war." That the nuclear element exists automatically makes it not a "normal" world war (if indeed there is such a thing!), and the fact, with all the dangers attending it, should be foremost in the minds of everyone whenever thinking about this conflict, whether or not one, like him, regards it as having already crossed the line into the territory of World War Three.
* Todd notes both that Russian wheat production (once an object of sneering in the West) has surged in the post-Soviet period, from 40 to 90 million tons since 1980 (in contrast with the much less impressive trend in the case of the U.S.), and that Russia has become the world's leading exporter of nuclear reactors. Where the labor force is concerned Todd points out that Russia, in spite of having a population less than half the size of the U.S., has 30 percent more engineering graduates than the United States--and this on the basis of its own citizenry rather than foreign students (Todd making much of the proportion of American engineering students coming from India and especially a China he sees as an American rival).
Last year this went a step further with Todd publishing a book in Japan that, so far as I know, is not available in any other language (French included), but the title of which has been translated into French as La Troisième Guerre Mondiale a Commencé--and in English may be read as The Third World War Has Begun.
Still, Todd recently spoke to the French newspaper Le Figaro about the book. Even a considerably longer interview than the one that paper published can give only so much of the argument of a whole book, but the essentials (once one gets beyond the causes of the conflict, in regard to Todd shares John Mearsheimer's position, actually citing Mearsheimer by name) may be summed up as follows:
The clash between Russia and Ukraine saw both states prove more resilient under duress than expected.
Ukraine proved surprisingly resilient in the face of military attack--mainly because of the stiffening effect of massive material support from NATO and its allies.
Meanwhile Russia has been more resilient than expected in the face of the Western sanctions applied against it--to the point that time and again the West has underestimated its ability to keep its artillerists in shells, and its air force in missiles. Significant to this underestimation has been the tendency to view the Russian economy as very small next to the economies of the U.S. and of NATO. However, Todd sees the Western economies as having hollowed out significantly in contrast with a Russia with more capacity than others realize as testified by its status as a key supplier of goods from wheat to nuclear reactors. Critical to this has been its having an extremely large corps of what we these days call "STEM graduates" for its size, providing it with exceptional industrial and military adaptability, the benefits of which have been evident in the country's making progress even in the years of sanctions preceding 2022.* (Indeed, Todd--first and foremost a demographer whose past work has relied heavily on data such as infant mortality, to the degree that it was central to his ultimately correct prediction about the Soviet collapse--points out that Russia now has a lower rate of infant mortality than the United States.) Todd also questions the image of Russia as "isolated," instead arguing for the country as possessing, besides the advantages of its economic importance, very considerable "soft power" resources, not least in the country appearing to be both an "anti-colonial" power and champion of cultural conservatism against a West militantly championing feminist/LGBTQ+ politics (Russia thus presentable as opposing both cultural and economic imperialism together).
The resulting resilience of both a NATO-backed Ukraine at one end, and a Russia Todd regards as (in contrast with the tendency of the press to downplay Chinese attachment to Russia) backed by China, has meant a conflict that is wide as well as protracted. Moreover, he sees neither side accepting defeat--in the case of the U.S. because its broader geopolitical position may be at stake, this in Todd's view being centered on a dominance of Western Europe and Japan, a key benefit of which has been America's capacity to run colossal trade deficits virtually without consequence for decades (and without which capacity the U.S. would be forced to retrench geopolitically). This would seem underlined by the dynamics within the NATO alliance itself, with a less hawkish France and German "sidelined" as strategically situated Poland has emerged as the key U.S. partner.
The result has been to make the conflict not potentially a world war, but already a world war.
Considering Todd's analysis I find myself looking at much that is familiar, not only from his earlier writing on the conflict but his work going back decades--for instance, to his 2003 book After the Empire. The vision of the "American empire" he presents in the interview is the same as what that earlier book offers, down to the hollowed-out American economy and trade deficit-dependent geopolitical position. Familiar from that book also is his expectation that Russia, the decline of which he argued then had already bottomed out, would play a critical part in undermining the U.S. position by linking up with another power center in the world (if Europe rather than China); his stress on U.S. disagreement with Germany and France; and his characterization of a political cleavage between Germany and closely associated but more "Russophobic" states, with Poland specifically cited. And at least methodologically familiar is his stress on family structures, values, educational levels, which is so critical to his reading of Russia's hard and soft power.
Indeed, so much is familiar that one may wonder if Todd has not adapted his old vision to new circumstances--the more in as key aspects of his thinking strike me as unpersuasive, especially when we get away from the clearer-cut facts (that Ukraine and Russia both proved more resilient than expected, etc.) toward the more interpretive portion of the discussion. Personally I have long thought that Todd sets too much store by relatively narrow aspects of family structure as a determinant of broad societal values, and by the role of values in international conflict as against hard material interest. The reality is that while Russia today claims the anti-colonial mantle, apparently with some resonance in many parts of the world (with, to show how far this seems to extend geographically, Haitians waving Russian flags in anti-government protests), and its cultural conservatism finds a response even in the U.S. (such that the media tells us of American conservatives converting to Russian Orthodoxy), I am not so sure how deep the significance of such things goes (a Russian government which never ceases to put down the Bolsheviks claiming their anti-colonial mantle is undeniably awkward), let alone that it will mean very much in the geopolitical arena even if it did, and none of this evidently causing Western governments significant inconvenience thus far (for instance, by way of right-wing politicians in the West obstructing support for Ukraine).
This matters all the more because I have my doubts regarding his reading of the material balance of power in the conflict. While Todd acknowledges that the combined GDP of Russia and Belarus amounts to about 3 percent that of the U.S. and its principal European and East Asian allies, he notes that much of the U.S. GDP (which accounts for by far the largest part of the West's combined resources), consists of a bloated health sector and dubious "services." This leaves much of it, in his words, "water vapor," implying a radically smaller distance between the real resources of the U.S. and its allies and Russia in this respect--which may be all the greater when one remembers how the "relocation" of so much production has called into question the capacity to mobilize industry for military purposes.
For my part I certainly do not disagree about the ways in which calculations of GDP can be misleading (indeed, the deficiencies of GDP calculations and the hollowing out of the U.S. economy have both been longtime research subjects for me)--and I accordingly made a point of considering manufacturing output when I took up the issue of the NATO-Russian balance some time ago. Specifically I crunched the United Nations-supplied numbers regarding manufacturing output ("value added"), and the shares of medium and high-tech manufacturing and that telling category, machinery and transport equipment, in that total; while looking at the production and consumption of such key inputs as steel, machine tools and semiconductors. However, in spite of the very real trend of deindustrialization of the U.S., which has seen the country's per capita manufacturing output fall by a fifth altogether since the 1970s and much more in certain key lines like primary metals, autos, machinery, etc. (offset, in the main, by the shale boom and the world's biggest defense budget), the U.S. still out-produces Russia at least 10-to-1 in manufacturing overall, and about 20-to-1 in the medium and high-tech manufacturing category, specifically including the critical area of "machinery and transport equipment." The disproportion becomes more than twice that when one counts in the rest of North America and Western Europe (and worse still for Russia in areas like machine tools, and microchips, where NATO may enjoy an advantage not of one but two orders of magnitude).
The result is that these numbers could be way off, and still leave NATO with a vast advantage over Russia in the military-industrial arena (even before, again, one counts in allied states like Japan or South Korea). Moreover, even granting Russia's educational system and labor force punching "above their weight class" in the engineering realm it is difficult to picture it compensating wholly for the lacks in its industrial system relative to others in the face of sanctions, even with the help of a China which, if supportive of Russia, and unlikely to sit idly by in the event of the Russian state's coherence, or even the stability of the regime, being endangered, has shown little sign of throwing its weight behind Russia the way that NATO has behind Ukraine thus far.
Equally, if overestimating Russian strength Todd would seem to be (again, granting the reality of many of the weaknesses to which he points) underestimating that of NATO. Again, there is no question of the U.S.' "consequence-free" running of massive merchandise trade deficits year in, year out, and the reality that there must be limits to it. Yet Todd has in the past underestimated how long this can go on (certainly, to go by his 2003 book, giving no expectation that it could still be ongoing in 2023), in part because he seems fuzzy on how this works. It is not a matter of "tribute" such as Todd describes, but of the legacies of the U.S.' past far more overwhelming strength, and the weaknesses of the neoliberal order today that make "least-worst" options different from what one might expect. While it is far from making things right by itself (indeed, it is a longtime cause of significant, worsening problems), it matters that this has been an age of "creditist" expansion of the monetary supply--enabling governments and countries to run once unthinkable imbalances. It matters that those countries that are manufacturing-oriented prefer their currencies undervalued for the sake of their exports, giving them reason to not want to see the U.S. dollar devalued (the more in as it has been such a critical market for the biggest manufacturer of all, China). It matters that the U.S. has Wall Street. It matters that the dollar continues to lack a proper rival, as the floundering of the European project (in which one must remember that Todd was once a great believer) shows--and that in an uncertain world where really profitable investment opportunities are few foreign investors are desirous of U.S. dollars, and U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds, giving them yet more reason to not want to see the dollar devalued. It matters that, as was demonstrated not so long ago when the financial crisis of 2007 hit, there was simply no substitute for the bailout powers of the U.S. Federal Reserve--around which, it might be added, European elites rallied and can still be expected to rally in time of crisis to go by their past and present conduct. (Indeed, it is relevant that Britain, with a much smaller and much less secure but not wholly dissimilar base of financial power--and which certainly cannot be described as exacting "tribute"--has likewise run chronic trade deficits through the same period without the trouble one would ordinarily expect, in its way displaying the existence of the pattern described above.) Admittedly where all this is concerned the trend appears untoward--given the turmoil in the Treasury market in March 2020, and the Reserve's shifting in reverse in regard to the policies propping up the system (the need for which is, again, no testament to the health of the neoliberal order without which it is unthinkable). Yet Todd's error, hugely significant in itself, would easily translate to his underestimating the capacity of the U.S. to keep running such deficits.
However, these faults in Todd's analysis pale next to an issue he scarcely discusses at all. Save for Todd's reference to Russian nuclear superiority being an accomplished fact on the basis of (apparently) nothing more than the Russian government's claims to have fielded working hypersonic missiles he does not acknowledge the reality that this is an escalating military confrontation between nuclear powers--and indeed he seems to slight the nuclear danger when he remarks in rather casual fashion that Russia has "five years in which to win the war, or lose it, a normal duration for a world war." That the nuclear element exists automatically makes it not a "normal" world war (if indeed there is such a thing!), and the fact, with all the dangers attending it, should be foremost in the minds of everyone whenever thinking about this conflict, whether or not one, like him, regards it as having already crossed the line into the territory of World War Three.
* Todd notes both that Russian wheat production (once an object of sneering in the West) has surged in the post-Soviet period, from 40 to 90 million tons since 1980 (in contrast with the much less impressive trend in the case of the U.S.), and that Russia has become the world's leading exporter of nuclear reactors. Where the labor force is concerned Todd points out that Russia, in spite of having a population less than half the size of the U.S., has 30 percent more engineering graduates than the United States--and this on the basis of its own citizenry rather than foreign students (Todd making much of the proportion of American engineering students coming from India and especially a China he sees as an American rival).
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