One of the ideas that seems to be missed from the study of history and economy, was the effect on the total destruction of the Japanese and German industrial base - during WWII.
Britain and USA, were left with their archaic industrial systems.
After WWII, the Japanese and the German steel industry had to be completely reborn.
(At the cost of primarily USA financing.)
Those two countries had no more relics of the past, and started over, necessarily, with the most modern technology and science.
North American industry was in a slow evolution from the 1900's, but Germany and Japan, had a hot start from the 1950-60's. No wonder everyone was impressed by their modern approach to construction, design, manufacturing, which more or less started to out perform USA and Britain in the 70's.
China, started it's industrial rebirth even later.
It is an interesting narrative but largely untrue. As the article points out, US Steel (and the US steel industry in general) was making enough profit, what they were not doing was re-investing those profits into upgrading their steel making. Instead, the "People in Charge" were giving themselves large bonuses and pay upgrades for being bosses of the "big steel." This was especially true through the 80's and 90's in a post "stagflation" atmosphere a lot of industry became more focused on executive pay than product production. The poster child was the auto industry "forgetting" how to make quality cars. They didn't forget of course, they just focused more on shoveling money into the C-suite and less on actually building a quality product. The massive erosion of the car market to Japanese automakers was a direct result of that shift of thinking.
> This was especially true through the 80's and 90's in a post "stagflation" atmosphere a lot of industry became more focused on executive pay than product production.
Really the thing that does this is market concentration. You have only three major companies in an industry and they can play "conscious parallelism" games to avoid competing with each other while pointing to the others as ostensible competition to fend off antitrust allegations.
Then because they're not actually subject to competitive pressure, they stagnate, and as soon as anyone else shows up who hasn't forgotten how to satisfy the customer, the incumbents start to crumble.
It isn't a coincidence that the article is about something similar happening to US Steel, the infamous former monopolist.
I’m not sure that narrative on “forgetting how to build quality cars” is fair. Germany and Japan introduced a lot of new technologies and processes that would naturally be a little rocky from time to time. It is the nature of immature services.
Once those matured, the new stuff quickly caught up. But it needed time.
What makes you think it was the increase in executive or shareholder comp that caused the degradation in quality? Do we even know if there was a degradation between a 1960 ford and 1985, or is it because the Japanese and German automakers raised our standards?
This is a situation where a lot of narratives fit the evidence.
Here's an example, before WWII brake lines were made out of Monel, a corrosion proof material aside from galvanic. Nickel and copper being expensive and needed elsewhere the lines were made then made from painted steel. After the war steel lines became the standard.
The cost difference is small but it's indicative of a larger issue of disposability. One of the reasons Japanese vehicles started to dominate was that they lasted longer. This is due to better tolerances, more efficient engines, and more robust component design.
The Toyota production method, lean and just-in-time were mostly methods for rationalizing better systems to eliminate waste within production and to minimize inventory. Such methods don't inherently make a better car though they leave more io the table to spend on coatings, quality parts etc.
The wiki has this line that sums it all up perfectly:
In 1982, Deming's book Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position was published by the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering, and was renamed Out of the Crisis in 1986. In it, he offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but also by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved products and services. "Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment."
Having owned a 72 Vega and a 79 Mustang the quality drop off from earlier vehicles was obvious. No one is collecting late 70’s mustangs. No one is restoring Chevy Vegas. American car companies made crap cars and didn’t care until it was too late.
> Do we even know if there was a degradation between a 1960 ford and 1985, or is it because the Japanese and German automakers raised our standards?
I know because I've driven cars from both eras. GM and Ford cars from the late 50s required a lot of maintenance by modern standards and they guzzled gas and they would kill you if you had a crash in one. But they were built like battle tanks: Lots of steel; very little plastic.
By the end of the 1970s, US cars were built mostly out of plastic. The issue was not that they required more maintenance. The issue was that they fell to pieces on the highway. If you left one sitting in the sun for a year, it would turn into dust. They were utter, unrepairable crap.
Which is precisely the culture people in Germany and Japan don't have (or at least: had). If there are profits at least a chunk of them should be re-invested into making things better, who knows what the future brings after all.
See the movie "The Mouse That Roared". Having seen the results of Germany and Japan being bombed and rebuilt by the US, a small fictional country comes up with the brilliant development plan of intentionally starting and losing a war with the US. Spoiler alert: they end up having to deal with the tragedy of accidentally winning the war. As I recall, part of it was they just assumed their generals would lose, so the generals weren't in on the plan.
A satirical movie involving nuclear weapons and Peter Sellers plays three roles? Where have I heard that one before?
(actually, it looks like it is five years older than Dr. Strangelove? This looks like it could be turned into a very mean pubquiz trivia question, hahaha)
Maybe someone can clarify this to me: wasn’t US help essentially given as a loan that would carry interest and repayments? Or was it given for free with the agreement that they would follow a US-inspired democratic system and be allies (and in exchange of trade agreements)? Were military bases in those countries given as a repayment, perhaps in addition to repaying the loans? But even then, isn’t the US paying rent for those bases?
The repayment is that we took over the defense of Europe and basically eliminated the pre-war European powers as global competitors. This gives us tremendous leverage to do whatever the fuck we want either unilaterally or by coercing our European client-states to act on our behalf.
Europe deciding to light itself on fire twice in the last century is the best thing that ever happened to America.
Loans to a bombed out country in the aftermath of losing a major war can be hard to come by, for the same reasons as they are for a third world country with an unstable government.
It's not uncommon for a country to get stuck in a situation where they have no infrastructure that could attract investment so they have no industry so they have no economic base to build infrastructure. "Get the US to loan us money" is nominally a way out of this.
The US noticed this too and makes loans to such countries de facto through the World Bank, providing them with an opening through which they can crawl up inside those countries and lay eggs.
Also one movie with him in brownface that oddly enough is actually extremely popular in India and Pakistan (to the point where I was introduced to it on a New Year's Eve party hosted by a friend from Pakistan).
The idea that it's haram (I can't quite think of the right word; not merely wrong but disgusting) for someone to make themselves up as a different skin tone is a distinctly American cultural quirk.
I think it actually makes sense in the context of US history though.
As always it starts with the uniquely explicitly race-based slavery, and from there you can draw a direct line to non-white people being systemically "othered" and denied basic human decency one way or another (to put it mildly).
In this particular case, the history of Hollywood to deny non-white actors leading roles, but giving white actors roles where they play racist stereotypes of everyone else. Aside from the issues on an individual level that also means "non-white" cultures don't get properly represented, but depicted according to whatever racist stereotype the white actors/writers have about a culture they usually don't actually know much about.
So yeah, I am not from the US but I get it. Which again makes the fact that Peter Sellers' apparently hit a positive chord an interesting exception.
> I think it actually makes sense in the context of US history though.
Well sure. Most cultural quirks make sense in the context of that culture's history. All part of the rich tapestry of life, as long as they don't try to impose them on other cultures.
> Which again makes the fact that Peter Sellers' apparently hit a positive chord an interesting exception.
GP was saying it was unpopular with their American-born relations, no?
The diplomat in charge of central Europe thinks their declaration of war is a practical joke from another department, so nobody notices when their army (of about 10 crossbowmen) shows up in New York and grabs a fictional doomsday device out of a secret lab.
This all depends on victory conditions. The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell. But WW2 was fought as the U.S. was an ascendant (but not dominant) power among a number of peer rivals, and the U.S. was not the aggressor. It felt like a victory, because we emerged as the dominant power, with the only industrial base that wasn't destroyed, and then enjoyed the economic fruits of rebuilding a country that had been bombed back into the stone age and then capitulated. Additionally, Germany and Japan expected that U.S. occupation would be absolutely terrible, that we would be tyrants in the same way that their militaristic governments of the time were, and so when it turned out we just wanted to make money, that was a huge relief to them.
With all the post-WW2 wars, we've gone in as a dominant power, as the aggressor, to a country that is far smaller and less developed. In terms of casualties, they've been even more lopsided victories than WW2. The second Iraq war killed about half a million Iraqis and displaced about 1.8M, vs. < 1000 Americans killed, for a kill ratio of ~500:1. But what does it even mean to achieve victory here? We go in as a bully and ruin our world reputation. The average American sees zero benefit from killing Iraqis; it just means higher oil prices, larger government debt, more inflation, reduced civil liberties, and a lack of focus on domestic problems (...which may be the point). Defense contractors make out like a bandit, and the executive branch gets to consolidate power (...which, again, may be the point), but there isn't room to grow the way there was after WW2.
The government of North Korea did not fall or surrender. You can argue that it was a political win if the goal was defending South Korea, but militarily, it was a stalemate.
North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam after we withdrew. It was in no way a victory for the United States. Afghanistan was arguably pretty similar, although we did install a new government while we were there.
Germany and Japan, on the other hand, surrendered unconditionally. Saying that Germany and Japan were “bombed back into the Stone Age” is a wild exaggeration, though — strategic bombing famously failed to cripple Germany’s wartime industrial production. (Strategic bombing in general is overrated.)
Your number for US deaths in Iraq is low by at least a factor of four.
You may wish to learn the actual histories of these wars before trying to draw big conclusions.
Deaths. US in Iraq. ~7000.
I think the point still stands. Even though they 'felt' like a loss, there was a ~500:1 kill ratio. So was it really a loss if you are mowing the enemy down?
Also note. There were 4x as many deaths from suicide.
If we really cared about soldiers, this would be the number one story every day.
Over 7,000 U.S. service members and over 8,000 contractors have died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Over 30,177 U.S. service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars have died by suicide.
Coalition partners have died in large numbers: approximately 177,000 uniformed Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Syrian allies have died as of November 2019.
>Saying that Germany and Japan were “bombed back into the Stone Age” is a wild exaggeration
Japan was firebombed pretty ruthlessly. McNamara openly stated that he would have been tried as a war criminal had the US lost the war. Here is a list of 67 Japanese cities that were firebombed with their destruction % and their US size equivalent:
I guess this all depends on one’s definition “bombed back into the Stone Age”. I’m sure descendants of those that lived in Dresden might argue that they, in fact, were indiscriminately bombed to the point of ruin.
> I guess this all depends on one’s definition “bombed back into the Stone Age”.
Well, yeah. And it's not exactly a technical term. Don't get me wrong, the strategic bombing was very destructive and killed a lot of people. The way I interpret the phrase is that bombing a country "back to the stone age" means destroying their industrial production. And strategic bombing didn't do that. Germany and Japan's GDPs did not crater; their production of military hardware increased through 1944. I'm sure the bombing kept it from increasing more, but that's not what the phrase implies. When the Allied armies entered Germany in 1944 their opponents were armed with guns and tanks, not bows and spears.
The US picks extremely difficult battles to fight in a way its citizens deem acceptable, and they aren't wars of conquest. Those factors are going to make it very hard to point at a simple winner.
I’m not sure why people care to mention Vietnam and Afghanistan in the same breath as real wars. These are wars against insurgencies, populations, and ideologies, not governments.
They’re inherently different and the only way to “””win”””(which is a loaded term with wars against insurgents. We accomplished important strategic goals in Vietnam before leaving the country to self determine) is to resort to tactics employed by folks like The Butcher did in Cuba.
Vietnam War was a conventional war between two governments and their international supporters. The government the US supported lost the war, because the US was unwilling to commit sufficient forces to win. Largely because they were afraid of a repeat of the Korean War, with China and possibly even the USSR joining the war for real. And because the US lacked the will to win, they eventually lost the will to maintain the status quo.
The Vietnamese didn't need active participation from China or the USSR to win. It was seen as a war of independence, with a popular Northern Vietnamese government and a US puppet South Vietnam government, whose soldiers were unmotivated. The South Vietnam government only lasted as long as it did because of US assistance.
Vietnam, the US war, was dought in South Vietnam against local insurgents and regular North Vietnamese forces. It ended with a formal peace treaty, in which the US agreed to withdraw all troops, not send further military aid to the South, return prisoners, remove mines from North Vietnamese harbours and pay, even if called differently, reparations. Vietnam was pretty much a war the US lost, and one that was not exclusively fought against insurgents.
The US won zero strategic goals, Vietnam was reunited by force under the communist North. The US goal was to orevent exactly that. Nice spin so, calling Vietnam a defacto strategic victory for the US.
And Afghanistan, seriously? Before, anti-Talobam forces controlled at least parts of zue country. Nowy the Taliban are in full controll after they over ran Kabul following a hasty retreat of NATO forces from the country, that is as clear cut a loss as it gets. Had the US led coalition left after Bin-Laden was killed, one could have declared a victory. By staying and tuening the whole affaire into a foreign occupation without clearly defined goals, the US-led coalition could only loose. And they did.
That’s completely false. A large strategic goal of USA in Vietnam was to show strategic partners and allies the extent to which USA was willing to go for its commitments.
> And Afghanistan, seriously?
I have no idea what you’re asking. Vietnam and Afghanistan were simply not real wars in the traditional “win-loss” sense for USA; Afghanistan moreso than Vietnam.
Would you mind providing some “clear and internationally acknowledged” sources for the Korean War that stated it’s still ongoing or that Afghanistan was an undisputed loss?
As for the Korean war, it's kind of a fuzzy topic. There was no formal peace deal, just an armistice that became the status quo. And there are still occasional clashes. These probably aren't the kind of sources you're looking for but it's a weird topic. To me it's more obvious that we lost Vietnam than Afghanistan yet I've heard so many arguments the US did win Vietnam (usually where "winning" means something different to different people). Either way Afghanistan was at least an embarrassment.
It 'feels' like a loss. I'm sure there are other ways to spin it.
The “clear and internationally acknowledged” criteria for a 'loss' is being caught on camera while the last soldiers evacuate and the enemy takes over.
So technically Vietnam and Afghanistan are losses. Because of the video's.
> You can argue that it was a political win if the goal was defending South Korea, but militarily, it was a stalemate.
Korea was a proxy war between the US and China (i.e. Communism). The US wanted a foothold on the mainland and to put a demonstration of the virtues of Capitalist Economics in the Communists' back yard, both of which it got in the form of South Korea. If the US hadn't been involved, "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (i.e. North Korea) would have rolled south with China's backing and "Korea" would have been a single communist country.
Without China's involvement the opposite would have happened. China was well aware of this and did not want a capitalist economy sharing a border with it -- Berlin Wall kind of problems -- so they weren't going to stop supporting North Korea.
Which is the kind of situation that makes unconditional military victory close to impossible. China just keeps giving North Korea assistance, most of the casualties are North Koreans rather than Chinese and the North Korean leadership won't surrender as long as they have China's backing because it's not a democracy so staying in power is the only thing their leaders care about. "Unconditional victory" would effectively have to be a military victory over China.
At the time the US had nuclear weapons and China didn't, but China had half a billion in population even then, and they too were a non-democracy whose leaders cared more about staying in power than dead citizens. The US could have won militarily if they were willing to kill several hundred million people. It's probably best that they weren't.
And it was largely the same for the other proxy wars. Unconditional victory would require victory over not just the nominal enemy but the ones propping them up. Hence Cold War.
> The US could have won militarily if they were willing to kill several hundred million people. It's probably best that they weren't.
Could they really? Would the nuclear-armed Soviet Union idly stand by and watch US commit nuclear holocaust against it's close neighbour? They wouldn't. Would US allies back them in a war that turned into genocide? Unlikely.
So no, they probably could not have done that because they would not risk escalation into WW3 where most allies abandon USA.
The government of North & South Korea that I'm speaking of was Japan.
The government of North & South Vietnam that I'm speaking of was France.
Acknowledged on the undercount of U.S. casualties in Iraq. It doesn't change my conclusion, though.
There's a sibling comment by delecti that's making the point that I'm driving at: what is the goal of war? Is it regime change? Is it to sell arms? Is it to kill people? If it's regime change, war in general is a remarkably ineffective way of doing that - it's pretty rare that the victorious powers get the government they actually want, otherwise we would never have had to fight WW2. If it's killing people or feeding the military-industrial complex, the U.S. was pretty good at that in all the wars listed.
Incidentally, Vietnam is currently one of the most capitalist countries on Earth. So politically, the communists were defeated. All we had to do was let them govern the country for 15 years and everybody realized they didn't want communism.
> The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell.
Now you are saying:
> The government of North & South Korea that I'm speaking of was Japan.
> The government of North & South Vietnam that I'm speaking of was France.
Which completely contradicts what you said before, and is even more wrong.
Yes and: maintaining an Empire (Hegemony) requires Forever War. Were USA to achieve a Von Clauswitz style victory, Pax Americana would quickly implode.
In my opinion, this is a misrepresentation of the Vietnam war. The country was not "bombed back into the stone age". The U.S. merely used extremely despicable tactics like Agent Orange, My Lai etc.
I'm also not aware of the existing Vietnamese government falling (depends on which one you consider the existing one but it was not the government the U.S. wanted to fall that fell). The country resisted a superior invader like it did in the past (China) and I'm pretty sure most people would consider Vietnam the winner of the war (if there's a winner in war).
If it was simply the case of a country resisting an invader then why did the winning side engage in a bit of ethnic cleansing of their ‘own’ people after the invaders had left?
> The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell.
This might be taught in US schools, but outside the US we have a rather different take on how the Vietnam war ended - the US-backed government fell and the North Vietnamese government took over the rest of the country. And we learned that the Korean war ended in some kind of stalemate, where the government structures on both sides exist largely intact today.
I'm arguing that this is the wrong litmus test for judging the winners of war, because war is an ineffective way of achieving regime change in the first place. Even in cases where it looks like a country "wins" a war by "defeating" their opponents, they usually collapse from the inside and then the true winners are those that either take advantage of the chaos to seize power, or stay out of the war entirely. The allies were victorious in WW1 - yet the government they wanted stayed in power for barely 10 years, and then we got Hitler and WW2. Russia was part of the victorious allies in WW1, but the country collapsed and the communists took over. The communists were the official victors of the Vietnam war, but Vietnam is now one of the most capitalist countries on earth, and so politically they were defeated by economics and not war.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Reality is the US won it's war against communism by the early 1970's. There wasn't much reason to continue the war in Vietnam after that. Not the least because the communists in Vietnam had no intention of being a Russian or Chinese vassal state. Suited the US just fine.
The reason to commit so ferociously to Vietnam was to show our other strategic partners and allies how far USA was willing to go for seemingly small things; if we’ll dump endless troves of blood and treasure for a small country in Asia, what will we do if tanks push into Berlin?
Thats a benefit to the military response, but I dont believe the massive waste of political capital, manpower, and supplies looked impressive to other countries. Especially after the abrupt exit. The use of cruise missiles has been far more imoressive.
What was more impressive was the results of the US's cultural economic and soft power efforts.
The cultural part can't be understated. By the 1960's young men world wide would rather be a rock star banging groupies than fight for the revolution. There is a reason the Khmer Rouge killed the pop stars in Cambodia.
Notable Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany became wealthy by aligning closely to the US. Where commies and non aligned became poorer.
Least impressive was the CIA's skullduggery and Kissinger's Real Politic.
It is interesting to compare the Iraq and Afghanistan war (the US didn't militarily defeat Vietnam, and Korea was a military stalemate) with successful recent invasions. China invaded Tibet, and Russia invaded Chechnya, and Tibet is now part of China, and Chechnya contributes soldiers fighting in Ukraine. They differ from the US invasions in that they rebuilt the invaded areas, hence "winning the peace". The US also helped rebuild Japan and Germany, which was sadly lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I would call the first Iraq war a success - the US achieved it's aims of driving Iraq out of Kuwait, destruction of the Iraq military, a UN resolution approving the attack, and wide support.
Contrast this to the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, where I agree the US was perceived as a bully. It bullied Pakistan ("You're with us or against us", war threats) into supporting the invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq was illegal, with France prepared to veto any UN resolution trying to legitimize the war.
> The US also helped rebuild Japan and Germany, which was sadly lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bingo! There would be no Taliban if USA made Afghanistan an unincorporated territory like Puerto Rico, handed out passports and rebuilt infrastructure / governance.
There was a plan for what to bomb, but no plan for what to build. Basically a huge waste of time.
> The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell.
I feel you're overlooking the critical fact that after the allies won WW2, Nazis didn't control Germany.
Whereas the Taliban remains in control of Afghanistan. To describe that as a US win doesn't really seem accurate.
The US did print a big 'Mission Accomplished' banner though, so I agree the folks who started the war do claim it was a victory.
The US isn’t fighting in Ukraine so that’d be a strange result. Especially since our surplus weapons with novice operators have laid waste to the invasion force of what was considered to be the 2nd or 3rd strongest army on the planet..
It’s utterly bizarre that people keep insisting the US is fighting a war given we have zero troops and zero military hardware committed there.. Ukraine has destroyed hundreds of armored units and multiple $billion naval ships with literal 25-yr old weapons… all the fear of WWIII is premised on the US actually engaging since the Russians would suffer immediate and massive losses and the only way to save face would be to go nuclear.
Where'd those Bradleys come from, then? Zero troops yes, but the US has absolutely shipped a ton of military hardware to Ukraine.
Ukraine would absolutely fold without the inflow of NATO military hardware, that's the crux of Russia's strategy for winning - hope it can undermine Western support for a Ukraine war, and then crush Ukraine once they're on their own. That's the entire reason why Russia blocked gas exports to Europe - they lost a lot of gas profits forcing the EU to choose between supporting Ukraine or having Russian gas for the winter.
The US itself isn't fighting in the war, but they're undeniably a key participant in it. With military hardware and training and intel support and money.
The US, like all other NATO members, shipped a ton of hardware to Ukraine. None of that hardware is operated by NATO personel, under NATO flag so. Hence, NATO is not an active participant in the war in Ukraine, despite being arms, ammunition and intelligence suppliers as well as close allies of Ukraine.
And yes, those details matter in geopolitics, a lot.
Formalities don't matter for image. And that's what US is about to lose completely. Do you think that China will say, but NATO soldiers didn't really fight? Modern war is supposedly all about equipment and ammunition. And NATO can't even afford proxy war against enemy fighting with heaps of junk apparently.
Tangent to all that - whether the US reputation will change or not, it’s becoming clear the russian military reputation is way, way overestimated. I’m curious what effect this will have
It was overestimated. Latest narration is that currently they are more prepared to taking on NATO and whoever than they were for decades. Because they painfully but successfully adapted despite the pressure from Western hardware.
Modern war is about equipment not people. Especially in case of a conflict where one side is successfuly prevented from deploying any soldiers. War is about making the other side behave how you want them to behave. US is failing hard at that.
World literally does not care. If Russia wins, Russia wins. US loses, Western world loses. Loses all credibility.
Russia started it. US didn't run away soon and fast enough. Now the fight is on. If it ends with Russia winning nobody will listen to US whining "but we didn't really fight". Nobody will care. Neither opponents, nor allies. Especially not China.
> The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell
The US isn't conventionally, even in the US. viewed as the victor in Korea (war is still in progress, with a long but imperfectly observed ceasefire), Vietnam (one of the few wars the US generally acknowledges as an unambiguous defeat, thought right wingers will often say that we won “militarily” and lost “politically” or some other cope), or Afghanistan (recently added to the list alongside Vietnam).
Also, the prewar opposing in Korea, Vietnam. Iraq (1991), and Afghanistan did not fall, and in each case remained in power after the war (and in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the primary opposing government ended up in control of more territory as a result of the war, controlling undivided a country which it had controlled only a divided—formally in Vietnam’s case, de facto for the Taliban in Afghanistan—fraction of before the war.)
> With all the post-WW2 wars, we've gone in as a dominant power, as the aggressor
No, we haven't. Not even in a loose sense of “aggressor” in several of them.
> won “militarily” and lost “politically” or some other cope
If you go by deaths, USA did very well in Vietnam. However, with wars of insurgency people like The Butcher showed that far more deaths are required to win than is palatable
I was going to respond to each of your points carefully, but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
> If you go by deaths, USA did very well in Vietnam
Yes, if war was a game where the victory condition was killing the most people... well, actually, the Khmer Rouge would have won the wars in the region, by a wide margin.
But its not, so “yeah but we killed more people than our immediate enemy” is... irrelevant, mostly. Killing people is a means, not an ends, in war (I mean, except when your war aim is extermination, but that's not the general case.)
> but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
I’m not the one that said a unifying feature of the post-WW2 wars was that the US destroyed the pre-existing government and thereby won, when that is very much nor a characteristic of those wars in general, or the specific cited examples originally provided (leaving off Iraq I, it wasn't a feature of Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, specifically cited as examples upthread, either.)
This is ignorant of Clausewitz's definitions, which no one has managed to supplant. It has nothing to do with emerging as the dominant power or getting average citizens any benefits.
"winning" the war means accomplishing your political objectives. Those objectives may change as the war goes on, and in the case of Korea, the objective became "keep South Korea free from North Korean domination." That was achieved.
It was unclear to MacArthur and he assumed it was "destroy North Korea, whatever it takes." That became NOT the US objective, when it became clear that China stood in the way of it.
In Vietnam the objectives were never clearly laid out, but "keep South Vietnam free from North Vietnam domination" was pretty clearly it. Thus, we lost.
Your other points are wrong: the first Iraq war's objective was to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Perhaps that goal was insufficient, but that was the goal the military undertook, and achieved.
That's mostly because we keep going into situations with political goals, and military means (when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail). If a small country declared war on us, we could easily bomb them back into the iron age. Though in 20 years, the young adults there would probably provoke us into another dumb situation like the above.
"If a small country declared war on us, we could easily bomb them back into the iron age."
Putin probably thought the same about Ukraine.
Military objectives were achieved in Afghanistan, but not in Korea and Vietnam. And based on Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means" And our politics changed....
Just because the US got a useful ally in the long run doesn’t mean that the military objective was met. That wasn’t the objective of the war.
The objective of the US once they pushed back the initial invasion in the Korean War was to destroy the DPRK, force communism out of Korea, and unify the country. They failed. The war became a stalemate once China got directly involved.
If Vietnam becomes a stalwart ally of the US over the next 20 years that won’t mean the Vietnam War was a success just because the US ended up eventually having a useful interest in the region.
Military objectives were achieved in Korea and Vietnam in the sense that we killed lots of people. What we learned (and really, already knew from WW2, where we very intentionally did not invade the Japanese home islands) is that killing lots of people on an enemy's home soil just turns a lot more people against you.
> "If a small country declared war on us, we could easily bomb them back into the iron age."
> Putin probably thought the same about Ukraine.
I doubt, as Ukraine is far from being a small country. It is the second largest European country (counting Russia as an European country, as is common in geography). (he most likely had other miscalculations leading to the current situation)
I mean, if the numbering system has to include every war ever fought in Mesopotamia, it would be more like Gulf War 200. You can't kick a rock in Iraq without hitting a cuneiform tablet describing a battle fought in 3500BC.
Are you implying the US post WW2 would lose a war of aggression to any small country? Indeed, I’d posit USA easily wins a war of aggression against any non-top 5 country(by military spending or what have you).
Technically, the US hasn't fought any wars since WWII -- as a declaration of war is a Congressional function. All of the other things people think of or refer to wars were technically "conflicts".
I'm unsure the US can unilaterally decide if it's in a war or not. Do the opposite side consider it a war? Do the international community consider it a war? Semantic games internal to a single side do not matter much.
That’s not even correct on a technicality, because you switch mid-sentence from discussing “war” to discussing “declaration of war.” A declaration of war is plainly different from a war. Declarations of war are frequently made well after a war has begun or well before any fighting takes place. And as you state, many wars are fought without any declaration of war.
You are using the word technically wrong. Whether a country is at war or not is not a technical matter, it is dependent on the facts on the ground. A war is an intense armed conflict, usually between states. Just as the US did not declare war after WWII, they have not had problems calling Russia's invasion of Ukraine a war, despite Russian statements it is just a special military operation. We all know it is a war, just like that the US has been involved in multiple wars after WWII.
Similar to many cities having catastrophic fires (New York, Chicago) which allowed them to rebuild their streets on a grid system. Vs Boston, which never had a great fire but which is known today for the phrase "You can't get there from here."
Chicago had a grid system before the great fire, maybe NY is a good example of this but I do not know. See this[0] 1869 map which shows Chicago was already quite regularized
It's not. The older parts of NYC are still not on a grid, there was no massive fire in NYC that needed to be rebuilt. They may have been thinking of London `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`
You jest but my friend is a professor in Toyama, Japan, and makes the occasional dark joke about moving the people out for a few days and having the US raze it again from time to time.
Sometimes getting rid of ossified organizations is a good thing, but there are probably better ways than high explosives.
Arguably the Occupation of Japan was more important than the carpet bombing for changing Japanese culture.
We brought in many new ideas - both in business and in government - most of which persist in some form today - and the Japanese in many cases have taken those ideas, refined them mightily, infused them with some Japanese culture - and re-exported them to us.
The best example of this that I can think of, is Kaizen - the various scientific management techniques exported to Japan by W. Edwards Deming - which was re-exported to us as Kaizen.
> Solution for the future of American industry: Bomb US Steel?
Plenty of places are bombed into oblivion. What makes the rebirth is the rebuilding. The marshalling of public resources. You can replicate that without the bombs with a public-spending initiative.
> You can replicate that without the bombs with a public-spending initiative.
You can, but the challenge isn't in the implementation as much as gathering the political will to do that. Since the New Deal and WWII, that has rarely happened in the US, and only recently: The ACA, the 2021 Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. All of those barely had enough support to pass and both are at risk if there is a significant shift in power.
The OP's contention was that Japan and Germany had an advantage due to their steel industry being bombed, which is apparently easier than upgrading legacy production facilities that haven't been blown to rubble.
It’s often easier to rebuild rubble using other people’s money than to modernize in-place using your own.
Beyond just the “whose money is buying?” is that the latter costs you current production while the bombed-out scenario has no current production to forego.
Every 100 years, the government send a warning and carpet bomb a city to the ground. This for sure would remove all the past vicious of the region affected. That would be something
The German industrial base was not totally destroyed after WW2.
Especially in western Germany most of it was still good and they had to rebuild little to get it going again.
The myth of the Trümmerfrau rebuilding Germany into a Wirtschaftswunder from total destruction is exactly that, a myth.
Edit: also the effect of Marshallplan is usually vastly overstated - due to the massive bureaucracy involved it had relatively little impact.
I don't really like this claim because we are perfectly capable of blowing up our own factories, but people generally agree that it probably isn't a good idea.
> North American industry was in a slow evolution from the 1900's, but Germany and Japan, had a hot start from the 1950-60's
You forgot that US took every German and Japanese engineer as prisoner.
As a friend said, US chemical industry worked 40 years after the WWII with German patents.
>You forgot that US took every German and Japanese engineer as prisoner.
Do you mean took them prisoner for a few days to sort out paperwork, or do you mean took them prisoner and kept them?
The latter is provably nonsense as indicated by e.g. Heckler and Koch, a German engineering company (and later gun company) formed by three former Mauser engineers. Mauser, the gun company.
I'm happy to see the link here as I was curious about the subject given that my career started in US Steel's data center in Pittsburgh.
I'm saddened by the fact that this retelling seems mostly negative and ignores a large part of US Steel's evolution into USX. The retelling is subtractive whether you view Marathon Oil's involvement as a positive complementary asset play at the time or a negative given the history of its divestiture.
I can say that there was innovation in the data center where I worked in the evolution from manual human mainframe era data center operations to token ring networks of PC API's along with abstraction and automation via glue code.
The minimization of manual human labor as people retired is likely lost to the history books unless one of my old technical collaborators decides to write a book in retirement.
The CMU kids I worked with at US Steel's data center in Pittsburgh were just as smart as the ones I worked with in the software industry from Boston to Seattle.
There was plenty of innovation clear to anyone with the proximity and education to recognize it, but your questions raise intractable issues of the proprietary information of any large corporation.
From my naive college kid's vantage point, the majority of innovation was tactical and not tied to core competencies owing to the siloed nature of communication between management and technical layers; i.e. it's difficult, if not impossible, for innovation to pass through that gated silo without a catalyst to nurture and support its transformation from tactical to strategic. This is a fundamental problem of complementary assets and the need for interdisciplinary culture that accrues to their composition, complexity, and collaborative community.
We could certainly debate whether this is the crux of "The Corporation" over the last twenty years of acquisitions seemingly aimed at silencing competition.
Of the two companies I worked with in that time period thirty years ago, both of their nail-in-the-coffin, final acquisitions approached $20 billion. Innovation has a way of disappearing in the dark subtext of large corporate acquisitions.
The "never given a chance to thrive" is insightful beyond US Steel. That is, well into modern tech startups that are managed by the same kinds of people who managed GM in the 1970's.
How does technical innovation serve their core purpose of produting steel? The things you name are a distraction from the real business and should have been bought not done in house. or they should have done a pihiot to tech and got rid of the mills to someone who wanted to run then.
Technical innovation in metallurgy plays a significant role. It's easy to say that things are a distraction, but it's also only true in retrospect, unless you're on a spectrum of Turing award winners or the like.
It's not clear to me whether you meant "pivot" or "pilot" but the downstream effect is likely the same. Trying to account for divestitures and acquisitions in such a large corporation is a fool's gold of forensic accounting. Just because the business wasn't more transparent than their incorporation required doesn't mean that they weren't thinking broadly and deeply about the future of their core business.
Wasn't US Steel who commissioned the books from a SciFi illustrator to ensure that lots of reference drawing illustrations would have steel in the future and got these books for free available to anyone who called, and they ended up getting famous in the film industry so people ended up always designing futuristic movies with things made of steel like ships and vehicles?
Don't build it where it snows then. I love Eichler homes, but there is a good reason all of them (as far as I know) were built in California. With big walls of glass and thin, flat roofs, their insulation is pretty horrible. But their design actually probably saves energy given how they encourage indoor/outdoor living in temperate climates.
For an overview of how Nucor became #1 in the US steel industry, see "American Steel" (1992) by Richard Preston. The author was present for the building and startup of Nucor's first continuous thin sheet casting mini-mill. Nucor bought a new experimental continuous caster from a German company, after trying to build their own, and built a mill around it. This plant could turn scrap metal into sheet steel. "You could punch garbage cans out of it all day." Gradually, the quality improved, and soon they were making steel for auto parts. Previously, steel recycling just produced lower grade steel - cars in, rebar out. So this closed the recycling cycle.
The amount of steel in use per capita in developed countries seems to have reached a constant level.
About 69% of steel produced in the US is the same steel going round and round. If you ignore rebar, low-grade steel stuck inside concrete, it's even higher. It's the developing countries that are still making and using new steel. They don't have enough steel infrastructure yet.
"Mini-mill", in this context, means "smaller than a square mile". Here's Nucor's Crawfordsville plant.[1] It's not small.
Compare with US Steel's Gary Works.[2] That century old plant is just about their last remaining big plant in the US.
A very good book, although being 31 years old some of the characters are dead now (like the then-head of Nucor.)
The chapter describing the accident (where a ladle of molten steel fell and the steel drained into a depressed area with standing water) is horrific. It's fortunate the body count wasn't higher.
Nucor's headquarters is near my office. It's about the same size as the local Coca-Cola bottler's. No huge edifice to the CEO's ego - just a typical office building.
"In 1928 a Soviet delegation arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, to discuss with American consulting company Arthur G. McKee a plan to set up in Magnitogorsk a copy of the US Steel steel-mill in Gary."
Steel remains a technology with huge potential for future development. Some keywords: eutectic solution, bulk metallic glass, and boron steel.
It seems crazy to me that any first world nation would let it's steel production fall into foreign hands. As a machinist for 5 years in my country I would have been excempt from military service even in total war.
If US steel is unable to innovate and foreign ownership is somehow not a problem, this development is probably a good thing. The Zaibatsu system is a good fit for what steel is.
America has started to have the appearance of griefing their own enlisted. I'm not sure if America actually cares about those types of war and military considerations any longer. Have you looked at ship construction times lately?
On the materials side. Totally agree. However the issue there, is that's not what corporations tend to optimize. The story itself really spells it out pretty clearly (it may be biased, never worked at US Steel personally). However, the article's description is:
US Steel became a monopoly, and immediately acted like a monopoly. Innovation ceased. Money extraction began. Commanding obedience was the norm. Convincing themselves all competitors would fail was the norm. And US Steel did not want to invest in anything outside its own sunk costs.
>I'm not sure if America actually cares about those types of war and military considerations any longer. Have you looked at ship construction times lately?
it's kind of funny because the US won WWII by the ability to churn out huge volumes of decent quality goods but now our military seems to be adopting the German idea that small numbers of expensive wunderwaffen will turn the tide
We're never going to fight WW2 again, because all the great powers have nuclear weapons now. The US army will never take the field in a straight up slugfest against Russia or China.
So that leaves non-nuclear regional powers. But you simply don't need a whole-of-society mobilization to fight Iran. The phase of active combat against Iran will not take years-- it won't take months.
If we really needed to, we could be building millions of Jeeps again. But we don't need to, and won't need to.
I find your lack of faith disturbing. Humans can totally figure out how to fight a ground war version of WWIII if they really want to.
For perusal in the many ways humans have found to deploy nukes other than ICBMs. Note: SAMs, Artillery, RPGs, Mines, and Torpedoes. [1] Yields stretching from 0.02 KT at 50 kg [2] weight to 50,000 KT at 27,000 kg. [3][4] Sure, the high end stuff is world ending, yet the low end stuff is war enabling. And there's enough ways to knock missiles out of the air. Wargames computers are still calculating.
Note the propensity of the wealthy to build bunker houses. Feel like they know something I don't know.
My guess is that the future of war looks like Ukraine, where small, cheap automated drones will overwhelm expensive, low volume hardware, munitions, and defensive positions.
And Chinese military build out seems to be "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and "quantity has a quality all its own", so soon we're likely to be the ones playing catch up despite our huge military budget and outlays.
>And Chinese military build out seems to be "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and "quantity has a quality all its own",
They're moving away from that - they're becoming more similar to the US in prioritizing quality. China is racing to build a first-world economy before their demographics shut down their growth, so relying on cheap, plentiful troops makes less and less sense as the years go on.
They really aren't struggling we have plenty of firepower there. But yeah, China will soon outstrip our naval numbers by a large amount within the end out of the decade. We still have better tech but what do we do when they launch 200 "good enough" cruise missiles at each aircraft carrier sitting in the Taiwan Straight?
They really aren't struggling. But yeah, China will soon outstrip our naval numbers by a large amount within the end out of the decade. We still have better tech but what do we do when they launch, at the same time, 200 "good enough" cruise missiles at each aircraft carrier sitting in the Taiwan Straight?
typical carrier complement has ~300-500 vertical launch tubes and sea sparrows can be quad packed into a tube, and CIWS. not sure i would bet against aegis
US steel and steel production in the USA are not the same thing. The company's name is that of a legal entity, not an accurate description of what it is.
The steel production will still be local... and it's Japan, a close ally. It's not like if war broke out the steel mills would evaporate. If for some crazy reason Japan was antagonistic, they would be nationalized or otherwise forced to behave correctly. We have the Defense Production Act which gives plenty of leeway for the government to change situations when national defense justifies it.
I'm not sure innovation is really the issue, this article never actually goes into the alloys US Steel developed (of which there are many), and alloys are what makes steel steel really. It's always been fascinating to me how the just a tiny percent of another element in a metal can have an absolutely dramatic affect on the strength/resilience of the material.
And they tried more complicated alloys, for instance they developed Corten steel, the biggest example of which is probably the US Steel building in Pittsburgh, [1]. It's a steel where it's 'rust' essentially works as a protective layer.
More than anything this article shows US Steel simply couldn't compete with foreign suppliers. It's interesting to me that they don't even mention the Steel Workers Union, which was/is one of the largest and most powerful unions in the U.S. I'm not saying the cause, but if you need 5% more steel to cover the deficiencies in foreign steel in strength, but it's 20% cheaper, than it's simply cheaper to import more foreign steel.
>And they tried more complicated alloys, for instance they developed Corten steel, the biggest example of which is probably the US Steel building in Pittsburgh. It's a steel where it's 'rust' essentially works as a protective layer.
Also worthy of mention is the New River Gorge Bridge. [1]
And the recently-collapsed Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh. [2]
My grandfather worked in a metal shop for 30 years after he served in Korea. I remember him telling me they switched to Chinese made steel in the 70s because of the quality problems they were having with American made steel. Being out West, they were somewhat more free from the political/social/union pressure to use American commodities.
Probably meant Japanese, I don't think China had much of a steel industry in the 1970s and given the politics of the time I don't think it would have been imported in the USA even if available.
The paradox of rights(don't quote me, i just made this up). In wealthier societies, demands for greater worker rights from the government increase. This can lead to more bureaucracy and higher labor costs, potentially making third-world countries with lower regulations more attractive for importing goods or outsourcing production. Countries already operates in a libertarian interaction with each others. I find these global economics aspects fascinating
Had a thought the other day, that the natural course of many businesses is towards becoming a bank and eventually a casino. If it were Pokemon, all corporations final form would be casinos with executives gambling investors money.
It fits the economy surprisingly well. Harvard, arguably a bank not a school. US Steel, joke is they produce money not steel. Airlines are trying to avoid flying airplanes, and operate air miles banks. Hasbro no longer produces toys, only money. Article today where the main commentary on Intel was the finance bros took over a long time ago.
Although it's true, that's a hazardous way of thinking. If they had put more of their focus on making steel, keeping up with the technological advances rather than being dragged along grudgingly, perhaps they'd be making more money these days.
It reminds me of that old quote that democracies die when the citizens realize they can vote themselves money. It's the same with these companies, the upper managements realizing they can just give themselves more money and coast on their companies momentum.
It's not the innovators dilemma, it's the c-suite lines their pockets while the company burns dilemma.
It's the eternal principal/agent problem. Those things go in cycles. When management goes too far off the rails then corporate raiders and private equity eventually take over to replace management and unlock latent value. Unfortunately, the managers who caused the problem still often end up fabulously wealthy while regular employees get screwed.
This problem can be somewhat ameliorated by compensating executives primarily using equity with long vesting or lock-up periods. That keeps their interests aligned with long-term shareholders.
It doesn't really fit the modern collapse. Democracies seem to decline when oligarchs extract so much wealth that the entire economy suffers and common people flock to strong political figures to bring back order and prosperity.
> citizens realize they can vote themselves money
Although this certainly sounds true if you consider just the richest citizens and by "vote" you mean inflence the votes.
It's a very successful strategy in any corporate. Focus on the books, produce results, take the bonus and then jump.
When things go pear shaped do not be found holding the bag. If later questioned: "it was all great when I was there, it's so sad that it went south - it was a great place and there was a lot of value on the table."
Strangely the big investors don't seem to ever cotton on to this - the big pension funds and sovereign wealth seem to respond by getting out of the equity markets and investing in things like property.
This comment reads like it was written in the 70s. Even with the interest rate hike, this is still the age of VCs with infinite pockets, companies that don’t plan on going profitable for decades, every company in sp500 throwing money in the AI money hole, etc.
As other replies have pointed out, your problem is with the word "they". There is no "they" at a publicly traded corporation. The key decision-makers are only there for 2 to 5 years, however long it takes them to suck out the blood of the company before they scurry off to parasitize a juicier host. Nobody with decision-making power ever gave two shits whether US Steel was going to make lots of money in N decades.
Many years ago, I read some that some executive of General Motors had said that GM was not in business to make cars but to make money. At the time, that seemed acute. Since then, I have wondered whether it was where GM lost its way.
For individuals interested in the steel industry who are visiting or living in the Northeast of the United States, the National Museum of Industrial History (affiliated with the Smithsonian) situated in Bethlehem, PA is a great place to visit [0]. It's located in one of the repair shops of the now defunct Bethlehem Steel plant and offers a wide ranging introduction to the production of steel in the US as well as various types of industrial machinery. As a bonus visitors can stroll the grounds of a largely intact, but derelict, steel plant. Interestingly, that particular area of Pennsylvania was also a center for the production of silk and more women were employed in the production of silk in that region then men were employed by steel plants.
Something like 70% of US steel production is now from scrap. Part of this was moderation of growth. In steady state, nearly all steel could come from scrap (limited by contaminants, I guess.)
I expect aluminum to displace more steel in the future. Witness what's happening with "gigacasting" at Tesla and elsewhere.
Substituting aluminum for copper (in wires, for example) may end up making steel more recyclable. Aluminum doesn't contaminate molten steel (it's used as a deoxygenating agent when making steel, in fact), while copper does.
Reminds me of the Wright Brothers. After their incredible invention of controlled heavier-than-air flight (using a wind-tunnel - did they invent that too?), the focus was on patent royalties, while others innovated.
US Steel’s vertical integration practices changed the game and influence goes all the way to Apple and Tesla today.
Their way of standardizing manufacturing processes inspired Henry Fords assembly line.
Their Research Lab paved the way for the establishment of similar, famous labs at IBM, Bell, Xerox and others.
Their corporate structure set a precedent for large-scale corporations, influencing the development of conglomerates like GE to diversify various industries under a single corporate umbrella
This analysis does not seem properly include wage/labor costs.
"By 1958 some steelmakers in Germany and Japan were able to compete on price with US producers, and by the mid-1970s input costs for Japanese steel (ore, labor, coking coal, etc.) were nearly half those of US costs."
So the input costs were half almost certainly all due to labor either directly or indirectly.
Viewed in this light the fall of US Steel is no different than any other manufacturing process in the USA.
In Japan between 1956 and 1976 the real cost of steel fell by some 39%. Although wages increased
more than 10-fold, gains in labor productivity more than compensated, so that real unit labor costs fell
by 16.3%, accounting for about 5 of the 39% drop in real costs. The rest of the 39% was due to a decline
in unit materials and energy costs.
This does not tell us what the wages were compared to Americans at that time. It is very easy to have a 10 fold increase in wages if people are making $2 a day.
it's a pretty interesting paper, it probably answers your questions.
paragraph preceding my last quote:
In the US between 1956 and 1976, while the dollar depreciated by 17.8%, the real domestic cost of
producing steel grew by 37%. Although steel had historically been a materials-intensive sector, by
1956 in the US, labor and materials each accounted for about the same share of unit input costs. Each
also grew in real terms by roughly the same rate from 1956 to 1976: unit labor costs by 35% and unit
material costs by 38%. Each therefore made like contributions to a loss in US comparative advantage
in steelmaking. The main reason for the rise in unit material costs was a 48% increase of the real price of
iron ore and (with our 1976 end date falling in the aftermath of the 1973 oil price shock) a near dou-
bling of the real price of coke.
It would have been interesting to get the take from my dad's cousin, who did early powdered metallurgy work research as an MIT undergrad in the 1940s, and later became a VP at US Steel. Unfortunately, he's no longer with us.
At that propitious 1900 banquet, perhaps pricing power was discussed?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
>The American steel industry responded to the rise of foreign producers not by trying to improve their operations, but by demanding government protection from “unfair” foreign trade practices
I remember this happening in school. Plus the teacher of a class (70s) I was in blamed the Steel Problems on the Marshall Plan. Until I saw this article I believed that.
Now I know it seems to point to the usual US trend of profits before anything else.
I jokingly discussed with friends that we have to buy some when Elon renamed Twitter with the idea that people are going to invest thinking it's Elon's X.
Not sure if that happened but the stock went up quite a bit since then.
