How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry

The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.

I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.

As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.

The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.

most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore.

in the XXIer century some australia cities have run out of gasoline for half a day, an afternoon, a few days

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-...

After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.

Who is going to make up the difference?

I actually doubt the value of modern navies for anything other than gunboat diplomacy, or coastal patrols these days. I think they’re too vulnerable to things like cruise missiles and drones.

Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?

This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.

In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.

This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.

The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.

Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.

There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down.

British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent.

You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.

The flaw in that annoyingly common logic is 1) countries are very reluctant to use nuclear weapons, and 2) any kind of nuclear escalation is an instant loss for your own side.

I personally don't think any country would resort to nuclear weapons in the case of an invasion or blockade, and certainly not a democratic one [1]. They may threaten, but I don't think they'd actually put that gun to their own head and pull the trigger.

[1] An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.

And even in that case use of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable escalation and they used regular army to (mostly) kick them out and carry on with their earlier invasion on other parts of the front.

(I am speaking about Kursk if anyone is confused)

Use of nuclear weapons when you are mildly threatened is not viable. In the same way as responding to a pickpockets with an artillery barrage is not viable.

"We do not need police as we have an artillery" is equivalent of "there is no need for any other weapons if you have nukes".

But I do think that you're right in that the time of the frigate and aircraft carrier is over, and we'll all more likely to die either from a nuclear missile or from a 50 gram autonomous drone. I agree: the national security argument is hollow.

There are other reasons to build ships though, and some degree of self-sufficiency is always sensible.

Russia can't prevent aid to Ukraine with nuclear blackmail. The US can't defend Taiwan without ships - it can't use nuclear blackmail itself. And if it doesn't defend Taiwan, not only is Western prosperity threatened, but the entire structure of allies that the US built after WW2 crumbles into a chaos of small parties more easily picked apart.

Just a reminder that Ukraine is currently at war with nuclear equipped Russia and it could absolutely use more ships, more tanks, more aircraft, more bombs, more guns, more drones and everything else that forms traditional warfare. It's clearly not like countries will immediately go from zero to nuclear weapons in any conflict.

It's an empathy gap. You are rightly cautious of nukes, but you then project that mindset onto belligerents, which is the mistake. A very important rule in strategic planning is to avoid projecting your own calculations onto the enemy.

Nuclear powers, like all states, need to meet the pacing challenge and be capable of winning, or at least have enough asymmetric capabilities to force a frozen conflict if necessary.

Makes a lot of sense in textbooks. But in the real world, when politics is involved, the whole theory breaks down. What does your text book say about China holding rare earths hostage in regard of comparative advantage?

The trade off is worth making. It gives you the ability to survive if things go wrong in return for being slightly worse off in the meantime.

> It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff

It can also mean very little more stuff. Part of the problem with our current system is that we will import rather than produce because its very slightly cheaper.

It would be ridiculous for the UK to grow its own tea, however it would be perfectly reasonable for it to aim to produce more of its own basic foodstuffs.

However the real world has politics in it, as we saw during the pandemic, at which points jurisdictions commandeer resources for themselves regardless of whether a “better price” is available elsewhere.

Within a jurisdiction where resources can be directed you only need one capacity for output. In a market situation you need multiple suppliers all of which with excess capacity to supply that you have reserved and which cannot be countermanded by other action (so it needs to be defended with military capacity). Once you cost all that in you may just find that doing it yourself is more efficient, once resilience is taken into account properly.

Nature rarely goes for the most efficient solution. When it does it tends to go the way of the Dodo.

A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow.

The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities.

Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.