Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> We all know boeing won't be "wrecked"; they're too critical for state interests to be allowed to fail

People keep repeating this without context. The auto companies are strategically significant. That didn't prevent them from going bankrupt [1][2]. Wiping shareholders doesn't mean blowing up the factories.

I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt. It can then shed unprofitable units--through spin-offs, sales or liquidations--and restructure its obligations. I'm not convinced the union comes out of that better off than it is now. But America sure does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Chapter_11_reorganiza...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...

View on HN

> The auto companies are strategically significant.

Not really, they're more politically significant than economically critical. I've certainly never owned an american car and never plan to. We'll be fine continuing to rely on foreign companies to produce our vehicles. Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, i guess?). None of this is true for the plane market, or at least not until boeing acquired its current popular reputation of not being very good at making planes (deserved or not)

The fact we bailed out the companies but refused to take ownership should be considered treason. Same for the banks, the car companies, the airline industry we bailed out for more than its entire value, etc etc. completely corrupt and incompetent governance

The auto companies are strategically significant because war footing America will turn those F150 lines into tank lines in a matter of months instead of the years it would take to spin them up from scratch.

IBM made machine guns on typewriter lines in WW2.

Exactly correct. Good time to skim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run.

Years of startup problems but when it finally started humming they were building a B-24 every 63 minutes! In the meantime existing factories were winning the war.

As Americans we tend to glorify the industrial feats of WWII but the US government used a very heavy hand to pull that off. Public-private partnership is the preferred euphemism today but essentially we were a socialist economy.

At its peak, the US had 40% of GDP going into the war. Forty percent!

Today the US military budget is 3.4% of GDP. Can you imagine it being ten times as much?

If America goes to war it will need many f-150s for the war itself.

No it won't, because only about 30% of F150 parts are made in the US. The rest are made elsewhere - mostly China.

This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the strategic industrial base it used to.

Off-shoring made some people a lot of money and lowered consumer costs (while simultaneously cutting consumer pay.)

But it was economically and strategically unwise. The US is set up to run small-scale wars against technologically inferior opponents. It has no ability to sustain a prolonged multi-year slug-fest against an opponent with a superior manufacturing base.

Considering the US hasn't won a single war against technologically and numerically inferior opponents since the turn of the century, I think we have even more fundamental problems than just a rusty war machine dependent on Chinese blue jeans.

Now granted I might be unfair to the US here; the Middle East is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason.

The US clearly choose to lose all wars lost though. The military was doing just fine, but the people back home got sick of the efforts.

1) That’s still losing.

2) I’m not sure the military was doing just fine in all of those. Vietnam comes to mind, but also Afghanistan—reading the Afghanistan papers, the brass seems to have given up on any kind of actual goals or accountability in favor of a system that let them continually cycle officers through and let them claim they succeeded at their mission (funny, they all keep achieving their mission, but facts on the ground remain exactly the same or worse!), for years and years. Fighting fitness may have been OK throughout, but military leadership in the military itself was absolutely not committed to any kind of winnable mission, let alone to actually winning it. That may have been driven (I’m sure it was) largely by civilian leadership, but the entire upper echelon of military leadership betrayed their commands and the soldiers counting on them, to keep up a convenient (to their careers, and a bunch of junior and mid-tier officers who got a big boost to their careers…) political fiction at the cost of any hope of something resembling actual success, and all it took was shitting all over their soldiers and the trust of the American people.

I bet Iraq (part 2) was similar. I have some grave concerns about the state of our more-politicized-and-static professional officer corps since roughly Vietnam.

I'm with you 100% on point #2.

Disagree on point #1. We occupied Afghanistan for 20 years. We operated with nearly absolute impunity in all population centers, through all trade routes, and all agricultural areas. Our casualties were a minuscule amount our total forces. Our culture completely transformed theirs (in a way that old school hardliners lament publicly). We killed a huge number of Taliban (and foreign fighters).

Clausewitz says that "the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it." Can you tell articulate what the political goal of the war was?

Thinking back to 2001 (I was in middle school), the goal was retribution. I believe the military achieved that in spades. Yes, in the end Afghanistan did not turn into a US vassal state or a US colony. But was that the goal?

>Can you tell articulate what the political goal of the war was?

The goal was to eradicate the Taliban, remove terroristic sentiments, rebuild Afghanistan, bring the country to 21st century democratic standards, and prevent future 9/11s.

Did we achieve it? Hell no.

Verdict: We lost. Over 20 years of bloodshed and misery on both sides for fucking nothing. We failed on every single fucking count. Every. Single. Count.

The discussion was more about if the military fumbled Afghanistan or if it was a political failure.

You haven't shown a military failure.

I also disagree with that list of objectives and their current status. Let's go through 1 by 1:

+Eradicate Taliban. Complete. This is a new gen of fighters and the movement shares very little outside the name. Nearly all the Taliban from 2001 are dead of violent causes.

+Remove terroristic sentiments. Not a goal, but also has Afghanistan committed many terror acts in the last 15 years? Current status is trending green.

+Rebuild Afghanistan. Not an original goal (ie in Oct-2001). Also not a DoD goal, this was a State Dept goal after the military victory was secured. Also I'd argue that Afghanistan today has better infra than it did in Aug-2001, so this is complete.

+Democratic standards. Not an original goal. Also not a DoD goal, this was a State Dept goal after the military victory was secured. Not met.

+Prevent future 9/11s. Current status is trending green.

So we met all but 1 goal. That's not bad as wars go.

>The discussion was more about if the military fumbled Afghanistan or if it was a political failure.

While I started off with the former, overall it is both.

>You haven't shown a military failure.

It has been demonstrated by Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and others that the best way to defeat America is to engage in low tech guerilla warfare. We have lost every single one of them.

Even more embarrasing is that the Houthi are demonstrating that the age old adage of "Don't touch America's ships!" also isn't true anymore. Our Navy hasn't adequately responded to some deranged goat herders lobbing missiles into one of the world's biggest sea lanes.

>Eradicate Taliban. Complete.

Are you drunk? The Taliban is literally back in power ruling over Afghanistan with an iron fist.

>Remove terroristic sentiments. Not a goal,

Lest we forget, we waged "The War On Terror".

>Rebuild Afghanistan. Not an original goal

You can not remove hate until the people thereof can live comfortable lives, which is still not the case.

>Democratic standards. Not an original goal.

See above.

>Prevent future 9/11s. Current status is trending green.

I've lost count on the acts of terror we've seen across the west, America and otherwise.

You've moved the goal posts of this discussion. We've been talking about military success or failure.

Democracy (and "comfortable lives") was not a military objective. The military provided security for the State Dept and NGOs to pursue those goals.

Since 9/11, Afghanistan has not prosecuted any terrorist acts on the West in my recent memory.

The Taliban of 2001 was largely killed off. Yes, there are people in charge of Afghanistan today who call themselves Taliban, have some limited pre-9/11 leadership, but are largely a completely different set of people than existed back then and this occurred because of military action, not old age.

When the participation trophy generation grows up and becomes generals you'll hear things like, we would've won that war if it wasn't for all that attrition!

What attrition? While deaths were not zero they were very low.

Roughly 2.2 trillion on the credit card for Afghanistan alone. That's without the interest that will be paid on it. Your grandkids children will be paying for that war.

The only time anyone cares about that debt is when democrats are in control of the government - then republicans care. (sometimes when republicans control congress and the democrats control the president they care, but it is not as much then)

The only president in my lifetime to not start any wars isn't really liked by either the democrats or the establishment republicans. Both parties are big fans of losing wars for some reason.

Were you born in 2020?

> An armed conflict between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups[ad] has been taking place in the Gaza Strip and Israel since 7 October 2023.

> The United States has given Israel extensive military aid and vetoed multiple UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions.

> United States provided advice and intelligence to Israeli forces during the raid, through its "hostage cell" stationed in Israel. The attack resulted in the deaths of 274 Palestinians.

How would that work in your mind? Call that one for Harris because Biden is mentally unfit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war

By that measure what the hell was bombing Suleimani? Or moving our recognised capital of Israel to Jerusalem? Or arms to Saudi Arabia during their war with Yemen?

Neither Trump nor Biden started a war. They had wars happening around them that we were to various degrees involved.

Here's a (kind of?) objective take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

By my quick count, Obama (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) started seven wars, Trump started zero wars, and Biden so far started one war. All three Presidents were involved in a war started by a predecessor.

So, yeah. Trump started no wars, and he is the most rejected POTUS by the Powers That Be(tm) for that and other reasons.

Reading a bit more into the war started by Biden against the Houthis, I... didn't quite realize the Navy had straight up admitted we are weak and useless.

>“We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage. … If you let it fester, the Houthis are going to get to be a much more capable, competent, experienced force.”

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/06/16/navy-fac...

Worth noting, this is an entire USN carrier strike group. This is simply embarassing.

literally no one said that or even a rough approximation of that. Seriously I have no love for the generals but even they're not that dumb.

The comment I'm replying to said that and it was said frequently about Vietnam. What they didn't do is use the clear language I used and instead blamed the public for not wanting to spend every last penny on a pyrrhic victory as if that isn't attrition.

I agree that the dollar cost is real attrition too. Vietnam and Afghanistan were so wildly costly because we made the (political) choice to limit how we could engage the enemy, while our enemies were not limiting themselves

   Vietnam: limiting Cambodia ops, the DMZ, limiting bombing of N Vietnam
   Afghanistan: limiting Pakistan ops, focusing on creating a stable democracy rather than killing Taliban then leaving

We made political choices on how to wage war, and then blamed the military for those poor choices.

Yeah, we could use biological weapons or drop hydrogen bombs as a few examples. We could send marines house to house executing anyone who even looks like a bad guy. Trouble is giving a few million civilians radiation poisoning or the bubonic plaque to "stop communism" or to "spread democracy" is evil and insane.

You've made a rather wild leap here.

>then blamed the military for those poor choices.

Also the military.

A war effort involves the entire country: The entire economy beyond just the military industrial complex, all branches of politics, and the military including both officers and rank-and-file soldiers.

Look I agree with your war effort comment. That simply isn't what the GP is saying though, so my comments are addressing something else entirely.

The US did not lose the war against Saddam. The war was started under false pretenses and they made a mess of the reconstruction after, but that's different from a military defeat. If one side of a war manages to destroy the other's military, execute its leader, and set up shop in his palaces; that's a win on the military front.

> This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the strategic industrial base it used to.

this is just wrong.

The US didn't really have that industrial base in 1940 either. We developed it fast over a couple years of war.

To the extent the US had an industrial base, we still do. US manufactures more than we did in 1940 - we just do it with far fewer people in factories via automation.

This is really the key - there's a ocean of difference between "we manufacture literally nothing" and "we don't manufacture/assemble as much as we could".

Seems like a terribly irrational and inefficient way to run an economy but I'm sure russia will invade any day now. Or is it china these days?

I agree. We should also stop subsidizing agriculture, there is enough food grown around the world for everyone. All this waste is very inefficient!

In fact, we dump our cheap overproduced food on third world countries and collapse their ag. sector. If we stopped producing and switched to importing we would boost their economies.

Since food can be grown in almost any country on earth, we would have a diverse supply chain. I'm sure nothing would go wrong with this plan./s

Major industries are economically critical for trade balance. Even if foreigners don't buy US cars, domestic buying means there's less import.

There's a limit to how long USA can print petrodollars to make up for the trade deficit. And the limit doesn't seem that far off.

Good, let's learn to get along with people without trying to dominate them for the first time in living memory

The auto bailouts saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and turned a profit for the US government.

Cool, i don't care about either of these things. Jobs are a poor index of economic health for americans and we should really be guaranteed one as a fundamental human right if we also refuse to implement modern welfare.

You don’t care about saving jobs but you think we should be guaranteed jobs? How do you imagine guaranteed jobs work?

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics,

The Nordics are not all the same, Norway is far ahead (20% of private cars already full EVs) of the rest with Denmark a distant second when it comes to electrification of transport.

But also the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in the WORLD in the last twelve months, not just Norway. Of course quite a few of those were built outside the US so perhaps they don't count as US cars.

Norway is special. 94.3% of new cars sold last month were electric cars.

Actually, in the private marked it was 96.7% !

Links to info (in Norwegian)

- https://elbil.no/vi-kan-klare-hundre-prosent/

- https://ofv.no/aktuelt/2024/nybilsalget-i-august-h%C3%B8yest...

> Norway is special

I know, I live there. Been driving electric since 2017.

China is the biggest auto market in the world and also produces the Teslas they buy domestically.

    > Foreigners certainly don't want our cars

FYI: Tesla sold 600,000 cars in China last year. It is a huge market for them. They also sold more than 200,000 cars in Europe last year.

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars

Then why are they always bitching about their neighbors who buy large American vehicles that are too wide for their streets?

>I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt.

I agree and hope they do go bankrupt, but I hope so because the country needs a fucking wake up call: American Exceptionalism(tm) is simply no longer true.

I sincerely think we need to see one (Boeing), maybe even a few (Intel? US Steel?) paragons of American Excellence(tm) go down in smoking ruins so we have to accept that we are not 1970s America taking mankind to the Moon and beyond anymore.

Once we realize that, we can actually get started on Making America Great Again in a real, meaningful way instead of a dumb political catchphrase.

> Once we realize that, we can actually get started on Making America Great Again in a real, meaningful way

I see no reason to believe this will happen rather than a continued slow decline and eventual collapse.

The Canadian government drove its primary aerospace company, Avro Canada, not just into bankruptcy/reorganization, but to completely shutdown operations. The country lost 14,000 aerospace professionals, but more importantly, it lost its leadership position in cutting edge aerospace. Its best engineers left for the USA or the UK. Canada, more than a half century later, has never recovered anything like the leadership role it had built during the post-war period. Be careful what you ask for.

Look, we're going down one way or another. We might as well get down there faster so we can start crawling back up sooner.

Maybe so, but I would say cars are different than aerospace.

It’s clear that Boeing was able to squeeze costs centers at the expense of quality and business investment all while keeping the coin under shell in the form of regular old stock buybacks.

But if/when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They’re just gonna spin it off to another buyer—consisting of who exactly? McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk? Tencent?

Seems like a nightmare for someone, not sure for whom.

> But if/when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They’re just gonna spin it off to another buyer—consisting of who exactly? McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk?

Idk, pick one that's American or closely allied [1]. Ideally not one of the three larger than Boeing.

Worst case: audit and re-assign the contracts. We'll be better for it in the long run. And I'm not convinced it wouldn't result in quicker, higher-quality deliverables in the short.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors

Who even needs a specific buyer? Boeing itself is a publicly traded company, the spin-offs can be too. Put the business unit into its own corporate entity and give all the shares of the new entity to the existing Boeing shareholders to do with as they please, or sell them into the market.

The top secret stealth formula they could possibly be privy to is not publicly traded. I was making the point that you're going to have a board filled with people who in some instances could be hand-selected to say the quiet part loud, and the list of companies who makes some of this stuff has one item in it.

Its military stuff.

There are more than a million people with a US security clearance. Finding enough to fill the board of a new company shouldn't be prohibitively difficult.

You probably know more about this than I do since you claim "people keep repeating this without context." Looking at your links, it seems to me a confusion of terms. Yes, the legal entities behind GM and Chrysler went away...in order for the new entities to receive billions.

So, technically, you are correct. The business entities of June 2009 failed. However, the consumer DGAF who owns www.gm.com or www.chrysler.com. They can still go to their local dealer and purchase a vehicle "made by" these companies. The "companies" live on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com