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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

If I remember rightly, one of the successful attacks was a floating "drone" made of a small boat packed with explosives. Kind of a hybrid between the torpedo and the fireship, and quite hard to defend against at night.

China has (checks wikipedia) three operational carriers, one very modern Fujian, the obsolete former training ship Liaoning, and Shandong, which appears to be halfway between the two, the first locally built carrier. During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Liaon... (interesting and varied history!)

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> During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.

And would have absolutely no way to reach that scale again. Or the equivalent in drone production, which is why it’s absolutely preposterous to take a hostile attitude towards our closest neighbors and trade and potentially put our geographical advantages at risk.

One of things that's a concern is the consolidation of industry into fewer and fewer bigger and bigger plants. Not only does that mean a bottleneck in one place is far worse, it also means that there's not the depth of experience available many places. There's a handful of production engineers rather than dozens. And there's not the same number of plants that can be converted from sewing machines to rifles or automobiles to tanks.

I was reading something that said militarily, the US is now in the same position that Japan was prior to WWII because we've outsourced so much of our production.

China doesn't need lots of aircraft carriers unless the want to invade US.

What they need and they have is enough weapons to destroy any US aircraft carrier approaching their coast.

Naval power doesn't mean just aircraft carriers and China has 100x shipbuilding capacity US has.

If China wants Taiwan back the only thing they need to do is make sure the US Navy and cargo ships can't reach the island.

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