Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
And tarriffing imports doesn't make a difference in the case of something like shipbuilding where the real problem is the government hasn't got a consistent order-book to keep factories staffed, operating and training - nor a plan to allow that capacity to leverage into being self supporting.
Like a much better plan has always been defence exports: increase your customer base to spread risk and reduce per unit prices. The F-35 and it's adoption was a great idea in this regard...right up till the US started threatening NATO allies and cutting off avionics support to partner nations (Ukraine) in the middle of a war.
You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry. The whole "bring manufacturing back" idea is almost wholly disconnected from it: a ton of factories extruding plastic childrens roys aren't suddenly going to start making anti-shipping missiles - in fact this is related to a secondary problem which is that it's not remotely clear that a peer/near-peer conflict would look anything like the long wars that WW2 represented due tot he delivery timelines on advanced weapons systems. You basically go to war with the military you have.
> You basically go to war with the military you have.
The war in Ukraine shows what a current-day war looks like: You rapidly expend stockpiled traditional weapons, and then rapidly ramp up low-cost drone manufacturing.
Currently, the #1 drone manufacturer in the world is probably Ukraine, with Russia and China somewhere in the #2 and #3 spots. The United States is somewhere on the bottom of that list.
Subsidising civilian drone manufacturing alone would catch up the United States dual-use manufacturing capability for any potential future war for the next half-a-decade or so. After that...? Something-something-AI-murder-bots.
But Ukraine built that industry after the war started. And the Ukranian conflict is uniquely well suited to drones because of numerous factors which wouldn't apply in say, a fight over Taiwan - where the outcome would more or less be determined by who still had a floating Navy at the end of the day.
No amount of 3D printed FPVs is going to bring down a modern warship - they're unlikely to even get near it (conversely the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets in anyway, but can be as cheap as "brick on a speed boat throttle").
"the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets"
Absolutely. Ukraine was able to push Russian surface fleet into Russian ports using sea drones. If Taiwan builds a fleet thereof, the Chinese blockade fleet will face Armageddon.
I saw an interview with a former naval radar guy, who claimed that the natural state of the sea produces so many small false blips that a smartly built sea drone of certain size is basically impossible to distinguish from those.
> built that industry after the war started.
Because for the first year of the war was the "burn down existing cold war era stocks" phase. More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have.
Now that every military has seen years of video clips on Telegram of tank after tank being blown up by $500 drones, the next war is going start with swarms of drones on day 1, not day 400.
"More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have."
The Ukrainians absolutely realized that, and I saw a lot of reports about Ukrainian drone operators in 2022 already. It was just after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Turkish-made drones were a significant factor in Azeri victory.
There was something else at play. The supply chain had to be built up, plus the Russians were/are quite strong at radioelectronic warfare. Overcoming Russian jamming was a serious uphill battle.
> Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
This is too limited in thinking. It's not just about "defence critical components", but the know-how and having the production workflow knowledge. It's all well and good to have rules on what goes into frigate, but if you don't have the shipyards to build things then it's a bit of a moot point:
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
> You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry.
It's not just about industry but about capacity as well: if you have (in this example) only (say) 4 shipyards you're going to have a tough time beating someone who has 40.
This is presuming you get to keep the shipyards. They're no use to you if they're all blown to hell in the first 48 hours - ships take months to build at minimum. If you lose your navy in the mean time, you won't be building anything.
This is the problem with these assumptions: they're all rooted in the industrial warfare the US won in WW2 but are not contextually accurate to today. WW2 wasn't fought with satellite targeting and precision cruise missiles which could be fired from half the planet away. Ukraine is currently hitting targets on the other side of Russia - "behind the lines" doesn't really exist for strategic assets anymore.
Giving up your economy for a future war with China that may or may not happen is frankly idiotic. The US already has thousands of nuclear warheads in storage so what are you afraid of? This is basically how the USSR collapsed.