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Today the US is no longer the world’s biggest manufacturing economy, its $2.5 trillion in annual manufacturing output exceeds the entire economies of all but seven countries. But it’s a distant second and its capacity to build enough of the most important tools of war is open to question.

Old-fashioned metal bending is among America’s hollowed-out sectors. Measured by output dollar value, the three largest US manufacturing industries are chemicals; computer and electronic products; and food, beverage and tobacco products.

In shipbuilding, the US is a nonentity. According to the US Naval Institute, China has nearly 47% of the global market, South Korea is second with 29% and Japan is third with 17%. The US has less than 1%.

It takes the US more than five years to build an aircraft carrier. Between 1943 and 1945, the US built 24 Essex class carriers, Symonds said. Granted, they were less sophisticated than today’s flattops. But the difference in volume is still striking.

A Chinese attempt to take Taiwan by force would test the US industrial base severely. War games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-profit think tank, suggest the US would “likely run out of some munitions – such as long-range, precision-guided munitions – in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict.”

China is said to be acquiring weapons five to six times faster than the US. In a conflict over Taiwan, would its vast manufacturing infrastructure enable it to outproduce the US the way the US outproduced Japan and Germany in World War II?

Meanwhile, NATO is starting to deploy combat troops to Ukraine. Soldiers from Poland, France, the UK, Finland and other NATO members are arriving in larger numbers.

Although Russia says there are over 3,100 mercenaries in Ukraine, these newly arriving troops are not mercenaries. They are in uniform, home country proclaimed via insignia. They mostly are concentrated in the western part of the country, although in some cases they are close to the actual fighting in the east.