To paraphrase patio11, a disagreement between you and the market is not a shortage.
I'm surprised that anyone still believes the perennial "labor shortage" complaints. It has always been about employers refusing to improve wages and working conditions.
One of the bigger problems of non-capitalist systems is that it requires whips to force people to do things they do not want to do without adequate compensation
They can hire people they can train. They chose not to, instead (whenever possible) whine for visas so they can steal trained professionals off less developed countries
And yet people don't, because it would reduce quarterly profits. So one market (for equities) does kind of magically prevent workers from being trained, by not allowing rational participation in another market (for workers).
How I view "labor shortage" complaints by default:
"What's with this shortage of new cars for $5,000!? As a hard-working consumer, I simply can't find enough of what I want at the limited price I am willing to offer, and I demand to know how the government is going to solve this pressing national crisis of enormous importance!"
Go out and look, and you'll see it's definitely a shortage... yet somehow it seems wrong to dignify it with a lot of concern, right? The conditions and causes of the "shortage" are quite important.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic (because you want a $5k car and they don't exist in your market) or serious (because you want a $5k car from China which they do actually sell at that price).
You can tell it's sarcasm because I have a second paragraph stating that it's wrong to dignify the pearl-clutching histrionics with a lot of concern.
> $5k car from China which they do actually sell at that price
Which will be +$2k to transport, and then someone will charge you more because of limited supply, and then it still won't be legal on public roads and highways.
You could say the same thing about any military hardware during a peace-time economy. It’s not a matter if it exists, it’s a matter if the relevant knowledge exists in domestic/friendly industrial base. The U.S. is making more satellites than the rest of the world combined right now.
It is also a question of spin up time. If the demand suddenly existed to rebuild satellites en masse, the lead time on labor resources is part of the total time to rebuild. It becomes concerning if and only if either a) for strategic reasons the time is inadequate, or b) the lead time requires generational training efforts, e.g. college programs, national initiatives, etc. which can't behave predictably in response to an emergency.
Broadly speaking, sure. But you’re not trying to rebuild every single one. At this point you’re in a war, things move faster, and there are a million unknowns. Under the given scenario, it appears that satellites have lost their usefulness akin to tanks in Ukraine. It’s not a matter if you can build satellites, merely if you can stay ahead of your adversary. At present the U.S. can launch more and faster mass to orbit. I’d be more concerned about that than anything else in the provided scenario.
We no longer have the culture, the expertise, or the infrastructure to do these things. They moved it all overseas and to Mexico to save a quick buck. America is dead.
SpaceX has >11,000 satellites whipping around the planet. They increased the number of LEO sats by nearly one order of magnitude in bit more than 5 years.
So apparently, in the US, the culture, expertise and infrastructure do exist to do these things.
The US absolutely should expect for their industry to get hit in a conflict like that.
China knows that the general attitude towards war in the US population is strongly skewed by the fact that they haven't had to deal with the fallout of war on their home turf in recent memory. To the US, war is currently something that happens somewhere else, not at home.
In a conflict, it would just be smart to correct that attitude immediately, and China has the means to do so. Many data centers, major refineries, large industrial targets, and important pieces of the US' supply chain I'd expect to not last the week.
Also China is not going to sit there, taking a beating, and let the US keep the support base that allows them project power overseas (including attitude to war) when it is within China's means to severely cripple the US' ability to do so. China has the home-turf advantage, allowing them to fight the same war for cheaper, guaranteeing victory even if the US retaliates in kind.
Will there be a conflict over Taiwan though? I strongly suspect that if China started blockading Taiwan tomorrow, no other power would do anything about it, because there's no realistic path to win that conflict. It might just get handed over with no shots fired.
There'd be meetings, and negotiating tables, and strongly worded threats, and sanctions, but eventually some agreement would be signed for the transfer of Taiwan.
Planning only/mostly for a limited conflict when both parties are well armed, large industrial powers is pretty short sighted (not to mention both nuclear powers).
Conflicts escalate in unpredictable ways across history because once you start it's really hard to stop sometimes.
The US has grown used to been able to enter a war on its terms and exit on its terms and against the people they've been fighting since Korea that's been entirely possible because they can just leave and the combatants on the other side couldn't really do a lot to the US once they'd gone.
>> Somehow I doubt that after a war with China, satellites would be high on the priority list of things that need rebuilding.
If GPS goes down, most of our communications will go down. A lot of other stuff falls from there. I suspect we'd be OK after a brief adjustment, but it would be very disruptive.
Unfortunately, you don't always get that choice. Just look at what Putin did to Ukraine. There was absolutely no reason for him to play that, but he did.
Yes, you should work for peace, but beware that it's not always possible. Or maybe I should say not always acceptable. It certainly would have been possible for Ukraine to give in, but I don't blame them for not accepting that option.
I think there would be a Kessler Syndrome within a few weeks of an anti-satellite campaign at which point trying to launch replacements wouldn't make any sense.
Wouldn't that depend a lot on what and how much were targeted?
Seems a sufficient number of satellites in a particular orbital altitude and inclination would be required to create a self-sustaining cascade.
Even then, the Delta-V of tens to hundreds of m/sec to for violent intercepts seems unlikely to eject debris into different orbital regimes; e.g., it takes nearly 4km/sec Delta-V to move from LEO to Geosynchronous orbit. So, totally Kessler-Syndrome-destroying the LEO orbital range would still leave GEO orbital range available...?
I mean, if we have a war with Russia that involves destroying satellites, it seems like there is a pretty big chance that means it's going nuclear and we'll have bigger fish to fry.
It's becoming increasingly likely that satellites will be targeted in even low intensity conflicts. Bear in mind that lasers are getting more powerful so you don't need to vaporize the satellite, just perform a mission kill by torching the FPA behind the lens.
I think the point is that there are scenarios where large powers would disable/destroy each other's satellites without using nuclear weapons and we would be poorly prepared to replace them.
Is there any infrastructure of which this is not true? Every country, not just the Great Powers, has a large amount of installed plant which is the result of decades, in some cases centuries, of capital accumulation. And which modern weaponry can destroy in a matter of minutes. It's just easier to destroy than to build, and literally no industry has the capacity to rebuild as fast as a war breaks - if they did, most of those workers would be sitting idle in peacetime.
Compare the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2: Germany was trying to destroy merchant shipping faster than the Allies could build it, and failed; not because the subs were hunted down (though they were) but because the US refocused a humongous amount of industrial policy on building Liberty ships in a matter of days per hull. That was a massive national mobilisation, it would have been impossible to do so for more than a handful of capital plants, and it certainly wasn't going to be maintained in peacetime.
Edit to add: Though to argue a bit against my own point, satellites are perhaps uniquely vulnerable, even to nonstate actors. Lasers get better all the time and a satellite inherently needs to pass over other countries to do its job. Much easier targets than, say, electrical grids which can be defended by the internal-security garrison.
Or distributed (grids) if they can't be defended. But yeah, most large infrastructure is susceptible to strikes by adversaries. Satellites are I think more delicate, difficult to replace, and easier to strike in certain cases.
I think your parent commenter's point is that the satellites are used to detect launches. No satellites == no early warning == temptation to launch preemptively.
It's possible. IIRC, the large powers have enough mobile nuclear capabilities that even if they suffered from a first strike, they could still retaliate and cripple the striking country, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
It's pretty much what Iran is doing to the US now with their supply of mobile ballistic missiles and drones, but on a global scale with subs/etc... added to the mix.
A lot of deterrence credibility depends on at least pretending you think you can get into a fight without it inevitably going nuclear.
After all, if America’s military thinkers all believe if America fought China it would inevitably result in mutually assured destruction - then American security guarantees for Taiwan lose all credibility.
Most American military planners assume that if China invades Taiwan they'll use smaller "tactical" nuclear missles to do things like destory carrier groups to test the will of the US on MAD. Predicting, probably correctly, that the US will not respond with a full scale nuclear strike in response to the destruction of a military target just because nuclear weapons were used.
They are likely expecting the same kind of war we are already in with Russia; in which Russia tries to keep its attacks just below the threshold of open war and its rhetoric and "negotiations" about "seeking peace".
Russia have already attacked subsea cables, openly assassinated targets in many countries, shot down civilian airliners, made multiple drone attacks in Europe, and more. They go for plausible deniability and/or exploit western politicians' desire to avoid conflict and "not escalate" on their watch (and nevermind western politicians already craven to them from the current US President to other parties including AfD, French National Party, etc.).
It is entirely plausible this will escalate to Russia taking out a few satellites, with either kinetic or directed-energy weapons, and the need to replace them. Indeed Russia has been observed testing such systems in the recent years.
There is no need to assume nuke use at all for something to get to the stage of taking out satellites. Taking out satellites with kinetic or energy weapons would definitely leave millions of graduates alive.
This is true for everything. They gutted the whole country. There is nothing left. Sold for parts. Collapse soon. That is why they are gearing up for total fascism, they know people are going to be pissed when the quality of life dies off for all of the US and there are no jobs.
To paraphrase patio11, a disagreement between you and the market is not a shortage.
I'm surprised that anyone still believes the perennial "labor shortage" complaints. It has always been about employers refusing to improve wages and working conditions.
Shortages can't be defined out of existence this way. Markets don't magically train workers or provide security clearances. People have to do that.
But markets can make doing those things financially worthwhile.
At most, markets can show whether they are financially worthwhile.
The market doesn't have agency. It's a projection of people's preferences.
One of the bigger problems with capitalism is that it reacts much too slowly to be a viable economic system.
One of the bigger problems of non-capitalist systems is that it requires whips to force people to do things they do not want to do without adequate compensation
They can hire people they can train. They chose not to, instead (whenever possible) whine for visas so they can steal trained professionals off less developed countries
>> People have to do that.
Companies can train people too.
And yet people don't, because it would reduce quarterly profits. So one market (for equities) does kind of magically prevent workers from being trained, by not allowing rational participation in another market (for workers).
How I view "labor shortage" complaints by default:
"What's with this shortage of new cars for $5,000!? As a hard-working consumer, I simply can't find enough of what I want at the limited price I am willing to offer, and I demand to know how the government is going to solve this pressing national crisis of enormous importance!"
Go out and look, and you'll see it's definitely a shortage... yet somehow it seems wrong to dignify it with a lot of concern, right? The conditions and causes of the "shortage" are quite important.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic (because you want a $5k car and they don't exist in your market) or serious (because you want a $5k car from China which they do actually sell at that price).
You can tell it's sarcasm because I have a second paragraph stating that it's wrong to dignify the pearl-clutching histrionics with a lot of concern.
> $5k car from China which they do actually sell at that price
Which will be +$2k to transport, and then someone will charge you more because of limited supply, and then it still won't be legal on public roads and highways.
In other words, that's a pretty big stretch.
You could say the same thing about any military hardware during a peace-time economy. It’s not a matter if it exists, it’s a matter if the relevant knowledge exists in domestic/friendly industrial base. The U.S. is making more satellites than the rest of the world combined right now.
It is also a question of spin up time. If the demand suddenly existed to rebuild satellites en masse, the lead time on labor resources is part of the total time to rebuild. It becomes concerning if and only if either a) for strategic reasons the time is inadequate, or b) the lead time requires generational training efforts, e.g. college programs, national initiatives, etc. which can't behave predictably in response to an emergency.
Broadly speaking, sure. But you’re not trying to rebuild every single one. At this point you’re in a war, things move faster, and there are a million unknowns. Under the given scenario, it appears that satellites have lost their usefulness akin to tanks in Ukraine. It’s not a matter if you can build satellites, merely if you can stay ahead of your adversary. At present the U.S. can launch more and faster mass to orbit. I’d be more concerned about that than anything else in the provided scenario.
All the stated problems are just problems in peacetime; Pay and bureaucratic red tape.
We no longer have the culture, the expertise, or the infrastructure to do these things. They moved it all overseas and to Mexico to save a quick buck. America is dead.
SpaceX has >11,000 satellites whipping around the planet. They increased the number of LEO sats by nearly one order of magnitude in bit more than 5 years.
So apparently, in the US, the culture, expertise and infrastructure do exist to do these things.
I have to disagree Newport, RI. is a hot bed for this kind of development and I’m sure there are other places not mentioned on HN.
Here is a trade school that is actively training the needed workforce.
https://www.iyrs.edu/
Somehow I doubt that after a war with China, satellites would be high on the priority list of things that need rebuilding.
You'd probably start with rebuilding more basic manufacturing and refinery industry destroyed during the war.
Most of the planning for possible conflict between the USA and China is for a more limited conflict, such as an invasion of Taiwan.
The US absolutely should expect for their industry to get hit in a conflict like that.
China knows that the general attitude towards war in the US population is strongly skewed by the fact that they haven't had to deal with the fallout of war on their home turf in recent memory. To the US, war is currently something that happens somewhere else, not at home.
In a conflict, it would just be smart to correct that attitude immediately, and China has the means to do so. Many data centers, major refineries, large industrial targets, and important pieces of the US' supply chain I'd expect to not last the week.
Also China is not going to sit there, taking a beating, and let the US keep the support base that allows them project power overseas (including attitude to war) when it is within China's means to severely cripple the US' ability to do so. China has the home-turf advantage, allowing them to fight the same war for cheaper, guaranteeing victory even if the US retaliates in kind.
Will there be a conflict over Taiwan though? I strongly suspect that if China started blockading Taiwan tomorrow, no other power would do anything about it, because there's no realistic path to win that conflict. It might just get handed over with no shots fired.
There'd be meetings, and negotiating tables, and strongly worded threats, and sanctions, but eventually some agreement would be signed for the transfer of Taiwan.
Planning only/mostly for a limited conflict when both parties are well armed, large industrial powers is pretty short sighted (not to mention both nuclear powers).
Conflicts escalate in unpredictable ways across history because once you start it's really hard to stop sometimes.
The US has grown used to been able to enter a war on its terms and exit on its terms and against the people they've been fighting since Korea that's been entirely possible because they can just leave and the combatants on the other side couldn't really do a lot to the US once they'd gone.
China isn't that.
>> Somehow I doubt that after a war with China, satellites would be high on the priority list of things that need rebuilding.
If GPS goes down, most of our communications will go down. A lot of other stuff falls from there. I suspect we'd be OK after a brief adjustment, but it would be very disruptive.
Did you mean “transportation”? Communications networks are not reliant on GNSS.
We "lack workers to rebuild" many things that could be lost in a war with peer thermonuclear-armed powers. The only winning move is not to play
Unfortunately, you don't always get that choice. Just look at what Putin did to Ukraine. There was absolutely no reason for him to play that, but he did.
Yes, you should work for peace, but beware that it's not always possible. Or maybe I should say not always acceptable. It certainly would have been possible for Ukraine to give in, but I don't blame them for not accepting that option.
[flagged]
> Ukraine had many, many opportunities to avoid war.
Being invaded being the straw that broke the camel's back?
I think there would be a Kessler Syndrome within a few weeks of an anti-satellite campaign at which point trying to launch replacements wouldn't make any sense.
No, there wouldn’t be. Space is huge. There aren’t that many satellites, and even the largest are relatively small.
I presume "anti-satellite campaign" means hundreds of anti-satellite missiles launched into LEO / MEO, at which point we do have a serious problem
Kessler Syndrome is a very specific accusation. It would be a disaster for sure, but not KS.
They are small until they are blown into a million pieces.
Wouldn't that depend a lot on what and how much were targeted?
Seems a sufficient number of satellites in a particular orbital altitude and inclination would be required to create a self-sustaining cascade.
Even then, the Delta-V of tens to hundreds of m/sec to for violent intercepts seems unlikely to eject debris into different orbital regimes; e.g., it takes nearly 4km/sec Delta-V to move from LEO to Geosynchronous orbit. So, totally Kessler-Syndrome-destroying the LEO orbital range would still leave GEO orbital range available...?
Depending on the density of debris in LEO it might be very difficult to launch through to the higher orbits.
I mean, if we have a war with Russia that involves destroying satellites, it seems like there is a pretty big chance that means it's going nuclear and we'll have bigger fish to fry.
It's becoming increasingly likely that satellites will be targeted in even low intensity conflicts. Bear in mind that lasers are getting more powerful so you don't need to vaporize the satellite, just perform a mission kill by torching the FPA behind the lens.
China destroyed a sat with a laser years ago. Not disabled - destroyed. It created a bunch of debris.
[dead]
I think the point is that there are scenarios where large powers would disable/destroy each other's satellites without using nuclear weapons and we would be poorly prepared to replace them.
Is there any infrastructure of which this is not true? Every country, not just the Great Powers, has a large amount of installed plant which is the result of decades, in some cases centuries, of capital accumulation. And which modern weaponry can destroy in a matter of minutes. It's just easier to destroy than to build, and literally no industry has the capacity to rebuild as fast as a war breaks - if they did, most of those workers would be sitting idle in peacetime.
Compare the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2: Germany was trying to destroy merchant shipping faster than the Allies could build it, and failed; not because the subs were hunted down (though they were) but because the US refocused a humongous amount of industrial policy on building Liberty ships in a matter of days per hull. That was a massive national mobilisation, it would have been impossible to do so for more than a handful of capital plants, and it certainly wasn't going to be maintained in peacetime.
Edit to add: Though to argue a bit against my own point, satellites are perhaps uniquely vulnerable, even to nonstate actors. Lasers get better all the time and a satellite inherently needs to pass over other countries to do its job. Much easier targets than, say, electrical grids which can be defended by the internal-security garrison.
Or distributed (grids) if they can't be defended. But yeah, most large infrastructure is susceptible to strikes by adversaries. Satellites are I think more delicate, difficult to replace, and easier to strike in certain cases.
I think your parent commenter's point is that the satellites are used to detect launches. No satellites == no early warning == temptation to launch preemptively.
It's possible. IIRC, the large powers have enough mobile nuclear capabilities that even if they suffered from a first strike, they could still retaliate and cripple the striking country, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
It's pretty much what Iran is doing to the US now with their supply of mobile ballistic missiles and drones, but on a global scale with subs/etc... added to the mix.
I think once satellites are in pieces while orbiting it’s not just a workforce problem to be solved.
A lot of deterrence credibility depends on at least pretending you think you can get into a fight without it inevitably going nuclear.
After all, if America’s military thinkers all believe if America fought China it would inevitably result in mutually assured destruction - then American security guarantees for Taiwan lose all credibility.
Most American military planners assume that if China invades Taiwan they'll use smaller "tactical" nuclear missles to do things like destory carrier groups to test the will of the US on MAD. Predicting, probably correctly, that the US will not respond with a full scale nuclear strike in response to the destruction of a military target just because nuclear weapons were used.
Hope for the US it won't reach the FOGBANK level of disaster.
what kind of war are the authors expecting, where war against Russia/China destroys sattelites, but still leaves millions of graduates alive?
population would be the first thing dropping off in the nuclear exchange
They are likely expecting the same kind of war we are already in with Russia; in which Russia tries to keep its attacks just below the threshold of open war and its rhetoric and "negotiations" about "seeking peace".
Russia have already attacked subsea cables, openly assassinated targets in many countries, shot down civilian airliners, made multiple drone attacks in Europe, and more. They go for plausible deniability and/or exploit western politicians' desire to avoid conflict and "not escalate" on their watch (and nevermind western politicians already craven to them from the current US President to other parties including AfD, French National Party, etc.).
It is entirely plausible this will escalate to Russia taking out a few satellites, with either kinetic or directed-energy weapons, and the need to replace them. Indeed Russia has been observed testing such systems in the recent years.
There is no need to assume nuke use at all for something to get to the stage of taking out satellites. Taking out satellites with kinetic or energy weapons would definitely leave millions of graduates alive.
This is true for everything. They gutted the whole country. There is nothing left. Sold for parts. Collapse soon. That is why they are gearing up for total fascism, they know people are going to be pissed when the quality of life dies off for all of the US and there are no jobs.
Already at 25% functional unemployment
[dead]
[dead]