Comment by adastra22
19 hours ago
Doesn't matter. All of the US's advanced weaponry systems now use "state of the art" electronic systems, which in the context of defense only means "not decades out of date." Two or three generations old is perfectly fine. The military does not need the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs going into the iPhone 17 or whatever, but it does need the equivalent of the chip in the iPhone 12 or iPhone 8 or whatever for integration into next generation weapons systems.
But if all of our advanced weaponry used chips from Taiwan or Korea, for example, then the strategic implications for war in East Asia would be radically different. People are right to say that China could engage in war over Taiwan for chips, but for the wrong reasons. It's not that they want access to the fabs (they'd love it, but they're not stupid and they know the fabs and know-how would be destroyed in the war), but it would deny the US defense industry access to those fabs.
If US missiles or drones use chips from TSMC, and TSMC is in occupied territory or a war zone... the US can't make more missiles or drones. And no matter how powerful your starting position is, you can't wage war without the ability to replenish your stockpiles. It's the bitter lesson Germany learned in both world wars.
China wants hegemony in Asia, and to remove the influence of the US, Japan, and their allies within what they perceive as their exclusive sphere of influence. How to achieve that? Invade Taiwan, which eliminates western access to TSMC one way or another, effectively blockading western defense industry from the core things they need to resupply their militaries in a war. Like WW1 all over again, a "preemptive war" becomes the game-theoretic optimal outcome, and the world suffers.
How to counter that? The US and its allies need to make sure they have access to chip fabrication facilities that can produce near-state-of-the-art chips, even at inflated prices that are not commercially viable in peacetime, as well as the necessary strategic minerals like germanium and lithium. Only then does calculus swing the other way in favor of peace. Hence Biden's effort to get TSMC to build SOTA fabs in Arizona, and when that failed/stumbled, this investment in Intel.
The China narrative is pure nonsense. You always have guys like Gordon Chang pushing alternating stories about the coming collapse of China, followed by a scary hegemonic whatever.
Regardless of whether you believe the China narrative is true or not (that is to say, whether China will actually do this or not), it is driving US policy.
Well, these guys have literally been saying the same crap for 30 years, so it’s a good bet they are full of it.
You’re reading a lot into the US right now. US policy in 2025 is more about which member of the whack pack is the alpha gorilla than anything else.
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I mostly agree with this but have a hard time digesting the fact that someone would invest going to war with inferior looking strategy and technology.
Future wars are likely going to be GPU driven, ML heavy entities where efficiency matters a lot more than brute force, blunt grenade throwing wars of the past.
A super power like US would likely want to be in the forefront of this if they happen to be in a tussle with a worthy adversary.
Bleeding edge efficiency doesn't matter as much as you think in those applications. A 20% or 50% energy efficiency matters a lot for datacenters or mobile phones. It matters less in a smart bomb, missile, or tank.
The upcoming generation of weapons is going to use realtime sensor fusion done by AI. Cutting edge chips will matter for those weapons.
The existing systems do this. Look up the F-35. It's what I was referencing. Bleeding edge state of the art chips aren't required though, or even practical -- these systems need a lot of validation before use, and that makes them always a few process generation behind.
I'm not talking about the plane. I'm talking about the weapon itself.
Imagine a next-generation fire-and-forget weapons with radar and broad-spectrum camera arrays and an AI trained on a fused version of all this data. Typical defenses like chaff or flares would be rendered almost entirely useless.
This kind of visual approach also renders modern stealth almost completely useless. When an unexpected plane is found on L-band (or some other low-frequency radar), the AD would simply fire a couple of missiles into the area with instructions to visually identify the large objects moving at fast speeds using the fusion of these different sensors (and ground+air-based radars) while in flight.
We are getting pretty close to being able to do this in realtime with cellphone-level chips.
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