<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>wolverine876</author><text>In 1993, at the end of the Cold War, Secretary of Defense William Perry [0] summoned contractors to a dinner meeting, now called &amp;#x27;The Last Supper&amp;#x27;. Unlike the original Last Supper, this one was the last (or the beginning of the end) for most of the guests: Perry told them that, having no more peer enemies, the US didn&amp;#x27;t need most of them. They would have to consolidate dramatically. At the end of the 1990s, 107 defense contractors had consolidated to five.&lt;p&gt;That was efficient and a good choice for the situation. Against a peer foe like the Soviet Union, you need lots of extra capacity to supply needs during a war when everything is consumed quickly, from ships to bullets. From the end of the Cold War until recently, that was unnecessary. The Taliban, Iraq, Serbia, Libya, etc. were not going to require so many munitions that there would be a crisis; they weren&amp;#x27;t going to sink any destroyers or shoot down any planes.&lt;p&gt;China is a &amp;#x27;near-peer&amp;#x27; threat. As Russia&amp;#x27;s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the capability of all of NATO - with combined economies maybe 30x Russia&amp;#x27;s - to manufacture supplies for Ukraine is insufficient. A war with China could be much larger; the US needs far more capacity.&lt;p&gt;Another, more critical reason is that some weaknesses are escalatory - they encourage escalation by the enemy. Chinese leaders, seeing the US lacks that capacity, are incentivised to escalate peace to conflict, conflict to war, a small war to a large war. Escalation is the bane of international relations - it is systemic and often cannot be controlled, leading to catastrophes that nobody wants but nobody can stop. Any professional foreign policy carefully constructs situations that are systemically de-escalatory.&lt;p&gt;(As an example, the US Space Force is changing from using a few expensive super-satellites to using very many cheap ones, in large part because having a few super-satellites is escalatory - it incentivizes an enemy to conduct a surprise attack, because they can knock out a large amount of capability at once.)&lt;p&gt;[0] OT: also a mathematics Ph.D. Do such people still rise to leadership in government? Or are they all maximizing click-thru for SV companies?</text><parent_chain><item><author>giantg2</author><text>Doesn&amp;#x27;t make much sense to revive shipbuilding in the US when you&amp;#x27;d have to import the steel. We still wouldn&amp;#x27;t be competitive on cost.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>U.S. seeks to revive idled shipyards with help of Japan, South Korea</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Defense/U.S.-seeks-to-revive-idled-shipyards-with-help-of-Japan-South-Korea</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ijidak</author><text>National security is my guess.&lt;p&gt;The inability to build ships at scale doesn&amp;#x27;t bode well during today&amp;#x27;s return to cold war &amp;#x2F; inter-war geopolitics.</text><parent_chain><item><author>giantg2</author><text>Doesn&amp;#x27;t make much sense to revive shipbuilding in the US when you&amp;#x27;d have to import the steel. We still wouldn&amp;#x27;t be competitive on cost.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>U.S. seeks to revive idled shipyards with help of Japan, South Korea</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Defense/U.S.-seeks-to-revive-idled-shipyards-with-help-of-Japan-South-Korea</url></story>