Insider Finance - Business - Insider Today: America isn’t ready

The US isn’t ready for a war. One of the big reasons why? America doesn’t build stuff the way it used to. 

Just think about the US during World War II. During that time, the US emerged as an industrial powerhouse, cranking out warships and aircraft at a breakneck pace. The Navy pumped out ships in just weeks — its fleet grew from just 700 to over 6,000 over the course of the war.

The US maintained this capacity for decades. But as Insider’s Jake Epstein and Jacob Zinkula report, America's manufacturing prowess has atrophied. 

And as tensions between the US and China grow even more strained, politicians, experts, and American military leaders are asking: Just how prepared are we if the threats from Beijing become something more serious?

War in the Western Pacific probably won’t start anytime soon, but experts say it is a possibility — and some are warning that America is unprepared.

"We are up against a strategic competitor that has power across many domains of military power," Dan Blumenthal, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the US Department of Defense. "And we have to be prepared to face an onslaught of the kind we haven't had to respond to in many decades."

If America wants to be prepared for a conflict with China, it's clear that it needs to get back to building — building ships, building semiconductors, and building up relationships with allies. But even if the US starts to regain some of its manufacturing might, a showdown would be catastrophic.

As Scott Kennedy, an expert on China's economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Insider: “You can only prepare so much, and then you would have to deal with the consequences."

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