Tag Archives: China and United States war

The Battle to Block Access to AI

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The U.S. is imposing some of its strongest measures yet to limit Chinese advances in artificial intelligence, requiring companies to get government approval to export certain information about their AI models and set up large AI computing facilities overseas.

The rules, in January 2025, are a final push by the Biden administration in a yearslong effort to use export controls to stem China’s advances in chip-making and AI, and they have sparked a backlash from companies including Nvidia. The rules impose caps on how many advanced AI chips can be exported to certain countries and require a license to export the data that underpins the most sophisticated AI systems.

Strict sales restrictions on these chips are already in place for China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries, and the new rules carve out exemptions for a group of 18 close U.S. allies and partners. These include countries such as the U.K., France and Germany, a senior administration official said. But a broad category of more than 120 other countries, including U.S. allies in the Middle East and Asia, are set to face new hurdles in setting up huge AI computing facilities.

While the impact of the rules isn’t yet clear, they threatened to limit sales of AI chips from Nvidia, which has built a large business out of satisfying demand for AI infrastructure in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Company officials said they expected to bring in almost $10 billion of revenue last year from so-called “sovereign AI,” where countries around the world increasingly see AI computing facilities as national assets.

Under the new rules, companies that produce AI models—the likes of OpenAI and Google—would need export licenses to send the “weights” attached to those models to many foreign countries. Model weights are the secret sauce in advanced AI systems like ChatGPT, a series of digital knobs that fine-tune their performance.

Excerpts from Asa Fitch and Liza Lin U.S. Targets China With New AI Curbs, Overriding Nvidia’s Objections, WSJ, Jan. 13, 2025

Crossing the Pacific: the Logistics of War

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Every two weeks since 2023, US officers convene a classified intelligence briefing about fighting in the Red Sea. The attendees aren’t politicians, policymakers or spies. They are private shipping executives. The meetings are part of a push by the Pentagon’s Transportation Command, or Transcom, to integrate shipping lines as crisis supply lines. The policy stems from a dire need in an unloved but vital corner of America’s military behemoth. A House select committee in February 2024 called Transcom’s sea-cargo capacity “woefully inadequate.” The U.S. is investing heavily in new weapons systems, but missiles, warships and jet fighters are only a fraction of what the military worries about. Troops sent to battle also need food and water. Their equipment devours fuel and spare parts. Guns without ammunition are dead weight. Wounded fighters require evacuation.

Moving all of that—and keeping supplies flowing for months or years—demands vast and complex support infrastructure, broadly termed logistics. If it doesn’t function, even a battle-proven force will grind to a halt…China’s rise has exposed America’s shipping weakness. Beijing isn’t just Washington’s biggest military rival. It is also by far the world’s biggest logistics operation. Within China’s centrally directed economy, the government controls commercial shippers, foreign port facilities and a globe-spanning cargo-data network that in a conflict could be repurposed for military aims or to undermine the U.S., including on home soil. Transcom’s fleet of planes and cargo ships, meanwhile, is aging and insufficient.

In conflict with China, the Pentagon would send roughly 90% of its provisions by sea. Among 44 government-owned ships for moving vehicles that Transcom can tap, 28 will retire within eight years. Replacements have faced repeated delays. But military logistics isn’t “just logistics” because in wartime, supply lines are prime targets. During Russia’s assault on Kyiv in 2022, Ukrainians crippled Moscow’s forces by destroying their provisions.

Robust logistics, in contrast, can deter attacks. If adversaries believe the U.S. can quickly mobilize a massive response, they are less likely to initiate hostilities. During the Cold War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies routinely made a show of flooding Europe with American troops and gear before exercises.

The U.S. has decades of experience working with NATO allies to send military supplies to Europe for a potential conflict with Russia. Cargo ships generally need about two weeks to cross the Atlantic. For a conflict with China, logistics would be more complicated because distances are far greater. Crossing the Pacific takes much longer than the Atlantic, and shipping routes could face greater danger of attack.

In 1990, at the Cold War’s end, the U.S. had roughly 600 available merchant ships. In 1960, it had more than 3,000. China today has more than 7,000 commercial ships. Chinese entities own every sixth commercial vessel on the seas—including ships flying other countries’ flags—a share comparable only to Greece.

Excerpts from Daniel Michaels and Nancy A. Youssef, Pentagon’s limited capacity to support a potential China conflict forces planners to tap private cargo companies, WSJ, Nov. 1, 2024

Great Fear and Uphill Struggle: US, Japan and China

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In Japan’s glory days of the the late 1980s, the country accounted for about half of the global semiconductor industry, and the U.S. was left to beg, plead and threaten as it tried to get a small slice of the Japanese market. A bestselling book in Japan during the Cold War’s waning days called “The Japan That Can Say No” suggested that Tokyo could leverage its dominance in semiconductors to control the world’s military balance—and perhaps help the Soviet Union instead of the U.S.

Today, the great fear driving chip investments in both U.S. and Japan is China. The U.S. policy calls for helping allies such as Japan build a supply chain that is less exposed to risks posed by a hostile Beijing. While the U.S. is expanding its own chip production through the Chips and Science Act, which includes some $53 billion of spending, people involved in the Rapidus project (between U.S. and Japan) said the U.S. needed further global diversification. ..The Rapidus project aims to get Japan back into the heart of the business of chip making by building facilities on the northern island of Hokkaido, known for its ski resorts. Rapidus says it wants to begin pilot production in 2025 and full-scale production in 2027. Some 6,000 workers are being drafted to put up the factory.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has said that it intends to help Rapidus achieve its goals, and that it wants the Japanese semiconductor industry to have revenue of some $100 billion in 2030, triple the 2020 figure. The ministry is pitching in billions of dollars for additional projects in Japan. TSMC is building an $8.6 billion factory on the southern island of Kyushu and is in talks about a second. Assuming it gets the money, Rapidus still has to master a level of manufacturing technology attained so far by only two companies, TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. Both are projected to have the ability to mass-produce 2-nanometer chips by 2025.

Excerpts from Peter Landers and  Yang Jie, Japan’s Plan to Become a Chipmaking Champ Hinges on This Football-Loving Engineer, WSJ, July 6, 2023

Squeezing China: the Asian NATO

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In defense terms, America’s “pivot to Asia” is not a single move, but a weaving of initiatives—with overlapping bi-, tri-, quadri- and multilateral deals—to create an ever-thickening lattice on China’s periphery. Some deals are modest; many are uncertain if tested in war. But they amount to the “fortification of America’s forward defense perimeter in the western Pacific.”…Despite its pacifism, Japan is greatly boosting defense spending. American marines in Okinawa are practicing how to scatter and defend the islands and sea passages. The next link, Taiwan, is under intense strain, given China’s aim to retake the self-governing island by force if necessary. America may soon announce the first “drawdown” of weapons from its own arsenal, pre-emptively strengthening Taiwan much as it has armed Ukraine. The Philippines, the next link, is weaker but has agreed to give America access to nine bases in the country; in return America is helping to beef up its forces….

America is devising ways to disperse its jets in wartime and hardening the defense of Guam. It wants to project more power from Australia, where it rotates air force and marine units. It is working with Britain to supply nuclear-powered submarines to Australia under the aukus deal; the three are also working on new weapons, including hypersonic missiles. Farther afield, the Quad—America, Australia and Japan working with India—is not a formal security grouping, but their navies exercise together. Across the region, American-led war-games are becoming bigger and more sophisticated. Sometimes America’s security arrangements are limited, for instance its new defense deal with Papua New Guinea; or its efforts to help littoral states improve “maritime domain awareness” to, say, curb illegal fishing by Chinese fleets. This, too, helps enmesh America in the region…

China accuses America of building an “Asian NATO”. But the reality is a looser system. America’s friends and allies in the “Indo-Pacific” have no mutual-defense commitments akin to NATO’s Article 5, under which an attack on one is an attack on all, nor integrated multinational commands.

Excerpts from America and China: The Chain, Economist, June 15, 2023