You have been conflating peace time with war time. There isn't going to be any chance to complete large naval vessels in modern war environment, as they will be the first to get bombed. If you couldn't see alternatives other than a futile exercise, then you should broaden your horizon.
As Patch pointed out in 2022, the US is unable to generate sufficient fires to penetrate the IADS in mainland China.
Plus the scenario assumption is that China is militarily dominant in the Western Pacific, but can't reach past.
And that the US can't reach into the Western Pacific, but is militarily dominant elsewhere
You can debate whether such a scenario is relevant today, in 5 years time, or 10 years time, but it is almost certain to be the balance of power at some point.
So perhaps you can suggest an alternative course of action in such a scenario.
WWII is irrelevant, which is why your hypothese make no sense. Manufacturing process today is magnitudes with an "S" more complex than back then.
This statement is incorrect.
Heavy manufacturing is fundamentally a complicated process rather than a complex one.
And since WW2, it has only become more complicated, and less complex
1. We now have digital models for the shipyards, the ships and their components.
2. Inspection technology is way better than back in WW2 and robots can reliably repeat operations
So you can put in place rules, systems and processes, so that it becomes a complicated (but manageable) process.
Here's an old example of welding with robots with the Virginia SSNs, so I expect the situation in China to be far more advanced today.
Gavekal Research states that Chinese shipyard workers are 3x more productive than in America.
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EDIT. We can also use airliners as an example. Since the 1970s, airliners have gotten more complicated. But production times have gone down substantially.
Point 1 is complete nonsense. Having machines for quality assurance doesn't magically improve people's abilities. When skills of the labour are not up to par, all the machines will do is say the work have failed qualtiy checks, which means no actual work got done. Furthermore, the machines themselves add another layer of complexity as the operators need to be trained as well to be able to identify false positives and false negatives.
As for point 2, automation can't keep up with manufacturing complexity. That's why things take longer to built despite advancement in automation.
That is incorrect.
Look at what is happening in the automobile industry for example.
1. Automation is substantially reducing production timelines.
2. Granted, cars are smaller than ships, but cars can be used a proxy for the components that make up ship modules.
Any process can be automated, but the question is whether the upfront initial cost and time is worth it. For aircraft carriers which are only built once every 5 years and are essentially unique one-off builds, it's not feasible.
But if you have a construction programme which assumes significant numbers of identical ships , it is worth developing the automation, then implementing this everywhere.
Nope. An aircraft carrier is not a facemask. The bottlenecks lie with people and there is no way to get around other than slow grind of 10 years, even at China speed. 10 years estimate is actually optimistic, because it didn't factor in social factors.
I feel this is just cope now. "Social factors" are the bottleneck in China expanding shipbuilding in a wartime scenario?
