Retirement and Systemic Fragility

 Well, I've come to that point in my life where I'm starting to sort out pensions and stuff. Yeah, I'm THAT old.

One of the many deferred pensions I have is from ICL (Now Fujitsu) when I worked for them back in the 80s/90s.

Maybe there's an amount of Rose tinting going on, but looking back they were pretty good times. I gave ICL 8 years of my life and despite not being rewarded in monetary terms (I was one of the Mid-80s intake that replaced high paid engineers with young, willing but lower paid staff) the crack at work was always good amongst the ordinary workers. Management was another thing entirely, the company mired in office politics. That's partly what killed them as a manufacturer. I saw the writing on the wall and left a couple of years before the manufacturing facility in the UK was sold off and closed down.

And that's what brings me on to systemic fragility. Because ICL eventually became Fujitsu and now only focuses on software and services. It doesn't make anything any more. Even the arm of ICL in India, ICIM (International Computers India Manufacturing) eventually became Zensar Technologies and only deals in software and services.

The hardware is now all made in Taiwan or China. Or the components that make the systems are made there. 

Which is a problem. A bloody big problem, strategically. 

Because if ever China decided it would like to have a pop at invading and occupying Taiwan, the supply of chips for computer systems would dry up overnight. We've all seen the issues with car manufacturing with shortages of certain chips halting production and that was just because the chip makers had to ramp up production after the lull from Covid. 

Just think what the impact would be if we couldn't get ANY chips from Taiwan. Where else would we get them from? China? Er, I don't think so if they're the one invading Taiwan.

Just think what the effect would be globally if the West went to war with China. What would happen if the global supply of things China makes (virtually bloody everything) stops. 

In fact would we be able to manufacture the weapons needed to attack China? Because even though the technologically advanced chips for the weapons systems might be made in the West for security reasons, the ancillary chips, the ones that don't require high-level security are supplied from Taiwan.

Transistors, capacitors, resistors, all the high-quality (not the cheap Chinese crap) are mostly made in Taiwan. 

I hope weapon manufacturers are looking at their supply chain, or have already looked at it and started to use robust and secure methods of supply from inside their own country.

It doesn't have to be Taiwan. Russia has signed a pact with China, so if it kicks off over Ukraine, we could see China invading Taiwan at the same time to produce a two-front conflict thereby making it more difficult for the West to commit serious numbers into the fight. China could instead just stop exports to Western countries in solidarity with their Russian friends. 

We really as a country need to look more seriously at security of supply. Not just for goods that require security of supply, but also energy. We need to have an independent energy supply because the Russians could turn the gas tap off any time they like and we would be absolutely fucked.