The man who saw the resource before the warThe man who saw the resource before the war
Churchill's most consequential pre-war act came two decades before he reached Number 10. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he converted the Royal Navy from Welsh coal to oil. Coal was domestic, secure, and politically comfortable. Oil was foreign, came from Persia, and meant betting the fleet on a supply chain Britain did not control. His critics were right about every risk. Churchill did it anyway, because oil-fired ships were faster, and in a naval war speed was survival. To secure the supply he had the British government buy a 51% stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914 — the state taking a controlling position in a strategic input because the market alone would not guarantee it in a crisis.
That is the Churchillian move, and it is the one Washington is refusing to make with compute. Today's strategic resource is not oil but advanced chips, the fabs that print them, and the gigawatts that feed the clusters. The US has correctly identified that TSMC in Taiwan is the Anglo-Persian Oil Company of our era — a single point of failure for the entire war effort, sitting 100 miles off the coast of the adversary. Churchill would not have responded with export-control memos and a CHIPS Act trickling out subsidies over a decade. He bought a controlling stake in 1914. He would treat domestic fab capacity and grid expansion as the 1940 equivalent of aircraft production — a number to be hit by a date, with the state guaranteeing demand, financing, and, if necessary, ownership.
Churchill's most consequential pre-war act came two decades before he reached Number 10. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he converted the Royal Navy from Welsh coal to oil. Coal was domestic, secure, and politically comfortable. Oil was foreign, came from Persia, and meant betting the fleet on a supply chain Britain did not control. His critics were right about every risk. Churchill did it anyway, because oil-fired ships were faster, and in a naval war speed was survival. To secure the supply he had the British government buy a 51% stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914 — the state taking a controlling position in a strategic input because the market alone would not guarantee it in a crisis.
That is the Churchillian move, and it is the one Washington is refusing to make with compute. Today's strategic resource is not oil but advanced chips, the fabs that print them, and the gigawatts that feed the clusters. The US has correctly identified that TSMC in Taiwan is the Anglo-Persian Oil Company of our era — a single point of failure for the entire war effort, sitting 100 miles off the coast of the adversary. Churchill would not have responded with export-control memos and a CHIPS Act trickling out subsidies over a decade. He bought a controlling stake in 1914. He would treat domestic fab capacity and grid expansion as the 1940 equivalent of aircraft production — a number to be hit by a date, with the state guaranteeing demand, financing, and, if necessary, ownership.