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Pentagon Makes It Official: U.S. Industrial Decline Is Undermining National Defense
Pentagon Makes It Official: U.S. Industrial Decline Is Undermining National DefenseForbes.
Some excerpts:
Earlier this month the Department of Defense released its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, setting forth a framework for revitalizing the sinews of American economic strength most critical to military preparedness...
... The Biden strategy recommends many of the same steps, reflecting concern over industrial base weaknesses that became apparent during the global pandemic and subsequent efforts to support Ukraine’s military campaign against Russian invaders.
Both documents single out the sorry state of the U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry, which largely ceased to produce commercial oceangoing vessels even as the U.S. became heavily dependent on ocean transit for supplies of everything from pharmaceuticals to rare earths to digital devices...
...The pace of submarine production at the nation’s two nuclear shipyards is lagging due to workforce challenges and a fragile domestic supply chain that contains numerous “single points of failure...”
... Shipbuilding is a particularly egregious example of how Washington has allowed U.S. industrial strength to erode, but there are analogous challenges in every sector that produces industrial goods relevant to defense.
For instance, only one domestic smelter remains that produces aluminum of sufficient purity to build military aircraft, and planners discovered during the Iraq war that there was only one steel mill making plates suitable for armoring trucks...
... The Biden strategy recommends many of the same steps, reflecting concern over industrial base weaknesses that became apparent during the global pandemic and subsequent efforts to support Ukraine’s military campaign against Russian invaders.
Both documents single out the sorry state of the U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry, which largely ceased to produce commercial oceangoing vessels even as the U.S. became heavily dependent on ocean transit for supplies of everything from pharmaceuticals to rare earths to digital devices...
...The pace of submarine production at the nation’s two nuclear shipyards is lagging due to workforce challenges and a fragile domestic supply chain that contains numerous “single points of failure...”
... Shipbuilding is a particularly egregious example of how Washington has allowed U.S. industrial strength to erode, but there are analogous challenges in every sector that produces industrial goods relevant to defense.
For instance, only one domestic smelter remains that produces aluminum of sufficient purity to build military aircraft, and planners discovered during the Iraq war that there was only one steel mill making plates suitable for armoring trucks...
I noticed this sort of thing during the Shanghai shutdown when two important instruments in our labs went down and both suppliers of the instruments informed me that they could not get chips to repair the instruments.
One of the companies that couldn't get chips was a spin-off of Hewlett Packard. I told my rep - who is by the way an very nice person who I like a great deal - "you people used to be Hewlett Packard and you can't get a circuit board in less than two months?"
Our industrial decline is connected with our rather odious cultural practice of valuing bean counters over engineers. It's just not on the right, by the way. If one discusses energy issues here in the Ennui and Excuses forum, one sees bean counting - and not particularly insightful or even remotely intelligent bean counting - riding roughshod over both decency and sustainability.
We need engineers, not MBA's, and we need a highly trained, efficient and productive work force, investments in people as opposed to "financial instruments."
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