The second part and final part of a series examining the history of the American industrial war machine and the structural factors driving the United States' current military production crisis.
I disagree that US generals should be better compensated. They are already sufficiently rewarded, and are for the most part entirely political creatures.
One technical note: in para 14, or thereabouts, the author uses the format "$1,000,000,000 billion". The word "billion" doesn't belong there: the numbers already contain it.
A worthy read, but missing from this otherwise sound analysis are (a) that the United States sits atop a rapacious empire dangerously flailing and dysfunctional in its decline, and (b) deficiencies in its industrial war machine go deeper and wider than his proposed reforms address. For some fifty years, since the Reagan era, it has suited a rentier American ruling class which has captured both wings of a duopoly masquerading as a democracy to offshore manufacturing to the global south while turning the domestic economy into a FIRE - finance, insurance real estate - dominated haven for rent seeking corporate oligarchies. Now far behind China on the creation of real wealth, it would take decades to catch up on the transport infrastructure, modernised industrial plant and training investment without which the narrower program Jon Kurpis proposes can have at best limited efficacy.
Philip, thank you very much for reading my article. You bring up a lot of very good points, and I don't disagree with the issues you're raising.
When I was thinking about how to approach this discussion about the military production problems we're facing, I knew there were much deeper issues underneath all of this. I touched on some of them towards the end of the article as there are significant structural problems that have led us to the pretty insane situation we find ourselves in today.
But those are enormous issues, and they go well beyond the military production. They really get into fundamental problems with the way the American economy and industrial base have developed over the past several decades. I could have gone much further into all of that, but then it would have become a very different article.
What I was trying to do instead was offer some practical policies that could at least get the ball rolling. They aren't perfect solutions, and by themselves they certainly aren't going to fix everything. But I think there's value in giving people something concrete that they can look at and say, "We could actually do this."
I've always believed in the mantra that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. If people can see honest, practical measures that would have some effect, even a limited one, they're more likely to get behind them and demand that something actually be done. And once you start moving in that direction, you create the possibility of building enough momentum to eventually tackle the much larger structural problems you're talking about.
So I just wanted to explain why I wrote the article the way I did. I wasn't trying to suggest that these policies address the deeper problems you've raised nor fix the military production issues in totality. My aim was to identify a realistic place to start, because we have to start somewhere.
Thanks Jon. In the main I see my comment as extension of, rather than disagreement with, your points. You say early on that:
"As an American citizen and taxpayer, I expect my country to be well prepared militarily, especially given the astronomical sums allocated to national defense every year. That does not, however, mean that I agree with America’s neoliberal foreign policy or view it as anything other than reckless and self-destructive. What I am asserting in this piece is pragmatic. If the United States is required to fight a high intensity conflict over an extended period of time, it should, in theory, have every weapon, aircraft, munition, supply, technology, and other resource necessary to defend itself for as long as required. Given America’s size, natural resources, population, and war chest, that expectation is more than reasonable."
As "crown subject" of a junior imperialism and former colonial power, the UK, whose governments have for decades prioritised Washington's interests over those of the people they govern, I too take a pragmatic view. While I welcome defects in the imperial war machine, be they in my country or yours, I also welcome your intelligent appraisal.
Leaving aside the point that seeing as how the Defence Department is now the Department of War it would be more accurate and up to date to describe that one trillion dollars as the war budget, rather than the defence budget, a number of observations occur:
Firstly, good luck with attempting to reorganise and reform a supply chain based on just in time production in which spare capacity and stockpiles are an anathema.
Secondly, reliance on a single contractor is downstream of the prime contractor business model where a single contractor chooses who does what rather than the client (in this case the Department of War). And the reason being is that the cornerstone of neoliberal dogma is that any firm is merely a collection of contracts with no actual organisation overseeing the process - as that would be planning which equated to Communism in the cultural mindset of the US Zeitgeist.
Finally, the elephant in the room which is not even a glint in the milkman's eye, never mind considered and dealt with, is that to even begin to remedy the identified problems will require a reversal of the best part of half a century of deindustrialisation in favour of a rentier economy.
A process which included the systematic eradication of not only effective organisation (see above) which has produced outcomes which produce less than the sum of the parts (2+2=3 rather than 5), but also of skills, knowledge, expertise and experience.
"Thanks to offshoring manufacturing, the Western industrial base mostly has to be built from the ground up. Is that even possible? If you think about it, an apprentice machinist on an assembly line fifty years ago was being taught how to do it by a master machinist who had been taught by a previous master and so on back to the middle of the 1700s when industrial production was invented. Each in the series advanced the technique, of course, but it’s still a chain you could trace back, machinist by machinist, for all that time. If that sequence of teacher-learner-teacher is broken, if the teacher has retired or died leaving no apprentices, how long will it take to get it back? Putting a pallet of engraved paper in the floor of an empty building and hoping it will turn into a pallet of artillery rounds (or anything else for that matter) is magic thinking."
It will take more than a generation to rectify this reality.
It will also take a lot more than "Reform" of a system paradigm for which all the identified problems are an integral feature of a cultural belief which is beyond dogma and which are protected as sacred tenets of that belief system rather than problems. For the US and the Collective West to survive as a functioning civilisation will require not reform but the permanent eradication of neoliberalism.
1. 155 shells involved a Turkish company, which shows how hollowed out the U.S. industry has become.
2. Environmental stuff has had an impact on manufacturing.
3. Energy costs, the U.S. has 5x the energy costs of China. There has been a deliberate effort to reduce energy output from non renewables. From closing of nuclear power plants, stopping pipelines, etc.
4. Politics driving procurement decisions.
5. Night of long knives, bill Clinton, that hugely consolidated the defense industry resulting in many sole source suppliers.
6. Financial rules that reward stock buybacks and low capital expenses with higher stock prices.
7. Allowing China to destroy industry’s in the U.S., rare earths is a great example of this.
8. Allowing China to force technology sharing by fire companies in China.
9. Closing production lines while a military item is still in service. Russia keeps production lines open, at a low output, so they can easily resume large scale production.
10. A procurement process that results in high cost low reliability weapons with high maintenance costs.
11. Required Outsourcing of maintenance to contractors.
12. F-35 debacle
13. Latest U.S. aircraft carrier debacle. Naval Ship building is broken in the U.S. contrast to China.
14. Boeing is another poster child of what’s wrong with the U.S. manufacturing. It used to be engineering run, and then md took it over.
In this piece, I genuinely tried to make clear that there are numerous factors affecting military production capacity, far too many for anyone to address comprehensively in a piece of this length. Space was already a significant constraint, as evidenced by the fact that, for the first time, I had to turn the article into a two-part series.
Given those limitations, I chose to focus on four or five issues that I thought would be both important and interesting.
First, the government needs to address the risks created by reliance on single-source suppliers and ensure that viable production backup plans exist, even if that means requiring them contractually.
Second, essential resources and materials need to be secured at the scale necessary to support production.
Third, I believe we need to address the revolving door that allows military officials involved in major spending decisions to later move into lucrative positions with companies that benefited from those decisions.
Lastly, I wanted to put the sheer scale of a trillion dollars into perspective by illustrating what could theoretically be accomplished, and the tangible value that could be created, for less than 1% of that amount. Irrefutable severe child hunger issues that can theoretically be solved for less than 1% of the budget fits the bill for this purpose.
There are certainly many other important issues that I would have loved to include including several of the points you raised. Their absence was not meant to suggest that they are unimportant. You honestly made many excellent suggestions. Rather, with limited space, I had to make choices about which issues to emphasize in the article.
I appreciate you taking the time to contribute additional points and I hope this helps explain the reasoning behind the approach I took.
Thank you for responding and I have a huge amount of respect for anyone that has run a company.
I’m extremely disgusted at a military that has a broken procurement process resulting in over priced, under performing, hard to produce, high maintenance weapons. I’m in shock that Iran has weapons, hypersonic missiles, with a budget 1/97th of the U.S. we don’t have in production. And that our anti missiles such as the patriots have limited ability, take years to produce, and are super expensive. So they and similar multi million dollar one time use weapons are being used to shoot down $20,000 drones. The exhaustion of this weapons inventory is a crime. We are going Winchester. And the Russians just keep on increasing production.
My worry is a military revolution is going on, and the U.S. troops are becoming sitting ducks. Be it on aircraft carriers that have become huge targets, with a sewer system taken from cruise ships for environmental reasons (Obama administration), that frequently breaks and stops working. And the elimination of urinals. The result was lines to use the toilets, in a multi billion dollar Weopon platform?
There are many different ways for an evil empire to go down. Starving children, broken down infrastructure, unbelievably poor education—the military problems examined in this excellent article are only a small reflection of the entire process of rotting. Not all of us are “disgusted” at your military. It’s a high time to stop harassing the entire world. Yankee go home and take care of your own house.
My comment was about the broken US procurement system. Not the right or wrong of US military policy.
To clarify, I’m disgusted by the US Weapon development process and the results.
Unfortunately it’s typical results of government funding in the U.S. So much waste and corruption. A joke, with a lot of truth, is “the U.S. has the best Congress money can buy”.
First and foremost, I would never suggest directing $10 billion in taxpayer money into another fraud machine. In fact, I specifically wrote that the $10 billion cut from the defense budget should be "redirected to a new and permanent initiative that will oversee and ensure..." I chose that language deliberately. The point is not to pour more money into the same failed systems and bureaucracies that already exist, but to establish something new with the oversight necessary to ensure the money actually reaches the children it is intended to help.
Second, if we are being honest about government waste and abuse, there is arguably no bigger fraud machine than the military-industrial complex. Removing $10 billion from that system is itself a meaningful step toward curtailing waste, profiteering, and fraud.
Lastly, my experience with these government entities has shown me greed on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. That is a major reason the situation has gotten so far out of control. And the thing about greed is that it never ends.
Even with a defense budget approaching a trillion dollars, the idea of removing roughly 1% under the banner of feeding hungry children will still be treated as ridiculously unacceptable by the elites and special interests who profit from the war machine. But that is precisely why Congress should do it.
If legitimate military-capacity concerns are what triggered the budget reduction, the military-industrial complex will have an enormous incentive to start getting its act together. It will not be perfect, and a tremendous amount of additional work and reform will still be necessary to get us where we should be. But the industry will have a powerful reason to address its production problems if it understands that failure could result in an even bigger cut the following year. Instead of continually rewarding inefficiency with more money, Congress can change the incentive structure.
So, to get the ball rolling, Congress should take $10 billion from the defense budget and establish a new, carefully structured initiative dedicated to feeding children who are genuinely suffering from a lack of food.
I personally believe that is an honorable first step toward righting the ship. Because as it stands, we are headed straight for the iceberg.
There is a lot of chatter among our current illuminati about a return to Hamiltonian economics.
Let’s review the legacy of Hamilton.
First, he enriched speculators in Continental debt by making them whole, which was part and parcel of his plan for the first United States bank.
Second, he imposed excise taxes on the production of alcohol, whiskey, almost entirely made by western frontiersmen. It resulted in the crisis of the whiskey rebellion, which was crushed by a federalized army, led by none other than George Washington himself.
Third his tariffs on industrial products from Great Britain to protect industrial activities, favored the north at the expense of the south. Within a long generation, the United States faced the crisis of the nullification act by South Carolina.
Aaron Burr, scoundrel that he was, saw this blatant favoritism and killed Hamilton in a duel for it.
Ultimately Hamilton‘s plan to industrialize the north was successful much to the fatal dismay of the south; for it was that industrialized north that crushed the agricultural south in the American Civil War.
It gives credence to those who argue the primary cause of the Civil War was the federal governments favoritism towards the north at the expense of the south. That struggle’s public and political face was slavery, but in the final analysis, the crisis of slavery was a derivative crisis of the economic favoritism of the federal government.
Hamilton was not among the “founding fathers”. He was its first bitterly, partisan, political figure that the real founders worried about. In retrospect, you could argue that Hamilton killed Jefferson‘s yeoman’s republic while it was in the cradle, you could also argue the first victim of American imperialism, the creation of Hamilton, was it it’s erstwhile partners in confederacy and federal governments, the southern states.
The hunger for profit, in combination with the retiring generals role in it, has also contributed to US defence systems being outdated. The MIC has managed to work under monopoly conditions: guaranteed internal market for any product, thanks to the generals/officials lobbies and to NATO. Once any weapon is produced, it virtually has a ready, throughout all NATO, guaranteed sales reception. No need for technical innovation and better performance. Typical examples: F35 and Patriot interceptors. The latter, for example, are ineffective against ballistic missiles. Both China and Russia are far more efficient, advanced and budget and production effective than the US today, let alone Iran, which should be the gold standard in these areas.
Our military has been one of aggression. Arguing that we should be the leader at building the most efficient killing machines is disgusting- look at the world around you, and now it’s coming home .
Socialism never worked in the past and will never work in the future! Wasting taxpayers' money on social security sounds good, but the results are always bad. Ask Mr. Mercouris about British healthcare! It is easy to point to problematic developments, but to address them, is a different story, especially if the solution to government failure is more government. There is one key question: why were so many production facilities moved out of the US? Why is it cheaper to produce in East Asia and have higher logistical costs than producing in the US? Or focus on the Navy and its costly programs: Why are the shipyards in China and Korea? The market for new ships is there! Without shipyards in the US, the engineers planning a ship, organizing production and later maintenance are without any experience — look at the disastrous "new" ships for the US Navy. So again: Why? Answer this question and do not make a rant about revolving doors, which can be addressed, after that "why" is answered.
“Socialism” (that has never existed sans small programs within the capitalist system)) “never worked” but capitalism is awesome! 👏 What about the healthcare care examples rather than British? They work quite well in Russia and China. As does their MIC, education, and children’s hinger elimination programs.
Ok. I really wish we could divide the world, one halve for your Socialist dreams, where you can do whatever you like - for sure you will find the perfect society - and the other halve for people like me, with no climate change, no identity policies, no racism, no class warfare, no social insurance, no to big to fail banks, absolute secure property rights, low taxes and thousand tiny little governments (not one, as you Socialist love), just to have enough police/military to keep you Socialist away. Sadly I am sure, you do not even understand what I am talking about, because the real "free market" style never existed, maybe when deporting all Socialist to the other part of the planet, there is at least a chance that we come closer to this dream of free market.
I don’t understand what you are talking about? Why? Not enough brain, or education, or exposure to your fake “libertarian” dreams? I sure do. You are the one who is sadly miseducated and propagandized. Socialism has NOTHING to do with any stuff you’ve listed here, your country is a victim of the neoliberal policies who you, in your pitiful parochial muddled state, were misled to confuse and conflate with socialism. I pity Americans. The whole world pities you.
Btw, I am an anarchist, but the REAL traditional type. The American Right even expropriated and corrupted this beautiful idea.
As you are an anarchist, maybe you can explain to me this school of thought. Long, long time ago, I had to learn about M.A.Bakunin and at least for my then young brain, some ideas sounded strange, but somehow fascinating. The official Soviet history sometimes calls Trozky an Anarchist, really? Today, we hear about anarcho-capitalist, like Milei in Argentina, again some ideas does not sound this bad, but it is the opposite of Bakunins ideas, is it? So what is YOUR anarchism?
I suggest you study the subject since you seemed to be enamored with the “libertarian” ideas. Bakunin was the father of anarchism, Trotsky was a Bolshevik—the proponent of the state power and party dictatorship. Bolsheviks murdered anarchists, their ideas and policies were the opposite of anarchism. The traditional 19th century name for anarchism was libertarianism. Anarchists belive that a state is a violent coercive entity because it has the power to murder its own citizens. Socialism is very similar to anarchism, that’s why we call ourselves anarcho-socialists. Socialism is where ALL the people own the means of production, have free access to their land’s resources, and make COLLECTIVE decisions about the way their lives are being lived and the country being run. The American “libertarians” who want “small government” and say the things you’ve listed in your 1st response are actually fascists. They corrupted the name and the very project of liberation. If you wish to learn more, can start with David Graeber. He shows that for the 90% of human prehistory and history, people were free and had various forms of anarchy or socialism. You were told that the USSR was “socialist” or even “communist.” That’s propaganda and lie. The same lie that teaches you about the “free market.” Or that the US Dems are socialist, god forbid. Or that the ideologues of gender ideology are socialists. You can start with his little book “Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology.”
You lost me with your first sentence. As humanity stares into the abyss on diverse fronts - climate, thermonuclear armageddon, gross and increasingly dysfunctional inequality - it has never been clearer to me that wealth creation dictated by private profit rather than human need will be the death of us. Rosa Luxemburg, pace Fred Engels got it pretty much right more than a century ago with the prescient formulation: socialism or barbarism.
Incidentally, I'm a Brit who recently spent fifteen days in an NHS hospital with pneumonia. My core care by doctors, nurses, radiographers, porters - even the smiling folk who wheeled the dinner trolleys - was stellar. There's a good deal wrong with the NHS but that's due far more to the criminal insanities of neoliberalism than what it please you to call socialism!
" -Every supplier should be required to submit a comprehensive surge production plan before being awarded a military contract."
On our program, I'm noticing more and more, the dwindling number of available vendors are simply coming back with "No quote" as our terms and conditions become more demanding for both quality and contratural concerns. This situation will have to be balanced depending on the criticality and technical level of the parts needed. A one size fits all policy may backfire in the current U.S. manufacturing environment.
I agree with your assessment that, when it comes to vendor, supplier, and contractor requirements, this is not a one-size-fits-all situation, and treating it as such could have negative ramifications. In my article, I outlined a number of steps that I believe are consistent with the philosophy you described.
First and foremost, there needs to be a mastery of the supplier landscape so that we know exactly what we are dealing with. That is why I suggested that "AI should be used to identify every single-source supplier and organize the entire supply chain down to the most granular level possible. Once that information has been uncovered, scrutinized, and prioritized, policymakers can proactively address the specific vulnerabilities that have been identified."
Beyond that, I introduced a possible long-term strategy when I wrote that "long-term steps should be taken to bring such manufacturing efforts in-house so it can eventually be performed by the very capable men and women of the United States armed forces." That, of course, is an immensely complicated proposition and one worthy of its own article.
Something else that directly aligns with your point about vendors declining work is the following passage:
"If a corporation is the sole producer of a critical military component, it should not be allowed to decline production without a backup plan.
A proactive way to guard against this is for the military to retain a backup supplier under contract for every genuinely critical component. The original contractor would be aware from the start that if it failed to meet its contractual obligations or refused to expand production when required, the backup supplier would assume responsibility for the work. To make this sort of system viable, the government would deploy legal mechanisms allowing the backup company to access the technical data, manufacturing information, or other IP needed to continue production."
Between the research and mapping of the supplier landscape, the use of backup suppliers, and the other nuances I included throughout the piece, I believe your position is, in most respects, closely aligned with the premises I laid out in the article.
In any event, thank you for taking time out of your busy day to read my work on The Duran and share your thoughts. I appreciate it immensely.
This is an excellent, sensible article.
I disagree that US generals should be better compensated. They are already sufficiently rewarded, and are for the most part entirely political creatures.
One technical note: in para 14, or thereabouts, the author uses the format "$1,000,000,000 billion". The word "billion" doesn't belong there: the numbers already contain it.
A worthy read, but missing from this otherwise sound analysis are (a) that the United States sits atop a rapacious empire dangerously flailing and dysfunctional in its decline, and (b) deficiencies in its industrial war machine go deeper and wider than his proposed reforms address. For some fifty years, since the Reagan era, it has suited a rentier American ruling class which has captured both wings of a duopoly masquerading as a democracy to offshore manufacturing to the global south while turning the domestic economy into a FIRE - finance, insurance real estate - dominated haven for rent seeking corporate oligarchies. Now far behind China on the creation of real wealth, it would take decades to catch up on the transport infrastructure, modernised industrial plant and training investment without which the narrower program Jon Kurpis proposes can have at best limited efficacy.
Philip, thank you very much for reading my article. You bring up a lot of very good points, and I don't disagree with the issues you're raising.
When I was thinking about how to approach this discussion about the military production problems we're facing, I knew there were much deeper issues underneath all of this. I touched on some of them towards the end of the article as there are significant structural problems that have led us to the pretty insane situation we find ourselves in today.
But those are enormous issues, and they go well beyond the military production. They really get into fundamental problems with the way the American economy and industrial base have developed over the past several decades. I could have gone much further into all of that, but then it would have become a very different article.
What I was trying to do instead was offer some practical policies that could at least get the ball rolling. They aren't perfect solutions, and by themselves they certainly aren't going to fix everything. But I think there's value in giving people something concrete that they can look at and say, "We could actually do this."
I've always believed in the mantra that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. If people can see honest, practical measures that would have some effect, even a limited one, they're more likely to get behind them and demand that something actually be done. And once you start moving in that direction, you create the possibility of building enough momentum to eventually tackle the much larger structural problems you're talking about.
So I just wanted to explain why I wrote the article the way I did. I wasn't trying to suggest that these policies address the deeper problems you've raised nor fix the military production issues in totality. My aim was to identify a realistic place to start, because we have to start somewhere.
Thanks Jon. In the main I see my comment as extension of, rather than disagreement with, your points. You say early on that:
"As an American citizen and taxpayer, I expect my country to be well prepared militarily, especially given the astronomical sums allocated to national defense every year. That does not, however, mean that I agree with America’s neoliberal foreign policy or view it as anything other than reckless and self-destructive. What I am asserting in this piece is pragmatic. If the United States is required to fight a high intensity conflict over an extended period of time, it should, in theory, have every weapon, aircraft, munition, supply, technology, and other resource necessary to defend itself for as long as required. Given America’s size, natural resources, population, and war chest, that expectation is more than reasonable."
As "crown subject" of a junior imperialism and former colonial power, the UK, whose governments have for decades prioritised Washington's interests over those of the people they govern, I too take a pragmatic view. While I welcome defects in the imperial war machine, be they in my country or yours, I also welcome your intelligent appraisal.
Leaving aside the point that seeing as how the Defence Department is now the Department of War it would be more accurate and up to date to describe that one trillion dollars as the war budget, rather than the defence budget, a number of observations occur:
Firstly, good luck with attempting to reorganise and reform a supply chain based on just in time production in which spare capacity and stockpiles are an anathema.
Secondly, reliance on a single contractor is downstream of the prime contractor business model where a single contractor chooses who does what rather than the client (in this case the Department of War). And the reason being is that the cornerstone of neoliberal dogma is that any firm is merely a collection of contracts with no actual organisation overseeing the process - as that would be planning which equated to Communism in the cultural mindset of the US Zeitgeist.
This explains both of these fundamental issues:
https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/
Finally, the elephant in the room which is not even a glint in the milkman's eye, never mind considered and dealt with, is that to even begin to remedy the identified problems will require a reversal of the best part of half a century of deindustrialisation in favour of a rentier economy.
A process which included the systematic eradication of not only effective organisation (see above) which has produced outcomes which produce less than the sum of the parts (2+2=3 rather than 5), but also of skills, knowledge, expertise and experience.
Patrick Armstrong explains:
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2025/03/03/an-idiots-guide-to-war/
"Thanks to offshoring manufacturing, the Western industrial base mostly has to be built from the ground up. Is that even possible? If you think about it, an apprentice machinist on an assembly line fifty years ago was being taught how to do it by a master machinist who had been taught by a previous master and so on back to the middle of the 1700s when industrial production was invented. Each in the series advanced the technique, of course, but it’s still a chain you could trace back, machinist by machinist, for all that time. If that sequence of teacher-learner-teacher is broken, if the teacher has retired or died leaving no apprentices, how long will it take to get it back? Putting a pallet of engraved paper in the floor of an empty building and hoping it will turn into a pallet of artillery rounds (or anything else for that matter) is magic thinking."
It will take more than a generation to rectify this reality.
It will also take a lot more than "Reform" of a system paradigm for which all the identified problems are an integral feature of a cultural belief which is beyond dogma and which are protected as sacred tenets of that belief system rather than problems. For the US and the Collective West to survive as a functioning civilisation will require not reform but the permanent eradication of neoliberalism.
Stuff I would add:
1. 155 shells involved a Turkish company, which shows how hollowed out the U.S. industry has become.
2. Environmental stuff has had an impact on manufacturing.
3. Energy costs, the U.S. has 5x the energy costs of China. There has been a deliberate effort to reduce energy output from non renewables. From closing of nuclear power plants, stopping pipelines, etc.
4. Politics driving procurement decisions.
5. Night of long knives, bill Clinton, that hugely consolidated the defense industry resulting in many sole source suppliers.
6. Financial rules that reward stock buybacks and low capital expenses with higher stock prices.
7. Allowing China to destroy industry’s in the U.S., rare earths is a great example of this.
8. Allowing China to force technology sharing by fire companies in China.
9. Closing production lines while a military item is still in service. Russia keeps production lines open, at a low output, so they can easily resume large scale production.
10. A procurement process that results in high cost low reliability weapons with high maintenance costs.
11. Required Outsourcing of maintenance to contractors.
12. F-35 debacle
13. Latest U.S. aircraft carrier debacle. Naval Ship building is broken in the U.S. contrast to China.
14. Boeing is another poster child of what’s wrong with the U.S. manufacturing. It used to be engineering run, and then md took it over.
Hi and thank you for reading my article.
In this piece, I genuinely tried to make clear that there are numerous factors affecting military production capacity, far too many for anyone to address comprehensively in a piece of this length. Space was already a significant constraint, as evidenced by the fact that, for the first time, I had to turn the article into a two-part series.
Given those limitations, I chose to focus on four or five issues that I thought would be both important and interesting.
First, the government needs to address the risks created by reliance on single-source suppliers and ensure that viable production backup plans exist, even if that means requiring them contractually.
Second, essential resources and materials need to be secured at the scale necessary to support production.
Third, I believe we need to address the revolving door that allows military officials involved in major spending decisions to later move into lucrative positions with companies that benefited from those decisions.
Lastly, I wanted to put the sheer scale of a trillion dollars into perspective by illustrating what could theoretically be accomplished, and the tangible value that could be created, for less than 1% of that amount. Irrefutable severe child hunger issues that can theoretically be solved for less than 1% of the budget fits the bill for this purpose.
There are certainly many other important issues that I would have loved to include including several of the points you raised. Their absence was not meant to suggest that they are unimportant. You honestly made many excellent suggestions. Rather, with limited space, I had to make choices about which issues to emphasize in the article.
I appreciate you taking the time to contribute additional points and I hope this helps explain the reasoning behind the approach I took.
Thank you for responding and I have a huge amount of respect for anyone that has run a company.
I’m extremely disgusted at a military that has a broken procurement process resulting in over priced, under performing, hard to produce, high maintenance weapons. I’m in shock that Iran has weapons, hypersonic missiles, with a budget 1/97th of the U.S. we don’t have in production. And that our anti missiles such as the patriots have limited ability, take years to produce, and are super expensive. So they and similar multi million dollar one time use weapons are being used to shoot down $20,000 drones. The exhaustion of this weapons inventory is a crime. We are going Winchester. And the Russians just keep on increasing production.
My worry is a military revolution is going on, and the U.S. troops are becoming sitting ducks. Be it on aircraft carriers that have become huge targets, with a sewer system taken from cruise ships for environmental reasons (Obama administration), that frequently breaks and stops working. And the elimination of urinals. The result was lines to use the toilets, in a multi billion dollar Weopon platform?
There are many different ways for an evil empire to go down. Starving children, broken down infrastructure, unbelievably poor education—the military problems examined in this excellent article are only a small reflection of the entire process of rotting. Not all of us are “disgusted” at your military. It’s a high time to stop harassing the entire world. Yankee go home and take care of your own house.
My comment was about the broken US procurement system. Not the right or wrong of US military policy.
To clarify, I’m disgusted by the US Weapon development process and the results.
Unfortunately it’s typical results of government funding in the U.S. So much waste and corruption. A joke, with a lot of truth, is “the U.S. has the best Congress money can buy”.
Indeed, your comment has lots of valid points, but you started it wrong by giving it the B grade. And this is what I commented on, not your points.
I’ll agree with that point. That was unneeded and I’ll edit it out. Thank you for the clarification.
Deleted! :)
Somehow I doubt that re-directing 10 billion into the fraud machine would somehow do anything to increase production of military goods.
Pete,
Thanks for reading and commenting on my article.
First and foremost, I would never suggest directing $10 billion in taxpayer money into another fraud machine. In fact, I specifically wrote that the $10 billion cut from the defense budget should be "redirected to a new and permanent initiative that will oversee and ensure..." I chose that language deliberately. The point is not to pour more money into the same failed systems and bureaucracies that already exist, but to establish something new with the oversight necessary to ensure the money actually reaches the children it is intended to help.
Second, if we are being honest about government waste and abuse, there is arguably no bigger fraud machine than the military-industrial complex. Removing $10 billion from that system is itself a meaningful step toward curtailing waste, profiteering, and fraud.
Lastly, my experience with these government entities has shown me greed on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. That is a major reason the situation has gotten so far out of control. And the thing about greed is that it never ends.
Even with a defense budget approaching a trillion dollars, the idea of removing roughly 1% under the banner of feeding hungry children will still be treated as ridiculously unacceptable by the elites and special interests who profit from the war machine. But that is precisely why Congress should do it.
If legitimate military-capacity concerns are what triggered the budget reduction, the military-industrial complex will have an enormous incentive to start getting its act together. It will not be perfect, and a tremendous amount of additional work and reform will still be necessary to get us where we should be. But the industry will have a powerful reason to address its production problems if it understands that failure could result in an even bigger cut the following year. Instead of continually rewarding inefficiency with more money, Congress can change the incentive structure.
So, to get the ball rolling, Congress should take $10 billion from the defense budget and establish a new, carefully structured initiative dedicated to feeding children who are genuinely suffering from a lack of food.
I personally believe that is an honorable first step toward righting the ship. Because as it stands, we are headed straight for the iceberg.
There is a lot of chatter among our current illuminati about a return to Hamiltonian economics.
Let’s review the legacy of Hamilton.
First, he enriched speculators in Continental debt by making them whole, which was part and parcel of his plan for the first United States bank.
Second, he imposed excise taxes on the production of alcohol, whiskey, almost entirely made by western frontiersmen. It resulted in the crisis of the whiskey rebellion, which was crushed by a federalized army, led by none other than George Washington himself.
Third his tariffs on industrial products from Great Britain to protect industrial activities, favored the north at the expense of the south. Within a long generation, the United States faced the crisis of the nullification act by South Carolina.
Aaron Burr, scoundrel that he was, saw this blatant favoritism and killed Hamilton in a duel for it.
Ultimately Hamilton‘s plan to industrialize the north was successful much to the fatal dismay of the south; for it was that industrialized north that crushed the agricultural south in the American Civil War.
It gives credence to those who argue the primary cause of the Civil War was the federal governments favoritism towards the north at the expense of the south. That struggle’s public and political face was slavery, but in the final analysis, the crisis of slavery was a derivative crisis of the economic favoritism of the federal government.
Hamilton was not among the “founding fathers”. He was its first bitterly, partisan, political figure that the real founders worried about. In retrospect, you could argue that Hamilton killed Jefferson‘s yeoman’s republic while it was in the cradle, you could also argue the first victim of American imperialism, the creation of Hamilton, was it it’s erstwhile partners in confederacy and federal governments, the southern states.
The hunger for profit, in combination with the retiring generals role in it, has also contributed to US defence systems being outdated. The MIC has managed to work under monopoly conditions: guaranteed internal market for any product, thanks to the generals/officials lobbies and to NATO. Once any weapon is produced, it virtually has a ready, throughout all NATO, guaranteed sales reception. No need for technical innovation and better performance. Typical examples: F35 and Patriot interceptors. The latter, for example, are ineffective against ballistic missiles. Both China and Russia are far more efficient, advanced and budget and production effective than the US today, let alone Iran, which should be the gold standard in these areas.
Our military has been one of aggression. Arguing that we should be the leader at building the most efficient killing machines is disgusting- look at the world around you, and now it’s coming home .
Socialism never worked in the past and will never work in the future! Wasting taxpayers' money on social security sounds good, but the results are always bad. Ask Mr. Mercouris about British healthcare! It is easy to point to problematic developments, but to address them, is a different story, especially if the solution to government failure is more government. There is one key question: why were so many production facilities moved out of the US? Why is it cheaper to produce in East Asia and have higher logistical costs than producing in the US? Or focus on the Navy and its costly programs: Why are the shipyards in China and Korea? The market for new ships is there! Without shipyards in the US, the engineers planning a ship, organizing production and later maintenance are without any experience — look at the disastrous "new" ships for the US Navy. So again: Why? Answer this question and do not make a rant about revolving doors, which can be addressed, after that "why" is answered.
No
“Socialism” (that has never existed sans small programs within the capitalist system)) “never worked” but capitalism is awesome! 👏 What about the healthcare care examples rather than British? They work quite well in Russia and China. As does their MIC, education, and children’s hinger elimination programs.
Ok. I really wish we could divide the world, one halve for your Socialist dreams, where you can do whatever you like - for sure you will find the perfect society - and the other halve for people like me, with no climate change, no identity policies, no racism, no class warfare, no social insurance, no to big to fail banks, absolute secure property rights, low taxes and thousand tiny little governments (not one, as you Socialist love), just to have enough police/military to keep you Socialist away. Sadly I am sure, you do not even understand what I am talking about, because the real "free market" style never existed, maybe when deporting all Socialist to the other part of the planet, there is at least a chance that we come closer to this dream of free market.
I don’t understand what you are talking about? Why? Not enough brain, or education, or exposure to your fake “libertarian” dreams? I sure do. You are the one who is sadly miseducated and propagandized. Socialism has NOTHING to do with any stuff you’ve listed here, your country is a victim of the neoliberal policies who you, in your pitiful parochial muddled state, were misled to confuse and conflate with socialism. I pity Americans. The whole world pities you.
Btw, I am an anarchist, but the REAL traditional type. The American Right even expropriated and corrupted this beautiful idea.
As you are an anarchist, maybe you can explain to me this school of thought. Long, long time ago, I had to learn about M.A.Bakunin and at least for my then young brain, some ideas sounded strange, but somehow fascinating. The official Soviet history sometimes calls Trozky an Anarchist, really? Today, we hear about anarcho-capitalist, like Milei in Argentina, again some ideas does not sound this bad, but it is the opposite of Bakunins ideas, is it? So what is YOUR anarchism?
I suggest you study the subject since you seemed to be enamored with the “libertarian” ideas. Bakunin was the father of anarchism, Trotsky was a Bolshevik—the proponent of the state power and party dictatorship. Bolsheviks murdered anarchists, their ideas and policies were the opposite of anarchism. The traditional 19th century name for anarchism was libertarianism. Anarchists belive that a state is a violent coercive entity because it has the power to murder its own citizens. Socialism is very similar to anarchism, that’s why we call ourselves anarcho-socialists. Socialism is where ALL the people own the means of production, have free access to their land’s resources, and make COLLECTIVE decisions about the way their lives are being lived and the country being run. The American “libertarians” who want “small government” and say the things you’ve listed in your 1st response are actually fascists. They corrupted the name and the very project of liberation. If you wish to learn more, can start with David Graeber. He shows that for the 90% of human prehistory and history, people were free and had various forms of anarchy or socialism. You were told that the USSR was “socialist” or even “communist.” That’s propaganda and lie. The same lie that teaches you about the “free market.” Or that the US Dems are socialist, god forbid. Or that the ideologues of gender ideology are socialists. You can start with his little book “Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology.”
You lost me with your first sentence. As humanity stares into the abyss on diverse fronts - climate, thermonuclear armageddon, gross and increasingly dysfunctional inequality - it has never been clearer to me that wealth creation dictated by private profit rather than human need will be the death of us. Rosa Luxemburg, pace Fred Engels got it pretty much right more than a century ago with the prescient formulation: socialism or barbarism.
Incidentally, I'm a Brit who recently spent fifteen days in an NHS hospital with pneumonia. My core care by doctors, nurses, radiographers, porters - even the smiling folk who wheeled the dinner trolleys - was stellar. There's a good deal wrong with the NHS but that's due far more to the criminal insanities of neoliberalism than what it please you to call socialism!
" -Every supplier should be required to submit a comprehensive surge production plan before being awarded a military contract."
On our program, I'm noticing more and more, the dwindling number of available vendors are simply coming back with "No quote" as our terms and conditions become more demanding for both quality and contratural concerns. This situation will have to be balanced depending on the criticality and technical level of the parts needed. A one size fits all policy may backfire in the current U.S. manufacturing environment.
Peter,
I agree with your assessment that, when it comes to vendor, supplier, and contractor requirements, this is not a one-size-fits-all situation, and treating it as such could have negative ramifications. In my article, I outlined a number of steps that I believe are consistent with the philosophy you described.
First and foremost, there needs to be a mastery of the supplier landscape so that we know exactly what we are dealing with. That is why I suggested that "AI should be used to identify every single-source supplier and organize the entire supply chain down to the most granular level possible. Once that information has been uncovered, scrutinized, and prioritized, policymakers can proactively address the specific vulnerabilities that have been identified."
Beyond that, I introduced a possible long-term strategy when I wrote that "long-term steps should be taken to bring such manufacturing efforts in-house so it can eventually be performed by the very capable men and women of the United States armed forces." That, of course, is an immensely complicated proposition and one worthy of its own article.
Something else that directly aligns with your point about vendors declining work is the following passage:
"If a corporation is the sole producer of a critical military component, it should not be allowed to decline production without a backup plan.
A proactive way to guard against this is for the military to retain a backup supplier under contract for every genuinely critical component. The original contractor would be aware from the start that if it failed to meet its contractual obligations or refused to expand production when required, the backup supplier would assume responsibility for the work. To make this sort of system viable, the government would deploy legal mechanisms allowing the backup company to access the technical data, manufacturing information, or other IP needed to continue production."
Between the research and mapping of the supplier landscape, the use of backup suppliers, and the other nuances I included throughout the piece, I believe your position is, in most respects, closely aligned with the premises I laid out in the article.
In any event, thank you for taking time out of your busy day to read my work on The Duran and share your thoughts. I appreciate it immensely.