I agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal to the extent that I think we should be able to provide munitions to Israel and Ukraine without degrading our own defense capabilities. Where I think I disagree is over whether we are able to at present:
President Biden hinted Tuesday that he may ask Congress for appropriations for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. That makes military and political sense. The U.S. is confronting an authoritarian axis that is increasingly working together.
Iran, the ventriloquist for Hamas, is helping Vladimir Putin as he tries to subjugate Ukraine. Tehran is pouring drones into Russia’s war, and the Biden Administration has warned of deepening cooperation, including a new weapons plant in Russia. The two are allies in Syria. Mr. Putin is also dining out on his “no limits†partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. The axis wants to set the rules of the world and topple the relative global stability the U.S. has enforced since World War II.
Yet some in Congress want to separate Israel from Ukraine and force a false choice. “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately,†GOP Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted this week. The Heritage Foundation is encouraging lawmakers to “resist attempts to link emergency military support for Israel with additional funding for Ukraine.â€
The implication is that the U.S. can’t supply both at once. But the two conflicts are different enough that the U.S. has weapons that can help Ukraine and Israel. The Ukrainians are trying to break through entrenched defenses of concrete and mines, a different job than destroying Hamas in Gaza.
I sometimes wonder where the editors have been for the last 30 years. The story of the last 30 years of American enterprise is that businesses have wrung all of the excess capacity out of our economy. Now in order to produce significantly more of practically anything it isn’t enough to place an order and turn the spigot a little more. We need to build whole supply chains.
It isn’t 1941 any more. Eighty years ago with a little retrofitting typewriter factories could be changed into machine gun factories in short order. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of munitions manufacturers. Now there are just a handful of primary defense contractors. We don’t have excess production of steel, microchips, and thousands of other things necessary to producing munitions. The “arsenal of democracy” is no more.
Maybe we still have that capacity. I don’t believe we do. If we did we wouldn’t be depending on China (and Russia!) for mission-critical materials and components. Furthermore, I’m skeptical that we can reduce our use of coal and oil, replace them with wind and solar, and produce enough munitions to supply two conflicts using munitions at a pace greater than during World War II concurrently.
“We just have to!” is not a plan. It’s an aspiration.
Update
Here’s a brief history of American steel production:
Present utilization is estimated at between 80% and 90%. In other words we’re not going to produce 30% more steel, for example, in the near term. I suspect we’d be hard put to produce 10% more.
The government likes wringing out excess capacity from defense industries. And also privatizing some functions – like intelligence analysis and ISR – that can be turned on and off instead of paying for a higher level of steady-state capacity that might go unneeded much of the time. I saw this first-hand when I was working at a unit supporting drone operations and ISR – a lot of contractors.
For defense production, the terms of surge production are usually laid out in the contract. And the terms don’t include much surge capacity because the government doesn’t want to pay for unneeded idle capacity, which raises the unit cost of the stuff they do buy.
The underappreciated risk is that turning something off can be done relatively quickly and easily. Turning it back on again may take considerably longer and be much more difficult.
A big problem that I saw was robbing Peter to pay Paul. The government would need more ISR support so it would give a contract to a company to do that. Then, seeing the high pay and benefits that company offered, people would quit the military and civil service to be directly hired doing the same job.
There is a relatively small pool of people qualified to do that kind of work. It takes quite a long time to train and qualify those people. Almost all of them are trained and qualified in US government service, and that includes the people working for those contractors. The contractors only hire people who already have an active clearance and the requisite experience.
The downside, as I told many of my subordinates who quit to go do this contracting work, is that once the government doesn’t need that capacity anymore, the contracts will end, and you won’t have a job. And of course, that happened, and some of these individuals wanted to come back into the military or civil service.
I have a fair number of reservists and former military since i hire ex-military when I can. 2 of my reservists were deploying with Special Forces doing some pretty specialized stuff. They were both offered tons more money by contractors so they left the reserves. They have full time jobs with us but we let them take leaves of absence. The pay differential is so large they dont need to work a lot. They also seem to think that the contractors are more experienced and that they have hired the best people.
Adding wind and solar would be perfect. They are now much cheaper than other fuels as long as you dont need back up. Run the factories like crazy when it’s windy or the sun is out.
Steve
For heating homes perhaps. The energy density is inadequate for heavy industry.