American troops drive 10,000 Humvees in Iraq. But if the U.S. Army suddenly needed 10,000 more of the slab-sided trucks for the war, the Indiana factory that makes them could not soon deliver.
Tooling and machine shops that supply critical Humvee parts, such as extra-large 3.5-inch shock absorber bolts, aren’t prepared to gear up output quickly.
“The industrial base just isn’t there if we ever had to surge production,” said Craig MacNab, spokesman at South Bend-based AM General, whose cavernous 1,100- employee Mishawaka plant is the Humvee’s sole producer.
It’s not only army trucks the U.S. might have trouble producing in large numbers. For the first time since America emerged as a first-rank war and industrial power in the 1890s, some U.S. military planners openly doubt the country’s manufacturers can sustain the nation in a major war larger than the Iraq conflict.
“What kind of superpower are you if you can’t make what you need?” asked systems engineer Sheila Ronis, a lecturer at the Pentagon’s Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
Since 1933, the Buy American Act has governed defense procurement. Last year, U.S. suppliers netted $79 billion in Pentagon contracts, compared with foreign firms’ $1.9 billion. However, Ronis, a director of the foundation supporting the Pentagon’s National Defense University, contends America’s weapons components supply chain now runs to China, France, Germany, Japan and other nations.
That’s because U.S. companies spend an undisclosed share of that $79 billion on imported parts. As a result, China supplies as much as 10 percent of the parts for the U.S. Army’s M1 Abrams main battle tank, Ronis suggested.
If overseas supply lines were disrupted, U.S. manufacturers could step in. In many cases, though, engineers could not quickly scale up production. Much of the factory manufacturing equipment also comes from abroad.
In 2004, a third of the new U.S. metalworking machinery was imported, along with almost 46 percent of the process control instruments and nearly a quarter of the relays and industrial controls…
The introduction of global standards and measurements has made possible “universal” specification of numerous components and subsystems — for any class of manufactured goods. Does that add anything to our economy when assigned priorities don’t especially include a self-sustaining infrastructure.
Thanks, Rose Peters
Please. If the country really needed it, ASAP, it would get done.
What I truly love about this citing is the baiting, almost hippocracy (sp?) of it. Imagine if the government spent billions of dollars (more than they do now) on keeping plants open “just in case”. Imagine the outcry on this board. “People paid to sit and do nothing, just in case” would be the title. It would go into infamy like the $700 NASA hammer.
Being a superpower is hard and complicated. Buying american for all our internal needs and having the resources ready, at all times, for multiple major wars would surely hurt this country more than reacting to situations as they come up.
It is a well studied phenomenon that when empires overreach they die. It would be hubris to think differently about ourselves.
The military were taken by surprise — by sand! All the military equipment was built for NATO fighting in Europe. In that environment you can count on mud. Mud lubricates the tank treads; dry sand quickly wears them out.
Suddenly they needed a cheap source of mobile firepower. Remember the Jeeps with mounted machine guns the Somalis were using? Let’s put some of those together, a bit bigger with bigger guns (we don’t want to look ‘third world’).
When the Hummers with machine guns got into combat, they were surprised by another point. In Somalia, life is cheap. In America, life is valuable. These Hummers need defensive armor!
If they had thought that through to begin with, they would have built light tanks with wheels, instead.
The REAL problem comes from How much we pay them to be on top of things. These folks bave been sitting on Lots of money given to them BECAUSe they make goods for the military..
We have been operating there far too long to say any of our logistic needs are a surprise. I remember watching troops go downrange for the first Gulf War, and that was about a decade ago. If we are still having logistic problems that’s the fault of our military planners, not surprises from the field.
1,
So that means either Bush is lying about the importance of the war or we are lying to ourselves about our ability to support it. Either the War is as important as the Fearmonger-in-Chief says it is or it isn’t. There is no middle ground, we are at war and need to put the resources into it that we need to win our we should get the F*CK out.
Paying large corps for goods they dont need to make, over years and years, is SOP for our gov.
Find the paper trail and we MIGHT get a tax refund.
Obviously, #1 understands neither traffic management nor production flow and design. If you don’t build machines to make machines, you ain’t a superpower anymore. That’s why Germany and England, for example, retain those skills and infrastructure. They may only wish to maintain their industrial capability; but, that’s more than US capital is willing to do — or interested in doing.
Just because Wall Street and the Oil Patch Boys are raking in the bucks, the mindset that avoids thinking about capacity and capability settles for short-term greed.
If you click the link — and see we aren’t capable of cranking up a quick production run of bolts to fasten shock absorbers onto a HumVee frame — that, Bubba, is a criticism of a manufacturing system going down the drain.
It takes weeks and maybe months to reset up a manufactouring plant, for a Old/NEW setup of vehicle, and this dont count importing products from other Corps to finish the product.
The biggest obstacle of WWII was building up production facilities. It took years to reach the volumes needed. That was an all out effort. Waging war has always been a battle of economies. Those that first ran out of money, supplies, and men lost.
OH MY GOD THE ARMY HAS SUPPLY PROBLEMS! THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE! QUICK, TO THE DVORAK BLOG AND FIND A WAY TO BITCH ABOUT IT AND MAKE IT POLITICAL!
We could ramp up war production like we did during WWII if the urgency was there. The fact that we haven’t exposes the lies of the present administration. They like to compare the current war on terror to a world war against Islamofascism. Well, if that were true, why haven’t we ramped up our arsenal of democracy to effectively fight this threat?
Why do we need Humvees? For hellsakes, one of the many lessons learned in Iraq is that Humvees are deathtraps. The above article strikes me as being nothing more than a ruse to keep the money flowing for more Humvees.
Chapter 7 of Military Hardware and Logistics for Dummies covers “Supply Chain”. One of the things it mentions is, if you don’t own it, you can’t control it. And if you haven’t been “making stuff” for 25 years, you will likely not be good at it on your first few DIY attempts. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the last people to actually DIY this are in their 90s, living in Florida at the Sunny Fossil Retirement Home or dead.
It’s not just mechanised equipment that needs work. I was in Quantico a few weeks ago and happened past an exhausted Marine out for a conditioning run wearing his backpack, uniform and boots. The poor guy wouldn’t have been more weight constrained and overheated, if instead of his pack, Barry White had been strapped to his back. His boots looked like they were factory fresh “Sargent York” models that sucked in 1918 and still suck today for any activities other than standing at attention for hours on end. This was a big strong young Marine, nearly unable to take the next step on a cool fall day in Virginia and not in 120 degree desert heat.
The Super Power America makes INVISIBLE parts. They exist on paper only. Of course the money is real that buys it, but if you examine the books everything is missing, unaccounted for or just plain ????
CBS:
“On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign terrorists, “the adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy,” he said.
He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat.
“In fact, it could be said it’s a matter of life and death,” he said.
Rumsfeld promised change but the next day – Sept. 11– the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten.
“According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” Rumsfeld admitted.
READ ON: http://tinyurl.com/6f82l
If business’s were run as well as our Government???
If our government was run as well as business’s??
In the first, we would see business with about a 20% loss ratio, insted of 1-3%
In the later, we Wouldnt see, LOST laptops, Lost funds, and the only ones making money would be the top 1%.
There are two types of systems, “off the shelf” and “custom”. The difference? If you need an off the shelf hammer, you could run down to the hardware store and buy a very good one for $10. If you need a specialized hammer, then you need it to be designed, tested, refined, retested, offered to the customer, refined, retested and then qualified. Now you have a $700 hammer.
When Hummer, and indeed most military suppliers today, design a product, they are more interested in also being the sole supplier of replacement parts. Does the HumVee need that specialized bolt or was the vehicle designed so that only that specialized bolt would fit. Small difference in design costs, big difference in repair and part replacement costs. So while American factories may supply all the bolts you want, because of the design, only AM General can supply this specific bolt.
One of the most valuable lessons in supply from WWII was compatibility. Because there was no standard definition of how big an inch was, many times the same parts made in America, Britain, and Canada didn’t fit the other countries weapons even though they were the same nominal size. It was only after the war that the inch was standardized at 1 inch = 2.54 mm. Today, all commonly used ammunition, bolts, etc. are universal throughout the NATO countries. A German soldier can use the same ammo as the Canadian or Italian soldiers. Excepting many American made items.
If you want to reduce costs of design, you stick with the off the shelf parts as much as possible. If you want to pad the whole contract and resupply, make your product as custom as possible.
People who use proprietary
technologytechniques (I don’t mean original IP, I mean custom interfaces and such) to trap customers should be castrated with a dull knife. This is a problem that permeates every industry, not just the military.Alix, why do you hate America?
What is your definition of hate, and how is it manifested in this case?
1 inch = 2.54 mm
Wow, I’m less than 1m tall! In fact 5 of me would be less than a meter!
Simply because the conservatives like to suggest that liberals, and I guess that includes me and anyone one that remotely agrees with me, hate America.
#19, AB CD,
I stand corrected. You are a bigger person then I suggested. At least ten times bigger.
1 inch = 25.4 mm
Hey when the times comes to make them, we can for sure count on China to make thousands of them real fast and real cheap…