The Pentagon is Trying to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy

[rangerrebew]

The Pentagon is Trying to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy
It’s not just one war or two. How do you fight three at once?
By Jack Detsch
 

JANUARY 4, 2024, 6:00 AM
If U.S. President Joe Biden wants to check the pulse of the arsenal of democracy, all he has to do is look at Bill LaPlante’s wall in the Pentagon. The U.S. Defense Department industrial chief’s office is covered with production charts for every weapon that the United States is building to fend off a potential war with China while helping countries such as Ukraine and Israel fend for themselves in wars of their own.

It’s like an electrocardiogram of the U.S. defense industry: There’s a line going up to count the number of units moved and a line going sideways for the time that it took to move them. There are production rates for the Patriot missiles that the United States has sent to the Middle East to provide backup for Israel, the sea-launched Standard Missile-6 that the United States has deployed to the Indo-Pacific to potentially bloody China’s nose if it launches an assault on Taiwan, and the guided multiple launch rockets—known as GMLRs—that helped the Ukrainians liberate Kherson and the areas around Kharkiv in a one-two punch to the Russian army in 2022.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/04/united-states-pentagon-defense-industrial-base-china-taiwan-ukraine-israel/

[rangerrebew]

If this is true, Russia is building its arsenal of democracy, too.

[Timber Rattler]

All those BRACS of the 1980s-2000s are coming back to bite us on the arse, as well as the so-called "Last Supper" mandate from the Clinton Administration:

'The last supper': How a 1993 Pentagon dinner reshaped the defense industry

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry

CHAKRABARTI: And in that presentation, William Perry provides basically some information about what the Pentagon thinks is going to happen regarding its procurement over the next several years. What did Perry say?

AUGUSTINE: Well, it was ... obviously a difficult time for the Defense Department. As the U.S. has often done at the end of a war is cut way back in defense. And people spoke at that time of the defense dividend, the peace dividend, that was the end of the Cold War and that the country could divert funds to other reasons. The Defense Department clearly was going to have a major budget cut. And if I take the example of the industry I'm most familiar with, aerospace, at that time, there were about 15 companies.

And the ideal from a standpoint of national security would be to continue to have 15 very strong companies of various sizes. It would be good for competition, would be good for the industrial base. The problem was that wasn't a choice. And so I'm in no way critical of what the position that Secretary Perry took. I think they had bad choices to choose from, and he did the best you could have done under the circumstances.

... Secretary Perry made a presentation using a graph that was projected on the screen. And it was a stunning graph, so much so that the following day I went over to the Pentagon and asked for a copy of it, which I still have. And what was startling about it was that the Defense Department was saying there are way too many companies in the defense industrial base. That we can't afford them. And that we couldn't have a bunch of companies with half full factories and not enough money to invest in research and development, huge overhead, high costs. And we need to consolidate the industry.

And just to give you an example, the chart had a column on it that showed how many companies in various categories of military equipment, like fighter airplanes, tanks or what have you, how many companies the Defense Department was going to be able to afford to keep in business. And as an example, there were 16 categories of equipment and there were three. The government said it could keep three companies in business in one of the categories. In another of the categories it could afford to keep, let's see, it was six categories, it could afford to keep two companies in business. And there were seven categories where it considered it could only keep one company in business.

(snip)

AUGUSTINE: That's accurate. Needless to say, I was stunned, for really two reasons. One, it pointed to how fragile our defense industrial base was going to become. But there was another factor that to me was also important, that in those areas there would not be competition. I happen to be a strong believer in competition. The free enterprise system, I think has served our country well. And apparently we were in such a financial position where we weren't going to be able to afford that and in some areas.

CHAKRABARTI: So then what did Aspen and Perry tell this gathering of CEOs from the defense industry? Like this is what's happening. The defense budget is going to decline. This is how many companies that we can continue to work with. Did they have any recommendations of what you should do as you filed out of the room?

AUGUSTINE: They did. They had made very clear what they could afford and they were going to pay for companies that had one third of all factories and inefficiencies to go with that. And they said that the government was not in the business of redesigning companies or consolidating industries or putting people in or out of business. That was up to us, the CEOs of the companies that were in the industry at the time.

(snip)

So the commercial industrial base was declining and the defense industrial was going to decline. Big worry for any future need for large scale military equipment.