The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military
Big, successful organizations sometimes fear change because they fear that change might endanger the success they’ve enjoyed. The result is institutional rigidity and, ultimately, obsolescence and failure. “Adapt or die.”
Mark Bowden reports in the Atlantic (gift link, no paywall):
I. Supply and Demand
Here, in the third decade of the 21st century, the most sought-after ammunition in the U.S. arsenal reaches the vital stage of its manufacture—the process tended by a young woman on a metal platform on the second story of an old factory in rural Iowa, leaning over a giant kettle where tan flakes of trinitrotoluene, better known as the explosive TNT, are stirred slowly into a brown slurry.
She wears a baggy blue jumpsuit, safety glasses, and a hairnet. Her job is to monitor the viscosity and temperature of the mix—an exacting task. The brown slurry must be just the right thickness before it oozes down metal tubes to the ground floor and into waiting rows of empty 155-millimeter howitzer shells, each fitted at the top with a funnel. The whole production line, of which she is a part, is labor-intensive, messy, and dangerous. At this step of the process, both the steel shells and the TNT must be kept warm. The temperature in the building induces a full-body sweat in a matter of minutes.
This is essentially the way artillery rounds were made a century ago. Each shell is about two feet high and six inches wide, and will weigh 100 pounds when filled with the explosive. At the far end of the production line, after the shells are filled and fitted with a fuse—or, as the military has it, a “fuze”—the rounds, hundreds of them, are loaded on railcars for the first step in their journey to war. Each train carries such a large concentration of TNT that there’s a solid concrete barrier, 20 feet high and 20 feet wide, between the rails and the building. The finished shells are delivered from plant to port by rail and by truck, under satellite surveillance.
https://leisureguy.ca/2024/12/17/crumbling-america/
