Why No Productions Lines Can Go Cold

accept reality and act on it

Are we really aware of what time it is?

I know a small cadre understands the bold-faced lessons so far of the Russo-Ukrainian War when it comes to industrial capacity and the real - not layered optimism-filtered “wargames” - requirements of sustained peer war, but do enough people? Are the people with access to funding and levers of power fully on board with what expenditure rates of munitions are on the modern battlefield?

Is the threat from the People’s Republic of China real?

The United States and her allies have a gift being paid for with the bodies of Ukrainians and Russians right now that, if accepted, will either minimize the numbers of Americans who die in the next Pacific war - or even better - will make us so prepared that the PRC will make every effort possible to avoid war.

The gift is simple; we have to re-expand our military industrial base and sustain what we have. We have to build redundancy. We have to be quickly scalable. We cannot - even if inefficient - let production lines go cold for essential weapons systems unless their replacement is already in full production.

Case in point outlined by Marcus Weisgerber by at DefenseOne.

Raytheon has called in retired engineers to teach its employees how to build the Stinger missiles heavily used by Ukraine’s military—using blueprints drawn up during the Carter administration.

It’s the latest example of a private company working to ramp up production of a now-in-demand weapon that the Pentagon hasn’t purchased in decades.

“Stinger's been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it's the star of the show and everybody wants more,” Wes Kremer, the president of RTX’s Raytheon division, said during an interview last week at the Paris Air Show.

…

When the U.S. Army placed an order for 1,700 Stingers in May 2022, the Pentagon said the missiles wouldn’t be delivered until 2026. Kremer said it will take about 30 months for Stingers to start rolling off of the production line largely because of the time it takes to set up the factory and train its employees.

“We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger,” Kremer said. “We're pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

This story can be replicated across almost all our most important systems. Previous decision makers decided to accept our future risk for their immediate ease. We no longer have that luxury.

We can’t do anything about the decisions decades ago, but we can about the decisions we make today.