You Can't go to War With Your Factory

...no one can, or should, defend this

Back in March, Joshua Steinman made a simple request of us all:

If you pay attention to one tech twitter chart this week, I beg you, make it this one

What chart was he referring to?

As Balaji let us know last month:

"The report was issued by Arlington, VA-based Govini which was awarded a five-year $400 million contract from the Pentagon in 2019 to deliver data, analysis and insights into DoD spending, supply chain and acquisition"

I forgot about both the report and the amount of money we - yes kiddies, we - paid for it. Nice snag by their Board of Directors, and … I hope their graphics department was well paid, because this report, now five years old, has some good ones.

I hope we got a lot more than a 12-page document for $400 million. You paid for it, so go here and download your copy.

As I was mowing the yard - wonderful therapy that is in 95 degree heat at 6pm with 85% humidity - it popped in to my head this simple fact; all this talk here and elsewhere of a long awaited ‘Pacific Pivot’ to get ready for a ‘Great Pacific War’ sometime in the Davidson Window™ against the People’s Republic of China … is it all just delusional?

Has the talk about “72-hr Wars” not so much a grand idea - but a requirement? How do we go to war with the same nation who we cannot produce weapons without their factories?

As a Southerner, going to war against your own industrial center is a Lesson Learned, and yet here we are.

Here’s another ponderable chart;

Just look at it. The implications are so … well … shocking that they don’t seem to quite sink in.

This report was funded in 2019 and delivered in 2024, 150% of the time it took for the USA to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific.

As such, a lot of that data is reward looking. It begs the question, what progress has been made in the last 5 years to wean ourselves off of relying on our greatest opponent on the world stage?