He said the factories no longer existed. But that doesn’t make sense. I would keep the people and equipment in place, produce for our allies and use profits for innovation.
That is a reason that foreign sales are so important, it keeps the factories in production while helping to cement cooperation and interaction from friends, in some cases it can even be an emergency source for additional weapon supplies and ammo if we run low and have to ask friends for ammo or equipment.
Businesses also need long term contracts to keep the factories open, short term contracts of a limited run don’t help much, all of this has been improving in the West since Putin’s invasion, while his weapon sales have suffered because of the bad results his weapons displayed on the battlefield, without foreign sales his government has to fully fund Russia’s weapon manufacturing.
Retain Mike wrote: “He said the factories no longer existed. But that doesn’t make sense. I would keep the people and equipment in place, produce for our allies and use profits for innovation.”
Some one has to pay to maintain those factors and equipment used to make munitions. We do produce some munitions for our allies and the funds are used to maintain the production lines.
We do need to modernize much of our production base. For example, much of our explosives, propellants are produced at Ammunition Plants first built in WWII. They are expensive to maintain and inefficient in production. Some of the propellants are identical to those in civilian ammunition.
BTW, democrats are trying to prevent ammunition production from being sold in the civilian market as part of their gun control efforts. See Lake City Ammunition plant. The brass cartridge cases can be used for civilian ammunition.
Some of our precision munitions were designed years ago and use components that are obsolete and no longer produced.
I spent about forty years in the ammunition and missile business.
AS someone who started in defense manufacturing in the 70’s , I watched the number of machine shops dwindle as work was offshored , foundries close due to EPA regulation changes, the government cancel programs left and right due to stupidity from the procurement officers. In WW2 the government bypassed the Army Arsenals and Navy Shipyards and went straight to Chrysler and Kaiser to get things produced. The Pentagon never saw a project that it couldn’t kill just before production was about to start. Patriot production rate is 550 missiles per year, going to increase to 650 this year. That’s about 2 per day. Hey China, Iran, and Russia, can you limit your total attacks to 2 planes or missiles per day. As my dad would say, bullshit.
The factories and the companies are gone. Even where the company survives, they closed down their military production. We were even stupid enough to have Congress mandate the destruction of tooling and knowledge bases.