Posted on 07/20/2019 11:38:03 AM PDT by Hojczyk
Spalding continued, “When you look at America today, we have no telecommunication equipment manufacturers left that are American companies. When China entered the WTO in 2001, from that time period to 2017, we lost 78,000 factories. We unemployed 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. In the same time, we spent trillions in the Middle East.”
“We fell into this trap of believing that open markets lead to wealth, and wealth leads to democracy, and, therefore, if we just open ourselves up to the world, that the world would automatically democratize,” noted Spalding. “In the space of that 20 years, we essentially deindustrialized our entire country to the point where we almost can’t manufacture any of the things we need to defend ourselves.”
“We even have F-35 circuit boards that are manufactured by Huawei,” noted Spalding. “We’ve gone from being the most sophisticated industrial countries on the planet to being one of the least sophisticated. There’s this fallacy and belief that Silicon Valley is this great engine of innovation in the United States. All they really build are business models based on software. All the hard sciences, all the hardware, all the real science and engineering is going on in China, right now.”
A revamped Space Program may provide the national focus necessary for a revitalized national industrial policy, speculated Spalding.
“If we want to get back to that, we need to have a [national] focused effort. Maybe it is to go to the heavens. Maybe it is to go to Mars. But more importantly, when I got to the White House, all my colleagues that came from the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department said, ‘The United States doesn’t do industrial policy.’ I’ll tell you what: the countries that are actually creating the things that drive the world today do industrial policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Full Title
Ret. General Robert Spalding: Moon Landing Couldn’t Happen in Today’s Deindustrialized America; ‘We’ve Lost It All’ to China
Artice worth reading
This article makes our sell-out political class very happy indeed.
They are high-diving each other in their walled/gated mansions by the pool giving orders to their servants, all for a job well done.
We can get it back. Just keep raising the tariffs. Not too fast, market needs time to adjust and realize that tariffs are good not bad for the US.
I’d be for government backed low interest loans to help restart some industries. But that ONLY makes sense if you have protective tariffs. Otherwise you’re just wasting money.
I worked for two companies, Regency Communications and EMR, who took NASA contracts and lost money on them. They took them so they could be a part of the lunar landing project. Both companies eventually went out of business. But the, mostly, one-off items they designed, built, tested and verified, were works of art. The level of technical expertise required to design those items was long gone from both companies by the time I came along in the late seventies and early eighties. I believe it was Isaac Newton who said, “I see far because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” By the time I arrived on the scene, the giants were long gone and forgotten. It was difficult to see over the next cube.
It is taking at least 8 years to design and build the prototype replacement of the SR-71 an airplane that was designed, built, tested and activated in about 5 years using sliderules, paper and pencil.
No. We couldn’t do what we did in 1969 again today.
““We fell into this trap of believing that open markets lead to wealth, and wealth leads to democracy, and, therefore, “
Put this into the same category of stupidity that says that “our strength is diversity” Really? Why? How does that work?
Hooray for Captain Spalding!!
..
Reference to a very old movie by a not so old FReeper.
Forget it.
I tend to agree. Ditto the Manhattan Project. Sure this country and its industrial complex can still do great stuff. But can we do great NEW outside-the-box, never-been-done-before, paradigm-shifting stuff like we did 1940-70? Doesn’t seem like it. Let’s face it. We peaked half a century ago. The left’s war on white males has consequences.
“It is taking at least 8 years to design and build the prototype replacement of the SR-71 an airplane that was designed, built, tested and activated in about 5 years using sliderules, paper and pencil.
No. We couldn’t do what we did in 1969 again today.“
I read an article many years ago where Kelly Johnson himself lamented that the US could not build the SR-71 anymore due to a lack of a sufficiently large forge for the titanium parts.
Not just that, we’d have a bunch of morons bitching about the crew not being diverse enough and not enough minority owned companies getting contracts.
“I tend to agree. Ditto the Manhattan Project. Sure this country and its industrial complex can still do great stuff. But can we do great NEW outside-the-box, never-been-done-before, paradigm-shifting stuff like we did 1940-70? Doesn’t seem like it. Let’s face it. We peaked half a century ago. The left’s war on white males has consequences.”
Your statements are offensive; unfortunately, I can’t make a single credible argument against them.
Spaulding also talks about the ever popular STEM education.
Instead of a program to recruit the best and brightest it has become just another cause for social justice warriors to provide opportunity in their own vision. STEM looks like a cause for females and minorities. Everything in this country is about equality instead of excellence. News flash. They are not the same and nobody has the right to equality anyway only opportunity. Success can only happen when only cream rises to the top of the bucket.
It’s not just a war on white males ... It’s an all out war on reality.
Then again, socialism ignores reality (except for those at at top of the food chain)
There may be some truth to what you say, but who else is doing anything of great consequence? It’s not like India or Zimbabwe is ramping up for a manned mission to Mars these days.
Didn’t he shoot an elephant in his PJ’s?
Actually, we have even bigger forges than we had then and the ones we built after the War, having recognized them as part of the German’s supremacy for certain parts in air craft manufacture. The largest of these forges was completely rebuilt in the last several years and remains an essential part of national defense. It is operated by Alcoa.
What we really lack is the urgency, skill and risk tolerance for projects. We also lack the integrity to do them. We are slowed down by inclusiveness, diversity and equality being forced into a system that should be exclusive, homogeneous in skill and cause and downright discriminatory in the process of selecting the very best people and organizations available to do the work.
Free markets lead to wealth and who in their right mind thinks wealth would lead to democracy? This article is nonsense. If you inflation adjust what was spent then and spend that amount again, within the same set of laws and regulations existing then, you could repeat the moonnshot easily.
Today’s 787 is far more complex then Apollo. Another moonshot is a matter of will not technology and industry.
But we have chosen welfare and government business cronyism and not free markets. We have chosen democracy over the rule of law and a Republic. Therefore we cannot afford a government run and financed moonshot.
We also learned by 1970 that — in retrospect — a manned lunar mission was an enormous waste of money and was a luxury that no normal civilization would ever embark on.
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