The State of U.S. Arms Manufacturing
For the last 4 decades, America’s defense manufacturing companies have pocketed billions of dollars by selling weapons that have directly contributed to a plethora of good and bad.
The United States is home to four of the five largest private arms companies in the world: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and the Raytheon Technologies Corporation. These firms, which make up most of the country’s arms sales and profits, promote warfare (or peace, depending who you ask) by capitalizing on conflicts across the globe. The U.S. accounts for more than 40% of the planet’s weapons exports, which has only grown since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022-Present).
Rise and Decline
Characterized by being synonymous with "bringing democracy" to wherever needed by the United States, the U.S Military Industrial Complex has developed some of the most cutting edge equipment ever fielded... and some of the worst ever seen.
The end of the U.S.S.R saw the forced mergers and consolidation of the U.S M.I.C as the U.S vastly demobilized, places like the Ford Motor Company's Willow Run Plant; which was considered the longest aircraft manufacturing factory in the world and produced an average of one (1) B-24 Liberator 4-engined bomber every hour of the day. "The Arsenal of Democracy" may have been a statement of propaganda, but boy, at one point was it truth; as of 2010, the Ford Motor Company (FMC) Willow Run Plant had been demolished outright.
The decline of the U.S Defense Manufacturing, unironically started in the 1980s under the Reagan administration and it's vast liberalization and "Divest to Invest" in U.S allies, the once self sufficient Armed Forces of the U.S began a subtle decline as specialized part manufacturers were pieced apart as American manufacturing was dismantled and shipped abroad under the banner of "Building up America's allies", and with the shuttering of the Designing Bureaus of the Navy, Army, the Ordnance Department's entire shuttering in favor of "letting the private sector do it", has not only caused the utter loss of the U.S's capabilities to design new warships and maintain low costs and up-to-date, cost effective vessels, but it transfers also to land; where the M2 & M3 Bradley Combat Vehicles have had well over 3 separate competitions to replace them, as the last designs of the U.S's Ordnance Department, they still remain in service with no replacement in sight.
Where the United States excelled above any other nation, was in the sheer quantity of war material that it could produce, and a beyond-superb logistics system that could get it where it was needed on time, anywhere in the world; regardless of weather conditions.
If the Sherman wasn’t as proficient as the German Tiger one on one, the Americans could generally bring several tanks to the fight for each German tank and overwhelm it—that is, if the American airpower soaring over Europe hadn’t already taken it out. Even reaching the combat zone might have been impossible for the enemy; relentless U.S. bombing rendered the Germans so short of fuel that their tanks and other vehicles were frequently immobilized. The industrial warfare America had mastered was summarized in the poem “A Bower of Roses,” by Louis Simpson, which read: "For every shell Krupp fired, General Motors sent back 4 more." The U.S carried this philosophy for majority of the Cold War, well into the 1970s and up until the first term of Ronald Reagan when anti-trust enforcement was stopped and blind eyes were casted as the bigger defense contractors began cannibalizing other parts in growing monopolies.
Even U.S-made weaponry, although generally considered of high quality and good reliability, once sought after by MANY across the world, has not invariably proved superior to that of the enemy. Many World War II tanker crews complained that the earlier standard M4 Sherman could not fight on equal terms with the more modern of German Panzer 3 and 4 variations, and pilots of the first generation of American fighter jets, such as the F-86 Sabre; got a rude surprise when they met the Soviet MiG-15 in the skies over Korea. In Vietnam, early models of the M16 rifle, fired a cartridge containing powder that fouled the weapon and claimed it didn't need cleaning, had a frequently fatal tendency to jam in combat, and the M-14 was ill-suited for the jungle temperate as it's wooden chassis would warp and take on moisture in the high humidity of the jungles, whereas the Soviet AK-47/AKM, cheaply made of stamped metal parts and having tolerances so loose it would not be accepted by a U.S. ordnance inspector, was supremely reliable in the dust and mud of Indochina.
Uncle Sam, even in the final stages of life of the USSR in the mid-to-late 1980s had a plan to invade the USSR, which called for 10 divisions of soldiers to be deployed to Europe within 10 days of launching the invasion. In 2017 it took over 40 days for the US Army to move a brigade (Something that is no more than a third smaller than a division) to unload equipment, move around and adjust personnel.
Further chipped away at, was the U.S's Merchant Mariner force and America's once vast fleet of logistical vessels and the total collapse of America's commercial shipping industry, and with the drain of war stocks from the 1960s-1990s put an even further strain on the US as the antitrust laws were relaxed by the Reagan administration and the once top fifteen Defense contractors shrunk to ten, down to the five we have today. The once near one-hundred and five "defense-capable contractors" that the U.S has, shrunk to just five by the end of the year 2000.
The Crisis at Hand
The attacks on 11 Sept, 2001 saw the U.S Armed Forces take another deep dive down to where they are today, with the quasi-takeover of Afghanistan and the subsequent banning of things that were considered the "norm" since World War II; things such as battlefield promotions, sanctioned (approved) war trophy-bring backs such as enemy rifles, all but disappeared entirely or were a once-in-awhile occasion as the U.S Army shifted to a steroid-ridden policing body, much like the British Army in Northern Ireland; but far, far worse. Those that hid Bin-Laden had no tanks, next to no armored vehicles, no aircraft and those that fought an insurgency against the U.S forces in Afghanistan had even less, and instead of the tradition of promoting based off military successes, those young officers were promoted based on a heavily censored and changed definition of "keeping peace and defeating an insurgency" instead of fighting wars, to where the issue of today is, all of those officers now consist of the U.S Senior command.
Continued in the Obama administration from 2009-2017 was the forced chipping away at America's near-peer capabilities. The biggest example was the gutting of the F-22A Raptor program, the only "matured" Fifth-Generation Fighter at the time in the world, cut from nearly a thousand airframes to just under two hundred airframes and the tooling kept "if needed" only to be left forgotten in the current crisis the US Armed Forces faces.
During this time, the U.S significantly slowed their procurement orders for everything, and thus prices skyrocketed even further, and left things shuttered and gutted, like the U.S's ability to produce armored vehicles; which went from 3 centralized cities in the Midwest, to 8 partial-production facilities that ships everything to one factory to be assembled; and left more situations like Boeing being the only capable U.S commercial airline manufacturer left, and the shareholder-priority has only proven to be further detrimental to the situation there. In the terms of munitions, the U.S Government managed to retain majority of it's legacy small arms ammunition manufacturing facilities, but suffered in everywhere else, with howitzer ammunition for artillery shells being manufactured at peak, in nearly nine facilities, down to just one from 1993-onward (with 1 new facility being added in 2023), and with the missile manufacturing being done ninety-percent by the private sector in small batches, with less than ten-percent of U.S missile manufacturing being done by the State-owned/operated facilities.
The Fix?
The U.S is actively trying to address every issue at once, however simply due with a lack of manpower for everything and a sheer insistence on the private sector to do everything at incredibly ballooned cost, the U.S will likely not ever again be a major contending powerhouse as it was from the 1930s-1990s in the manufacturing department, especially with the blatant refusal by both the oldest generations of Americans, the baby boomers and the generation X to modernize/automate facilities. The US Navy estimates that they will finally begin recovering the utterly destroyed U.S commercial shipbuilding industry and the shipbuilding industry as a whole by the 2040s if they have no new delays, with antitrust laws still not being enforced; more defense companies have merged, like Raytheon Technologies and United Technologies' merger in 2020 to form Raytheon Technologies Corporation; however there appears to be some new players with intention to combat the legacy defense companies, companies like Anduril (est.2017) have shown incredible promise and in-house ingenuity; with an emphasis on "using the untapped potential of America" and going as far as sinking $1 Billion (USD) in the state of Ohio for what could potentially be the largest Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Missile production factory in the U.S with their "Arsenal One" program. Only time will tell if the US is truly able to get out of the slump or fall even further behind in the upcoming middle of the Twenty-First century.