Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, wants to overhaul parts of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to protect industries and jobs that are vital to national security. Dodd told Defense News (January 29) he is “very concerned about whether we are doing everything possible to ensure that our nation’s defense production capabilities are as strong as they should be.” Dodd said the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy “is hemorrhaging, plain and simple – including jobs in defense manufacturing.”
The Senator is correct and the DPA is the right place to look for a solution, as it gives the government all the authority it needs to draft and implement an industrial policy that can safeguard the American economy in a brutally competitive and politically dangerous world.
The DPA was first enacted in 1950 and drew on the painful lessons the United States had learned in the world wars. On the eve of World War I, the United States was the world’s foremost economic power, with manufacturing output greater than Germany and Great Britain (the number two and three producers) combined. But the war would demonstrate that generic economic size did not smoothly transform into military power if a nation did not invest in defense industries prior to the outbreak of hostilities.
The United States declared war in 1917, but when American troops went into combat in 1918, they did so armed mainly with French machine guns, artillery, tanks and airplanes, supplemented by British equipment. U.S. factories could not shift quickly enough from consumer goods to military hardware, especially for items not built in America before. Manufacturing requires experience, not just a set of blueprints. And in some cases, British and French firms were reluctant to supply American firms with blueprints. This was particularly true in the emerging aircraft industry where European firms wanted to protect the progress they had made during the war from any post-war competition by American firms.
Comments
Hooray for Sen. Dodd. At long last someone is taking a look at how Defense contractors and the Pentagon, are, and have been for years, exporting our military industrial base and transferring advanced and vital defense and military technologies abroad through co-production and Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreements, along with so-called "forward-basing" strategy. Even R&D and Testing & Evaluation procedures are too often exported. Meantime, U.S. taxpayers foot the entire bill, defense workers and their communities pay for the scam with their jobs and livelihoods and military spending continues to dominate the federal budgetary process in ever-increasing billions, with little or no oversight or analysis and no end of the spend-and-spend and export-and-export cycles in sight. This was true before 911 tragedy, which by the way, was not and could not have been prevented by most of the costly, hi-tech and Star Wars technologies being exported for global proliferation - nuclear stuff, included. Anyway, I say to Senator Dodd, what Senator Harry S. Truman did in the 1940s, you can do in triplicate now. Exporting our military industrial and technology base is almost tantamount to economic treason. (My term, not yours). Best of Luck. Dick Greenwood. Ioa City, Iowa.
ridding sniffing awakened binomial truthful:perk.