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.
