Quote:
Originally Posted by mpipes
Interesting, but I disagree in some measure.
I don't think any arms producers (except for maybe shipyards) operate on 24/7 basis. There is thus a lot of "slack" built into the manufacturing base. Full mobilization will occur, but will take probably six months to a full year. A lot of government military contracts require maintaining manufacturing equipment from closed production lines in storage - mothballed. For example, when the B-1B production line was closed, Rockwell was required to mothball the production line equipment with the ability to reactivate production by a specified date (I think was either 6-months or one year).
At one time, the F-16 production line was supposed to be able to "surge" to over 600 fighters per year. I think the requirement for M-1A1s was to surge to well over 500, but I am not sure.
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Speaking as someone who has worked on refurbishment programs, in my experience there are always hurdles when restarting a product line, because parts or materials will have gone obsolete, drawings won't be totally accurate (there will have been "tribal knowledge" that either wasn't recorded or wasn't kept), and the knowledge base will be shallow because of loss of experts to retirement or transfer to other programs. One of the items I worked on was an auxiliary sight, a pretty simple piece of optics (i.e. no special coatings and low magnification). It required six or seven engineering changes to become manufacturable again, with problems ranging from dimensions that were unreadable because part of the drawing was blurry to needing to find a substitute material because the metal that was specified hadn't been manufactured since the end of World War II (and this was for production circa 2010).
While there's slack capacity in that nobody runs 24/7 shifts, there's often a shortage of trained labor even at current production levels, so ramping up will actually slow production while new people are brought up to speed on things like CNC operations, material handling procedures, and clean room requirements. Given the number of reservists that work for DoD contractors who would be recalled to active duty, the lack of a reserve of trained labor, and production bottlenecks at sub-tier suppliers, it could easily take multiple years for some production lines to be able to expand, since all items would need to expand; it does no good to double the production of Hellfire missile bodies if you can't make any more of the seeker heads, or the engines, or the fuses for the warheads, etc, etc. As it currently exists, the industrial system supporting the military is capable, but brittle.