OT: US armored vehicle manufacturers winding down

[Targan]

Interesting article:
Armor industry finds itself at turning point

[stormlion1]

We are going to pay for this in the future. The skill set to maintain and build these tanks will disappear as the men who know them and retire and the younger generation never learns them from those older folks. What's worse is the equipment will be sold and scrapped to make ends meet for the company's and will also disappear.

[Olefin]

Lived it myself - used to be working at an armored vehicles mfg until September - but no more orders means no more job - finally got something else last week - so no longer among the unemployed - but not armored vehicle work unfortunately.

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

We are going to pay for this in the future. The skill set to maintain and build these tanks will disappear as the men who know them and retire and the younger generation never learns them from those older folks. What's worse is the equipment will be sold and scrapped to make ends meet for the company's and will also disappear.

That pretty much happens when any war ends that the US is involved in. Then, when a war comes up, its a chinese fire drill to get back on track again.

[Olefin]

agree with you totally there on the chinese fire drill - the whole process of getting MRAP's out to the units was done sloppilly and too quickly - and as a result many are probably better to be scrapped than try to fix them to work right - we seem to think all the time we dont need to study war anymore - and then end up with badly equipped forces at the outset

[Webstral]

It's a tough one, for sure. Lots of factors are involved. Knowing which skills are going to be needed in war requires a very good crystal ball. I have read much opinion that the MBT is a relic on a battlefield menaced by attack helicopters, superb guided munitions, and the ordinary land mine. I don't know if it is, but it would be a great irony to go to great lengths to preserve the capacity for building a new fleet of MBT only to discover that like the Maginot Line they are designed to fight a war that will never come.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Yeah but in this day and age "preserving the capacity" means keeping tooling packed in heavy grease, computers stored in ESD/climate controlled facilities and handy copies of all the manuals on how to run them on microfiche. It's not like we're talking about the preservation of a whole fleet of battleships.