Continuing the theme of pre-war production planning …
We previously discussed wartime production planning (see, “Wartime Production Plan”) and noted that our war
plans should not focus on the number of ships and planes we currently have but,
instead, the ability to quickly produce more ships, planes, and everything else
we need during a war. Indeed, the
pursuit of large fleets of ships and aircraft can easily become
counter-productive as noted in the landmark Army Green Book series,
One lesson was that people get so caught up in the minutiae
that they lose sight of the big picture.
The pursuit of minutiae then delays the effort to the point that the
effort is no longer useful.
For example,
Another lesson is that people tend to focus on the wrong
aspects of planning. For example, there
was a pre-WWII mobilization plan but,
One of the best ways to plan for, and enhance the ability
of, wartime production is to establish a set(s) of standardized construction
programs that are fully detailed, fully resourced, and ready to go. For example, a basic destroyer that has been
prototyped, debugged, and is ready to put into mass production would be an
invaluable aid to have on the shelf. As
the Green Book notes,
Regardless of the approach, pre-war planning is required. A survey of industries to see which can be usefully
and efficiently converted, and to what product(s) is required along with plans
for doing so. Sets of
construction/modification blueprints for facilities should be maintained and resources
should be identified.
And the list of issues and lessons goes on and on …
As in sports, you win because of the planning and effort you
put in before the game. We can
win the war with China by putting in the planning and effort now, before
the actual shooting starts. Instead of
directing our budget towards new ships – that lack CONOPS or usefulness and are
being retired decades early – we should be budgeting the planning of industrial
capacity and logistics.
… preparedness may take one of two forms. A nation may choose to maintain an aerial fleet-in-being or, as an alternative, it may choose to rely upon its capacity to build an air fleet in time of emergency. The fleet-in-being or "Big Stick" form of preparedness has certain advantages. It can be used as a diplomatic weapon to terrorize an opponent into surrender without a fight, as Hitler found. But at the same time, the fleet-in-being has serious limitations. Obsolescence in aviation is so great that large numbers of old aircraft rapidly become relatively vulnerable to fewer aircraft of newer design and superior performance, as France found to her sorrow after the outbreak of World War II. In the United States, officers of the War Department in general and the Air Corps in particular were firmly committed to a policy that emphasized the importance of capacity to build, the importance of industrial potential, the power to create and replenish an air force, rather than a fleet-in-being.[1, p.158-9] [emphasis added]Consider a couple of example issues about pre-WWII planning, as documented in the Army Green Book report on pre-WWII planning for aircraft procurement and see what lessons it offers.
In 1936 Air Corps officers were still computing the aluminum requirements for the 1933 mobilization plan … [1]Those officers were given a task and were determined to pursue it to its bitter end no matter how irrelevant the passage of time rendered their task. They were unable to see the larger picture and adjust.
War Department General Mobilization Plan," which was "based on personnel and not upon supply and equipment."[1, p.158]This was a fundamental flaw since personnel are useless without equipment. Planning has to be for both.
An educational order is an order designed to familiarize a manufacturer with the item he will be expected to produce in an emergency. In its simplest form, an educational order might involve little more than acquainting the contractor with the item he is to make. In its most complex form it might even include the construction of jigs and fixtures as well as tools and dies to be held on a stand-by basis.[1, p.159]Another critical pre-war planning issue highlighted by the Green Book is that of expansion of existing industries to meet increased war demand versus conversion of industries from a non-war product to a war product. An example of the latter would be the conversion of the auto industry to tank production. As with most things, a mix of the two approaches is probably preferred.
https://history.army.mil/html/books/011/11-2/CMH_Pub_11-2.pdf
So, there have been a million comparisons of today's ships and planes complexity vs those.of the WWII era. The reason im mentioning it is, Im wondering how fast we could actually.build a plane or ship today?? Is the complexity truly above and beyond our manufacturing capability vs the old days?? It could be said that an Iowa class BB was the most complex and advanced machine of its day. But it didnt take a huge amount more time than we spend building a DDG today. So, how fast could we actually build things? Can we churn out 10 F-35s a day?20? Can we build a Connie in 7 momths, or a DDG in 10?? Of course it's all moot if we run out of munitions, Im wondering if talking about increased building capacity is even worthwhile...
ReplyDeleteThanks ComNavOps for highlighting the pre-WW2 planning. In the book "There's A War to Be Won" Geoffrey Perret mentions the US Army survey of industry begun in 1924 and updated yearly. They knew who could make what, how quickly and well, and at what cost. Unmentioned is the War Production Board that allocated materials (steel, aluminum, etc.) to industrial production. Priority of steel for tanks or ships or for a pipeline? Steel for what kind of ships and aluminum for what kind of planes? Steel and materials for production plants to expand and new ones to be built. Materials for housing workers. It was a delicate balancing act.
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDelete1. End of cold war has put the world militaries in a false sense of peace. They feel that no big peer war is going to happen. This is not limited to the US military but around the world. Else how can one explain a recent news in my country India, where the army has not ordered for any new 155 mm shells in the last four years, when we are in the nidra of a military standoff with china since the last 2 years.
2. All the talk about systems having become complex is to be countered with the question on whether our manufacturing systems have improved or not. Human manufacturing capabilities also have increased leaps and bounds. Hence for me the complexity of new systems invariably means lony manufacturing time does not cut ice.
3. US manufacturing has atrophied and hence the lack of capability to quickly replenish.
I just read a paper about our history of using plant equipment packages (PEPs) for mobilization. They were mostly for the Army to have all the machines ready to produce things like artillery shells or rifles. The Navy also had some. They felt it important after there were machine tools shortages in both WWII and the Korean War.
ReplyDeleteFunny that the Army just had their PEPs in warehouses not being tested for decades at a time. When they finally dusted some of them off the lack of use had damaged them. While the Navy kept their machines hooked up and used them a few hours a week so they worked well.
I think similar lessons would apply today where we need low utilization lines that are actually working. The production processes are complicated even for "simple" munitions and trying to plan all that turns into a Soviet economy problem immediately. The paper using DPICM grenade cases as an example where there are more than twenty steps with all sorts of materials and tools. But if you are actively producing them then you at least know some suppliers and can talk to them about their suppliers and how hard it would be to scale production. You might even do surge tests every few years.
I think this also gets to another point about what kind of munitions we buy. Cheap munitions have an advantage in that we can fire more during training, afford to stockpile more, and keep a higher production tempo. Scaling them is always going to be more straightforward than complex guided weapons. But we need to be shooting off more off those in training, too, if only to justify more active production lines.
As far as platforms, you've already discussed how ship life needs to be shorter with single purpose ships to stimulate more continuous production.
link to the paper:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/36720429.pdf
Without strong civilian industry base, plans are useless.
ReplyDeleteBiden is right (not political statement) - they nation needs rebuild industrial base.
We actually have a strong industrial base. Well, let me rephrase that. We actually have a strong industrial need that's being met by overseas (China) industry. We have extensive manufacturing but it's not in the US. If we'd bring that industry back to the US (via regulatory and economic reform) we'd be okay.
DeleteReading about plans to massively increase production of 155mm shells it mentioned that in 1951 at the time of Korean War US had 86 military ammunition plants as part of an industrial mobilization plan designed to meet wartime ammunition needs, today that number has dropped to just five government-owned, contractor-operated plants that supply most of its conventional ammunition, propellants and explosives.
ReplyDeleteThe US industrial base appears no longer there anymore to support a wartime production plan, to rebuild it will take massive funding from Congress, e.g. the Scranton plant alone has received $420 million for new plant and machinery and will not come on-line till 2025. A similar story for the Stinger missiles, when the U.S. Army placed an order for 1,700 in May 2022, the Pentagon said the missiles wouldn't be delivered until 2026.
China starts with a massive advantage of being the workshop of the world and its attendant massive industrial base in being that could switch to military production, how to counter that advantage with a wartime production plan will require some great planning and funding.
This article in" Bloomberg" is alarming !
ReplyDelete"Delays at naval shipyards mean that nearly 40% of US attack submarines are out of commission for repairs, about double the rate the Navy would like, according to new data released by the service." This is a recent article.
PB
While I certainly agree that we need to plan more on how to ramp up production after the war starts, I believe we also need to have capability in place at the beginning. Remember, even in World War 2, we started ramping up production a few years before entering the war, and it took a couple more years to really get to maximum production. In a modern war with China, we could easily lose before that process can complete.
ReplyDelete" I believe we also need to have capability in place at the beginning."
DeleteOf course! We are already at war with China. Well, to be clear, they're at war with us although we refuse to acknowledge it. We should be pulling our industry out of China today and re-establishing it in the US. Right now is our few years of grace time to prepare for the kinetic portion of war and we're squandering it.
Our war preparations begin with these discussions. We need everyone to acknowledge that we're at war and begin recognizing and implementing our war plans.
This phase of our war should revolve around cutting regulations, promoting a US-based incentive tax program for industry, imposing tariffs on anything from China, and establishing alternate sources of strategic raw materials (rare earths, for example) so that China cannot hold us hostage.
We are at war. It's time to start acting.
Training additional workers to quickly ramp up production rates of high-demand munitions, pharmaceuticals, and medical supplies should be near the top of our priority list. There's only so much increased production capacity a single plant can reasonably handle, and then you need more plants dispersed around the country to take advantage of local labor, even if enemy attack or equipment and power failure or labor strikes are all non-issues.
ReplyDeleteMaking additional casting molds for bomb casings and forging dies for artillery shells, so that other companies may participate in the war effort, should be done before the shooting starts. The Chinese will throw their considerable manpower advantage over the US at their production problems, so we need to account for this and be smarter about allocation of labor and materials.
One avenue of approach to solving production problems is substituting lower cost materials and faster manufacturing methods when they're acceptable. Austempered Ductile Iron can replace forged steel in certain applications, such as shell bodies (mostly mortar shells) and bomb casings (already done for our Mk82 / Mk83 / Mk84 bombs), motor vehicle suspension components, track shoes for armored vehicles, at reduced cost and with faster production rates.
Lamborghini (composite vehicle chassis and body panels) and Duc Helices (aircraft and helicopter propellers) use a method Lamborghini calls "carbon forging" to pop out fully cured carbon fiber reinforced plastic structural aircraft and vehicle parts in less than a minute. Lamborghini uses very cheap "chopped" carbon fiber that is far less expensive than woven carbon fiber fabrics, with an approximate 10% loss in tensile strength, compared to very laborious and time consuming methods to make traditional fabric-based layups in vacuum molds that have curing times measured in days. The carbon fiber tape winding machines used by Boeing to make airliner fuselages are after the same target- drastically reduced labor and time investment to make strong but light aircraft structures, although Boeing uses traditional oven curing processes. One worker babysits the tape winding machine and changes out the spools of carbon fiber tape after a complete spool is wrapped over the fuselage, rather than a small army of riveters requiring many hours to buck thousands of rivets, plus automated drilling equipment to precisely drill thousands of holes in the Aluminum.
There are plenty of similar production time and labor saving measures not widely employed outside of the US and Europe due to lower labor costs in places like China, that the US should leverage to its advantage to produce acceptable quality war materiel at rates similar to what China could achieve using a vastly greater labor pool.
-kbd512
"One avenue of approach to solving production problems is substituting lower cost materials and faster manufacturing methods when they're acceptable."
DeleteThis is a very slippery slope. You never want to substitute cost savings for quality in combat equipment/munitions. Unfortunately, the temptation for a company - or a military - to decrease costs by using lesser materials is almost irresistible. Yes, you qualified your comment with 'when they're acceptable' but we've seen in the private sector AND in the military, that given a chance, cost always wins out over quality and that CANNOT be accepted in military applications. Of course, if you can reduce quality and maintain standards, that's great but it's a very rare occurrence.
We also need to carefully distinguish between immediate acceptable quality and long term acceptable quality. For example, a plastic transmission part may work perfectly well in a combat vehicle during acceptance tests but will fail over the long term when subjected to the kind of abuse that military equipment is routinely subjected to.
Another aspect is battle damage resistance. A lighter, cheaper part may meet all standards but how will it hold up to battle damage? Overkill is a useful characteristic of combat equipment. The older, heavier, harder to manufacture piece of equipment that can continue to function - or simply hold together - when shot half through is far preferable to the newer, lighter, cheaper piece that fails when shot half through.
So, yes, I fully agree with optimizing production methods IF WE CAN MAINTAIN QUALITY but I'm highly skeptical that we can do that since we've already seen ample evidence that we can't. As one example, the new Virginia class subs, despite being newer and made with more 'advanced' materials and production processes, are turning out to require much more maintenance due to premature material failures compared to their Los Angeles class predecessors.
I'm guided by the concept of the Grumman 'Iron Works' philosophy which got its nickname for a very good reason. The Wildcat/Hellcat could have been built lighter and cheaper and still met specifications but they would have been less successful because they would have been less rugged and 'combat tough'.
So, yes, let's improve our production methods and materials but let's do so very, very carefully with a constant eye on combat-worthiness - something I'm not sure is possible.