Is There a Ramp-Up Plan?

I've written about wartime industrialization before, but a recent podcast and blog post made me more optimistic about the US' ability to ramp up production...as long as we start planning better.

A-20 attack planes roll through the Douglas Aircraft plant at Long Beach, California

I've been listening to the podcast EconTalk for four years. This week's episode pulled me in by talking about the "arsenal of democracy" with Brian Potter. The host Russ Roberts had invited Potter to talk about his post How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years from May 2024. As I wrote in April 2025, I'm concerned with the US' ability to ramp up production of materiel if needed for industrialized conflict. What made me more hopeful was the relative difficulty that we had during World War II: the factories weren't built, the production rates were orders of magnitude less than needed, and just like today the aerospace industry was hugely more complex than automotive manufacturing. The mega-factories that became emblematic of American industrial might in 1944 didn't exist in 1940.

That doesn't mean that industrialization was easy. French and British aircraft orders provided a base level of aircraft demand well before the US entered the war, and even before Pearl Harbor President Roosevelt had persuaded Congress to pass the Two-Ocean Navy Act in 1940, which increased the size of the Navy by 70%, including funding 15,000 airplanes. These gave the aviation industry a start before the US entered the war. In addition, because the low-volume factories extant in 1940 were so inappropriate for the mass production required, the US government created "Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated" (GOCO) facilities where the government designed the factory and paid for its construction, and then had experienced aviation companies fill the factory with the tools and workers needed.

Today, I worry if that could be duplicated. Trust in the federal government is lower (needed to push through construction), and we are not taking advantage of the opportunities we have. When preparing for my Monday post on the role of the aircraft carrier, I stumbled across several variations of "Army to cut 155 mm artillery spending, citing budget pressure" from June 2021:  big budget cuts to the production of artillery ammunition. In retrospect, this looks like an awful decision: 8 months later Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine began firing 10,000 shells per day. The US had a goal to produce 100,000 shells per month by 2025 - three years after the invasion kicked off - and will miss it. The missed target was 1.2 million shells per year when Ukraine alone was consuming 3.6 million shells per year (at their preferred rate; they had to accept taking more casualties and losing more land because there wasn't enough artillery ammunition to keep up that rate).

Overall I came away from my reading and listening this week more optimistic: the pre-World-War-II industry was less prepared than I had thought, and there were fewer synergies with other industries e.g. auto manufacturing. But before a few key people took control, there was no plan to shift to wartime production. We need a similar plan today: which industries might need a dramatic ramp-up, and what can we do today to prepare? Are our part drawings up-to-date so that additional manufacturers could step in? Do we have domestic / allied sources for the tools to make the tools that we'll need in an airplane factory (e.g computer-controlled machining centers, cutting heads for those machining centers, injection molds)? Cogs of War recently published a podcast with Joe Musselman of Union Technologies, and their philosophy is "Factories-as-a-Stockpile": if the factory can increase production quickly enough, it's equivalent to having a large stockpile of that factory's product on-hand. Unfortunately for me, they're based well out of my commuting range, but I like the idea: we as a country need a plan for wartime production. If we have a credible-enough plan, we won't have to use it.