U.S. economy leans heavily on making, selling weapons
stages. Whatever the case, the United States’ weapons production is still far greater than China’s, while China has burnished its reputation as a manufacturer of civilian goods for export and, increasingly, for its own citizens.
The United States once went that route. In summer 1945, after nearly five years of wartime rationing, the civilian population of the United States was starved for new cars and appliances, new clothing and shoes, and new homes and their furnishings. So was the rest of the world, and U.S. manufacturers prospered by meeting that need as well. Converting factories to civilian production was a no-brainer and sufficiently profitable to match wartime earnings.
After the Korean War in the early 1950s, however, a somewhat similar conversion back to civilian production wasn’t as profitable. And companies that considered it in the early 1990s, like General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut, decided to stick with making weapons for the Defense Department. These companies argued — accurately — that military work was more profitable and, in those days, generated more jobs.
As weapons production increased, the manufacture of autos and electronics shifted partly or wholly overseas. So did the production of other civilian products — leaving behind weapons bought by the Defense Department as an ever bigger share of the nation’s factory output.
While President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the perils of the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address in January 1961, the Vietnam War accentuated this reliance on weapons production, which became embedded in annual budgets. That may well continue in the years ahead. In his first budget proposal in May, Trump called for significant cuts in domestic spending but roughly a 10 percent increase in military outlays.
Given the history of recent decades, is it any wonder we now have a president who, at least in part, equates “making America strong again” with an enhanced military equipped with the weaponry that an enhanced military requires?
Public money flows to factory owners in many ways — often as a result of the frequent bidding by municipal governments to persuade a manufacturer to locate a factory in one community rather than another. These auctions sometimes top $100 million per factory location.
Cities and towns are eager to have a factory, with its network of nearby suppliers and its relatively well-paying jobs.
The outlay of taxpayer money is concentrated in eight sectors of manufacturing, including ammunition, aircraft, guided missiles, shipbuilding and armored vehicles. Shut down production in those areas and factory production in the United States, measured as value added, would shrink 10 percent or more, according to Richard Aboulafia, a vice president of the Teal Group, a defense consulting firm.
Cutting back on factory production isn’t the direction the Trump administration has been going. Instead, the promise is that — whatever goods they produce — the Trump era’s factories will be big employers. But the reality is that modern factories, even when they materialize, are highly automated, which helps to explain why the manufacturing workforce has bumped along at less than 13 million for nearly a decade, according to the Labor Department, although factory output — including weapons production — keeps rising smartly.
These constraints make me yearn for the good old days just after World War II, when the United States seemed to have easier policy choices. Disarmament ran deep in the late 1940s. We didn’t need to produce weapons, even BB guns, to keep manufacturing afloat. I’m afraid that we do now.