LAST WEEK I WAXED WISTFUL about the passing of the American consumer electronics industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Part of that is a sort of patriotic nostalgia — Zenith, RCA, Admiral and the rest of the American manufacturers were the “home team,” and I took their defeat by Japanese electronics giants as a sort of mark against the United States.
I have more practical concerns, however. Those concerns come from both pragmatism and from my study of history.
For most of World War II, Germany had the most advanced weapons, in almost every category worth mentioning.
German tanks were arguably the best in any theater of the war. Their most advanced tanks, the Tiger and Tiger II models, would — with relatively simple modifications involving the installation of targeting computers and higher-power engines — be formidable opponents even on a modern battlefield. Similarly, German fighter aircraft were cutting-edge for their day.
It was only late in the war, with the introduction of the American P-51 Mustang fighter, that the Allies fielded a clearly superior piston-engine fighter aircraft. The German response was the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, which outclassed anything the allies could send to oppose it.
Germans also invented and used both ballistic missiles (the V-2 rockets) and cruise missiles (the V-1 “buzz bomb”), and their optics and electronics were among the most advanced of the major belligerents in that conflict.
Given all the above, how did they lose?
The Allies realized that they did not need to have the best equipment; their strategy, given the productive capacity of the United States, was to come up with tanks and planes that were “good enough” and then produce those tanks and planes in truly staggering numbers. During the entire war, Germany produced 94,622 planes. In 1944 alone, the United States produced 96,270. Germany produced 46,274 armored vehicles of all kinds during the war; the United States produced slightly more than 100,000.
Keep that in mind when you read this: In 2010 (the most recent year for which I could find figures) United States industrial production amounted to roughly $3.2 trillion. China’s was $4.7 trillion and growing fast.
I have read numerous stories the last few years about Chinese companies buying idle American machine tools, unbolting them from the floors of our factories and putting them on boats to be used by Chinese industrial concerns. Can you see how I might find this worrying?
China comes up fairly often on lists of possible future military opponents of the United States, so the fact that they are now the number-one producer of things ought to be a cause for concern.
It is often forgotten that our economy is a partnership between government and business. I said in column last April in this space: “For all the talk from the right about how governments can do no good, it is worth mentioning that an awful lot of what we think of as modern technology came about as a direct result of government initiatives. Jet air travel, digital computers, the Internet, the GPS navigation system, synthetic oil and rubber, communication satellites, a large proportion of experimental physics and human space travel, to name a few, all were either begun or hugely accelerated by the government.”
Among the reasons government funds those things is that there is a direct benefit to our national security from it doing so. And what is true for basic research can also be true for the protection of our industrial base — specifically our production capacity and competence in mass production.
Ever notice how practically everything of practical use seems to be made in China these days? Looking around the desk on which I’m typing this — including the desk itself — I find a fair fraction was made there: the computer I’m using, the chair I’m sitting in, the folding dining table against the wall of my kitchen, the Kindle siting on my desk, the phone currently begging for a recharge, and so on.
China now has deep competence in producing vast quantities of advanced equipment — smart phones, televisions, computers and tablets, and so on — and it is not hard to imagine those skills being turned to the production of advanced armaments.
Remember that the United States won WWII by producing vast quantities of materiel that was good enough to win. I think it would be prudent for us to takes steps to preserve our industrial capacity and the competence of our production workers.
It would take a sustained, national commitment to achieve this. I think we ought to make a commitment to achieving the goal of regaining our place as the world’s number-one industrial power, and a commitment to maintaining that status into the future.
Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.
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