The term World War III used to stand in for theoretically possible but absurdly unlikely occurrences.
Now people are talking about it as the United States stands on the brink of World War III. Columnist George Will commented the other day that ongoing, seemingly localized conflicts now span six time zones. Thursday new reports stated the U.S. sent B-2 bombers drop conventional “bunker-buster” ordnance on the Houthis in Yemen. The U.S. military has been jabbing back at the Houthis for months, but never with a stealth bomber that took off from Missouri.
Meantime a Thaad missile system is headed to Israel to protect against missiles from Iran, 100 U.S. service members there to operate it. The upward march of capabilities the U.S. is shipping to Ukraine continues in that other time zone.
You can find a million opinions about where this all leads. whether we’re seeing creep towards war or what a third world war would look like. At whatever level of deployment that might happens, the Defense Department would want to make sure its warfighters have enough supplies to prevail. One source of supply shows the military mostly, but not completely, depends on industry for its supplies. The “not completely” part gets fulfilled by the organic industrial base.
This odd term refers to the two dozen-odd Army sites where the military stores, remanufactures or produces new goods. Parts discontinued by manufacturers, ordnance such as 155mm howitzer shells, even cannon barrels all issue from the OIB. Mostly civilian Army employees fashion all of these materials.
A weird side note: Even when the big contractors discontinue support for some vehicle and stop making parts, they don’t always give the government the blueprints for parts. That seems chintzy. So employees at one of the OIB facilities must reverse-engineer them.
The facilities themselves are, on average, 80 years old. Yet metal-pounding is an extremely technologically intensive activity. New alloys, new methodologies, and new generations of production equipment emerge regularly. It’s as if the military operates plants designed to produce Ford Falcons in the age of the Mustang Mach-E.
During the Association of the U.S. Army conference earlier this week, I spoke with Stephanie Hoaglin, the director of the Organic Industrial Base Modernization Task Force. Her group, within the Army Materiel Command (AMC), carries out an ongoing plan, subject to Congressional appropriations, to bring the OIB up to date. Hoaglin said the Army estimates an $18 billion tab for the whole job, in today’s dollars. She has $4 billion to work with now.
An engineer, I joked that Hoaglin herself knows the one end of an anvil from another. The government needs people like that.
New equipment and state-of-the-art practices require people with the necessary skills. Hoagland said the craftmen of the OIB often serve from one generation in a family to the next. A new shell is made with different forging, heat treating, annealing and joining techniques than the same shell of yesteryear. “It’s literally not your grandfather’s howitzer shell, and so providing the current generation with the kills that need forms a big part of the modernization strategy,” Hoaglin said.
Munitions plants and depots don’t generally lie in the nation’s tony areas. Moreover, the OIB competes with other industries needing similarly skilled people. The Defense Department has limits on what it can pay welders or machine operators. So it needs the latest technology in clean, well-lit installations to remain competitive.
I visited the Watervliet Arsenal about 15 years ago. I drove and drove. Across the river from the arsenal you could see Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a gleaming, wealth university. The Arsenal was off a winding back road and seemed stuck in the deep past. The gigantic naval cannons from World War II sat mutely outside, a testament to the past. But I remember the pride with which one of the employees showed off operation of her machine that ensured the trueness of a big gun barrel. These things are formed to tolerances of thousandths of an inch. Today, Hoaglin said, Watervliet is half modern and half still-to-be-modernized. I’ll have to go back.
Over at the AMC’s personnel shop, the OIB workforce is high on the priority list for Christina Freese. She said DoD uses special hiring authorities, training, apprenticeships and recruitment down to the high school level as ways to maintain the OIB workforce of about 20,000.
No sane person wishes for World War III or any war. But when troops are called, keep in mind those 20,000 home-front federal employees far from the policy and finance shops of Washington, casting, forging, stamping and welding their support.
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