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Roosevelt started rearming in 1936, years before officially dipping neutrality and joins the war. If you want peace, prepare for war?
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Damn, early on Patton ordered nuts and bolts for tanks at his own expense from the Sears catalog, they were so short 😱
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1940: Roosevelt asks for 700 million in army appropriations, up from... 24 million. This, coming just 7 years after dumping the gold standard must have been a huge shock. How much is that in 2020 dollars?
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About 15.6B inflation adjusted. Drop in bucket compared to CARES act. But then, shit was low-tech and cheap in absolute terms then.
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“...on policy matters FDR was a procrastinator. He preferred to put off decisions — or at least to keep news about them from going public.” Hmm. The anti-Trump, who declares mission accomplished before it starts.
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Bernard Baruch, organizer of WW1 War Industries Board (and target of Nye committee) declines to do an encore for WW2. Don’t blame him.
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Apparently WIB didn’t manage to pull its act together in time for WW1 despite (because?) of strong economy. Baruch nominates Knudsen, who enters stage left.
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Hitlers response to FDR plan of 50k planes/year: “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood” Oh shit Hitler had 2016-America viewing palantir
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Knudsen starts off as an immigrant doing riveting work on the tough New York waterfronts and learning boxing. This is already cartoon grade. Marlon Brando plus Rocky.
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Montage of early industry career and now Knudsen is systematizing Ford’s assembly lines by 1916. The real Taylorism is Knudsenism it seems.
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Replying to
GM is more interesting as an early business case study than Ford, even though Ford steals the technology honors. The invention of the federated conglomerate was a bigger deal than the assembly line.
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“Speed produces nothing in manufacturing,” Knudsen likes to say — which was one reason he eschewed the complicated time-and-motion studies of production gurus like William Taylor. “Accuracy is the only straight line to great production.” I LIKE THIS GUY
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He’s basically discovered “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” thinking in 1922. True flow thinking including lean vs fat tradeoff. Unlike charlatan F. W. Taylor. There’s an element of Elon Musk first principles thinking to Knudsenism.
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Knudsen set a “one to one” goal of matching Model T sales and got from 18:1 to 2:1 in a few years. He also invented model year system of annual updates. Damn.
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Aside: this was clearly the OG example of the Mac vs PC pattern. Dunno why I didn’t see it before. Probably because this is the first time I’ve read about the Chevrolet story.
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Kaiser was a dropout hustler who led with sales looks like. Makes his start in photography in upstate NY, then heads west to grow a hardware business, then lands in highway construction. So a hacker-hustler pair saved the US in WW2.
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Kaiser builds thriving road construction business in BC but WW1 makes the name Kaiser acliability do he he adds back to US and grows big there.
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Kaiser building thousands of miles of roads in the west. Early adopter of innovations. Steve Ballmer type seems like. Hard driving and hard working but subtler than Ballmer... not a bull type. Seems like he elevated roadwork from mostly manual labor to mostly machine.
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Now we have Kaiser orchestrating the Six Companies to build Hoover Dam. He spent most of the time in DC managing the political bosses.
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Huh, Kaiser apparently pioneered the internal competition model with Grand Coulee dam, which he later used in WW2 work. I guess that’s where the X/Y flyoff model originated perhaps?
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Interior secretary Harold Ickes skeptical of Knudsen; “I have heard that Knudsen even makes his own notes in handwriting” (presumably as opposed to a secretary transcribing shorthand into typewritten notes) Moron. If you aren’t taking your own notes you’re not thinking.
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Knudsen pulls together a sort of fellowship of the ring from across industry. They have to figure out what the military needs and tell them, because the military if 1940 doesn’t know.
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Finally into the war production story proper. We’re talking tanks, airplanes, engines. Building for US, British, and French needs all at once, 1939-41. Just a vast amount of action getting underway.
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Nice anecdote: a banker who has to transfer top secret Merlin engine plans meets the battleship bringing them from the UK with an empty suitcase. The captain laughs: the plans occupy a whole railroad-car sized crate of paper (would be a container today... or a largish USB stick)
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Spark plug and steering gear auto subsidiary companies commandeered into making machine guns. We’re still on Knudsen. Kaiser is trying to get in on the action but Knudsen doesn’t trust him. Yet.
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The auto industry had 1050 factories and $3B in facilities and largest pool of engineering talent. Like Silicon Valley today. Except luckily SV capability is a better match for Covid response.
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“It was also an industry of associations” 850 companies, 1/20 of workforce,... saw this while at grad school at UM. Auto industry is ridiculously full of industry orgs associations densely knitting it together. SV is much looser.
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“What Knudsen saw in the defense buildup was more than just rearmament... he saw a way to revitalize American business and industry”
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“The arsenal of democracy” has a nice ring to it. Need something similar to capture strengths for pandemic. China may have started it and democracies may have suffered way more casualties but I suspect long term liberal democracies will win the war against covid better.
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Vignette about unions opposing Knudsen and proposing alt Reuther plan by UAW chief Walter Reuther. Book is clearly anti-union but Reuther’s plan does look like stupid wrong-problem (fighters overran bombers) vaporware objectively speaking, from engineering and other lenses.
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Alright Kaiser back in the story to build merchant freighters for British because America’s biggest shipyards were at capacity for navy orders.
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Knudsen gets full authoritah over Office of Production Management (OPM) but FDR sez he has to share authoritah with a labor leader. Guy named Hillman.
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Apparently Kaiser revolutionized shipbuilding by treating it like a construction industry rather than a steel industry.
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Ship building go brr. Knudsens people are now making a huge Soviet style central production planning and demand forecasting ledger.
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Guy named Stacy May did a massive project to compile the ledger but is now forgotten. Not even a Wikipedia page smh
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