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Replying to
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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Replying to
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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The production priority lists of “strategic”, “critical” and “essential” had to be repeatedly redone to balance regular and military economy needs.
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Everybody cool in 1940s USA had quoted nicknames. “Babe” Meigs, “Powder” Johnson. Still at 34% on this book. Slow going since I’m dividing limited reading time between 2 books rn,
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“That was the magic number: 18 mo. That’s how long Knudsen estimated it would take for American business and industry to make the arsenal of democracy a reality. One year to build new plants and retool the old ones, 6 mo for conversion. Everywhere he looked that number held true”
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Fraught period of Knudsen jockeying for position with labor leaders and losing, and FDR vacillating on commitment to war effort under pressure from isolationists. But crucial period of ramping up machine tools is underway so big risk mitigated.
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Interesting that 2nd gen companies like Cincinnati milling machine stole a march over first-gen more artisan NE tool makers in this period, including sneaking large naval gun drill out of Nazi germany.
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Fascinating glimpse of balancing civilian and military production. No point diverting raw materials to military if you then can’t build houses for civilians to work on it, or roads to transport material to factories. Economy is intertwingled. Military/civilian is fake divide.
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The breakdown of various attempts to partition the economic web by fiat in human meaningful terms (civilian/military, essential/non-essential, strategic/non-strategic) is like the explainable AI problem. Like declaring pi=3 like Arizona once tried to do. Might blog this.
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Picking this one back up after a while. Now into 1941. Defense spending up 12x through the year. US approaching Nazi germany in output. 1942 overtake. Capitalist exponential network effects slower to start, but faster once past a point.
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Now at Pearl Harbor... “[the army plan]... still saw Japan as a problem to be put off until at least July 1943. The timetable had suddenly, catastrophically speeds up.” Timetables speeding up is a general theme across everything I’m reading right now. “Slowly, then suddenly”
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The auto industry was like Silicon Valley of 1940-45 looks like. Knudsen weathered the 1940s techlash by simply ignoring it, refusing to defend himself, and just doing what he thought necessary. You can do that if you’re kinda indispensable.
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Though this book is obviously strongly pro-capitalism/anti new-deal crowd, the state of play still filters through. Looks like Big Labor at its height was as corrupt as Big Finance at its height today. Absolute power corrupts absolutely etc.
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New dealers get Knudsen fired from OPM. OPM and SPAB replaces by new agency WPB. War Production Board. Knudsen devastated but lands 3-star generalship on military side of effort. Only civilian to get that. Kicked... sideways?
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Rule of three: In the first year after a production order output was bound to 3x. In second year, 6x. In third year, at supply limit: materials and labor.
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Summer of 1941: 4000 workers in Richmond yards. After Pearl Harbor, by end of 1942: 80,000. 20x. WW2 manufacturing tech was highly scalable with relatively low-skill/low-training labor. Kinda like driving Uber today I guess.
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Fascinating story of race between 2 Kaiser shipyards, Richmond 2 (Clay Bedford) and Portland (Edgar Kaiser) to drive production faster using prefab deck house sections and assembly line techniques. Time cut from 220 days to 10 over a couple of years. armed-guard.com/teal.html
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Alright let’s pick this up again. Now into the story of Knudsen successor Don Nelson, ex Sears guy who learned how 135k products in the Sears catalog were made and ran the WIB.
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Nelson faced down trust-busting threats from Roosevelt AG and FDR eventually suspended trust-busting for the war. Also fought Truman on hiring of dollar-a-year crowd. Basically anti-corporatism suspended. By end of 1942 US was producing more arms than all 3 axis powers combined
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Interesting. Massive levels of direct open cooperation among dozens of aircraft makers. Kinda like Silicon Valley with open source. Sorta open source mechanical and industrial engineering under wartime pressure.
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Now reading about Andrew Jackson Higgins who designed 92% of the small boats used in ww2. Landing craft, PT boats etc. Hitler called him the new Noah.
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Aluminum production went from 327m lbs to 2.2b lbs between 1939 to 1943. Today the US makes about 1 million metric tons which curiously is about the same (2.2b lb) and imports about 6 million. 🤔
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Excellent story. Huge problems with production design and labor. And dual purpose of both parts supply and full assembly resolved to focus on latter. Innovation of field modification allowed production to get past constant stream of design mods and hit pace of 300/mo.
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B24 Liberators were less popular with crews than B17s but more capable. VLR version won’t the Atlantic war by closing the gap in coverage for U-boat defense. Funny I never looked up this story despite being in Ann Arbor for years and a fan of WW2 aircraft lore.
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Generally impressive the extent to which this generation of engineering leaders had mastered enormously complex command economy production, just a couple of generations after boutique early mass production. Artisan production craft turned to manufacturing science in 50 years.
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A big part was being asshole dictators. Sorensen was apparently called the Mussolini of Ford. Leaders of this era punched each other up. Still the culture in large-scale manufacturing but less so.
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