The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the discussions,” says the Trump Pentagon has urged leaders in the U.S. automotive industry to do more for the war effort. America’s national weapons cache has, it seems, begun to look a bit depleted from all the arms we’ve shipped abroad, and rounds we’ve squeezed off lately—particularly in Ukraine and Iran.
CEOs including Mary Barra of General Motors and Jim Farley of Ford have been among the executives who have sat for talks with high-ranking defense officials about upping the production of arms in what are currently car factories, with labor from people currently employed as automotive workers.
GM, it should be noted, already makes a military vehicle called the Infantry Squad Vehicle or ISV.
In a speech in November of last year, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth described the industrial effort he’d like to see, but sounded a bit more like ChatGPT than he probably intends:
“We’re not just buying something. We are solving life and death problems for our war fighters. We’re not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.”
The Pentagon’s statement to the Journal said the Department of Defense/War is “committed to rapidly expanding the defense industrial base by leveraging all available commercial solutions and technologies to ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage.”
Earlier this month, President Trump requested a $1.5 trillion military budget, with an explicit push for an expanded industrial base.
For no particular reason, here’s a flashback to high school history class: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1940 “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, one of the all-time masterpieces of U.S. war propaganda.
In it, FDR makes the case that the Nazis are a threat to the American way of life, and that our allies need our help fighting them off. We’re not being asked to lay down our lives, he explains, just to come together as government, industry, and workers.
“We must have more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything. And this can only be accomplished if we discard the notion of ‘business as usual.’ This job cannot be done merely by superimposing on the existing productive facilities the added requirements of the nation for defense.”
It’s utterly convincing, and listening to it today will stir up feelings of determination and patriotism you might have forgotten you could feel. If you feel inclined to listen to it in the current context, and play a little game of compare and contrast, that’s your business.
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