1,835 words
Shyam Sankar & Madeline Hart
Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base & Stop World War III
New York: Bombardier Books, 2026
Sometime between the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill protest and the point in 2021 where Biden’s cognitive decline was obvious to all but American liberals, America lost her ability to deter, and hard knocks have followed. The best way to prevent a war going forward is to be so militarily strong that no one dares to carry out an attack in the first place.
Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart, who work for the software company Palantir, have pointed out that America’s industrial base is not robust enough to support a military that can prevent a future World War III. Sankar and Hart write:
The American industrial base’s mobilization for World War Il remains a singularly impressive feat. Given the parallels today, it is often referenced as something the United States did before and, therefore, could easily do again. It’s a comforting thought, but as we’ve seen [recently], wartime mobilization isn’t a switch that can be flipped on and off at will. It wasn’t back then, either. We primed the pump for defense production via Lend-Lease while building new factories and retooling existing ones. Yes, Ford built B-24s at Willow Run, but it required two painful years before production was in full swing. The United States didn’t hit peak production until 1944. Now, with 2027 fast approaching, Taiwan is waiting on a massive backlog of defense articles, including 66 F-16 fighters from the United States. The delivery is years behind schedule and is now slated for the end of 2026. If that date slips any further, it might be too late. Worse, by not aggressively ramping up production to support Ukraine, the United States missed the equivalent of Lend-Lease. Instead of priming the pump with new production, the United States mostly drew down stockpiles of weapons and equipment made decades ago. This is painful because, as historian Arthur Herman said, “it’s through making things that we learn what can be made better.” The alternative to learning in peacetime is learning in wartime, precisely when stakes are highest and the margin for error is smallest. (p. 10)
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Is America Doomed? here.
The industrial base in America has been damaged by neo-liberal policies which hollowed out the economy of large swaths of America and transferred factories to the Far East, making Communist China a rival that the Pentagon optimistically calls “near peer.” China isn’t “near peer,” however. China is a peer. China is also flexing its diplomatic muscle, influencing Canada, and until recently, Chinese agents were securely positioned in Venezuela. The Chinese manufacture more than half the new ships built anywhere. Industrially, China is ahead by all metrics.
The abandoned factories that litter the American Rust Belt indicate more than just a jobs desert; they represent a decreased ability to support the military — and that lessens deterrence. The Ukraine War, for example, has become a war of drones, and America has very little ability to manufacture or employ drones. Sankar and Hart write:
. . . [T]he story of the commercial drone industry so far is tragic: a single Chinese firm, DJI, has a chokehold on the industry, with more than 90 percent of the global consumer market. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress banned the Pentagon from buying Chinese drones. It would take another five years before similar legislation extending to the rest of the federal government passed in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. (p. 78)
The decline of the industrial base is only part of the problem. The other piece is the military itself. Sankar and Hart don’t say anything about the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion problems in the military. Although in an interview promoting the book, Sankar did say:
[America has some cultural advantages] — a profound cultural current of America . . . the popular narrative is something like . . . the Silicon Valley culture comes from the Gold Rush, this sort of frontier spirit of California. I don’t think that is right, actually. The modern Silicon Valley culture that’s led to all this creation, it came from Iowa. It came from Bob Noyce, the inventor of the transistor, co-founder of Intel. Noyce is literally the guy who came up with the term “open-door policy.” And it’s rooted in Midwestern values around playing positive-sum games, open communication, transparency, an ability to sustain those positive sum games over long periods of time. Noyce was the first employer in Silicon Valley who gave even his secretary equity . . . There’s a lot in that sort of ideal, that sort of value system . . . Isn’t it kind of weird that there are zero Indian or Chinese enterprise software companies that are competitive on the world stage? Those countries do software, but they don’t do software companies. And so that is not a technical skill, it is a cultural capability that . . . is uniquely resident in America.
Sankar and Hart point out that the American military is hobbled by a deep cultural hostility in America toward companies becoming wealthy by selling weapons to the government. This goes back to when Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota formed the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry in 1934, which sat until 1936. Nye was an isolationist — and in my view a great patriot — and his political career was destroyed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, his ideas regarding the munitions industry have extended to President Eisenhower’s warning about a “military-industrial complex,” as well as President Clinton’s post-Cold War draw-down of the military. Nye’s committee and Clinton’s drawdown have directly led to the inability to deter today.
President Clinton wanted to cut costs and take advantage of the “peace dividend” we were said to have earned at the end of the Cold War. Just after he took office, William Perry, the new Deputy Secretary of Defense, held a meeting with the CEOs of the major defense firms that came to be called “The Last Supper.” Perry took advantage of the fact that the Department of Defense was the primary customer of the assembled CEOs, and he told them that they needed to consolidate to achieve efficiency and lower prices.
This one-sided relationship is a monopsony, and this has warped the American economy and weakened America’s ability to deter. William Perry’s Last Supper was the start of “the Great Schism” wherein the industrial base that produces new things for the civilian economy became completely separate from the products of the defense industry.
This schism means that the defense industry is missing out on new innovations, such as Kevin Czinger’s desire to undertake digital manufacturing using 3-D printers and AI-powered software. Additionally, it is nearly impossible for a company in the industrial base to pass through the security checks that would allow it to handle classified information, which is essential for work in the defense industry. As a result, the firms that merged after the “Last Supper” continue to dominate, and that is a big risk for America. The defense industry is operating like Walmart: squeezing suppliers, underpaying employees, and being resistant to change. It has also left itself susceptible to losing market share to rivals, except that instead of merely losing market share, soldiers will end up dying in battle against a more innovative rival. Sankar and Hart write:
While cash [from the defense industry] paid to shareholders in dividends and share buybacks increased by a massive 73 percent from 2010 to 2019 versus the previous decade, the amount that defense contractors spent on R&D declined from a paltry 3.6 percent of revenue to an even worse 3.1 percent (for comparison, Palantir spent 18 percent of revenue on R&D in 2024, which is par for the course for publicly traded technology companies) . . . even the small amount that defense contractors spend on R&D isn’t comparable to what the traditional private sector spends because of perks and quirks specific to the defense industry. Decreased spending on R&D is the exact opposite of what you’d expect from a healthy sector, which should be plowing profits into new products. Lockheed Martin, for example, paid $3.1 billion in dividends in 2024, while spending just $1.6 billion on R&D. In short, despite improved financial performance from the lean times of the ’90s, we’ve seen an aggressive continuation of the financialization of defense, incentivized by a monopsonistic Department of War. (p. 149)
America’s ability to deter is likewise hindered by the Pentagon’s vast bureaucracy. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara enacted an “efficiency culture” that has persisted to this day, and which has stymied development. Of this, Sankar and Hart write:
In some ways, McNamara’s failures in Vietnam and defense acquisition were two sides of the same coin — they were attempts to reduce the complexity of the universe through stovepiped analysis that could produce a magic-bullet solution to every problem. In Vietnam, the “McNamara Fallacy” as this mindset became known, led notoriously to the use of body counts as a proxy for success. Meanwhile, in the Department of Defense, “efficiency” was the watchword, and it became an end in itself-at the expense of flexibility and optionality.
You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Reuben here.
Under the Pentagon’s current processes, which were inspired by McNamara’s vision, a new weapon, system, or program must go through a lengthy process before it can be deployed in the field. Once funded and fielded, these tools become difficult to swap out even when a new technology comes along that renders the old one obsolete.
Apart from this, McNamara’s focus on a single weapon, system, or program to be used by multiple services means that dysfunctional tools continue to be used because there are no alternatives. This policy likewise inadvertently ended up hampering innovation. It turns out that a development in one area — say, in missiles — can lead to technological innovations that can also be utilized in an entirely different system.
Some of the most important military innovations of the past were invented by mavericks who were able to operate outside the confines of the military’s bureaucracy. These mavericks need to be found again and given the freedom to innovate. The sidewinder heat-seeking missile was one such case. On the other hand, the “big five” — the Patriot missile, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, M1 tank, Apache attack helicopter, and Blackhawk utility helicopter — have all been successful, and they were developed via the processes put in place by McNamara.
This book is partially a promotion of Palantir’s software products related to intelligence-gathering. Palantir’s software replaced a clunky program that had been put in place after a long and bitter fight between the military brass and a rival company. Palantir’s programs have greatly speeded up targeting and been used by Israel in Gaza. Palantir’s products, like all weapons, can be used in all sorts of unpleasant ways. Should these products fall into the hands of an antifa-inspired administration, things could go very badly for Heritage Americans.
Sankar and Hart have nevertheless written an outstanding book on the problems of deindustrialization and its related pathologies. Like it or not, Heritage Americans are facing a foreign bloc — BRICS — led by Russia and China that is entirely hostile. Dealing with this hostile force means thinking hard about what changes need to be made in agricultural policy, banking, and industry.
9 comments
Sometime between the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill protest and the point in 2021 where Biden’s cognitive decline was obvious to all but American liberals…
Great article! Shouldn’t the quote above say “the point in 2024,” or some other later date? 🙃
Great article. I would question, however, that President Clinton’s “peace dividend” negatively affected U.S. Deterrence. Clinton was the first President since Carter who even tried to balance the budget.
The 9/11 security failure was caused by not scrutinizing Jihadis and other foreigners traveling in and out of the country.
But little was learned from this failure because they created a new agency called the TSA to do airport security on the premise that the rag-head with a bomb in his briefs might as well look like the Grandma next door.
Clinton’s Jewish Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, a Republican from Maine, proposed the creation of a Cold War Victory Medal, and a consideration for this was signed into law by President Junior Bush in late 2001.
But there was so much resistance to the idea of the “end of the Cold War” ─ or the “End of History,” oh Gawd! ─ that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld squashed it.
Apparently you can still get a “commemoration” letter if you served honorably in the U.S. armed forces between September 1945 and December 1991, but no Victory Medal.
A few states like Texas have recognized the Cold War Victory Medal but you are still not allowed to wear it on a uniform.
🙂
Why should I be worried that the US, the Jewish attack dog, gets weaker? Especially as this attack dog also wants to destroy white populations everywhere? I laugh every time the arrogant US gets a humiliating blow on the head.
From the article …
” Although in an interview promoting the book, Sankar did say:
” [America has some cultural advantages] — a profound cultural current of America . . . the popular narrative is something like . . . the Silicon Valley culture comes from the Gold Rush, this sort of frontier spirit of California. I don’t think that is right, actually. The modern Silicon Valley culture that’s led to all this creation, it came from Iowa. It came from Bob Noyce, the inventor of the transistor, co-founder of Intel. Noyce is literally the guy who came up with the term “open-door policy.” And it’s rooted in Midwestern values around playing positive-sum games, open communication, transparency, an ability to sustain those positive sum games over long periods of time. Noyce was the first employer in Silicon Valley who gave even his secretary equity . . . There’s a lot in that sort of ideal, that sort of value system . . . Isn’t it kind of weird that there are zero Indian or Chinese enterprise software companies that are competitive on the world stage? Those countries do software, but they don’t do software companies. And so that is not a technical skill, it is a cultural capability that … is uniquely resident in America. ” [Emphasis added.]
Robert Noyce did not invent the transistor.
That was William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, all three of whom won the Nobel Prize.
This first try was improved and patented a year later (1948) and today is called the germanium Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT). The more robust and cheaper silicon BJTs were also under development (1954).
William Shockley, got his undergraduate degree at Caltech in Pasadena and his PhD in Physics at MIT. He bailed from Bell Labs in 1955 and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with some funding from the Caltech professor and instrument manufacturer Arnold Beckman, who was an Iowa farmboy. (Beckman made a very nice digital multi-meter in the 1980s.)
Shockley setup shop at Mountain View, California in the Santa Clara Valley near Palo Alto because he wanted to be closer to his mother who was ill.
Shockley recruited talent from Bell Labs, Raytheon, and new Berkeley graduates, but he had an abrasive management style and his Shockley Diode product was not commercially successful.
Eight of Shockley’s best engineers soon bailed on him, including Robert Noyce, called the Traitorous Eight, who founded Fairchild Semiconductors in 1957, and Noyce also co-founded Intel Corporation in 1968.
What Robert Noyce did invent was not the transistor but the first monolithic silicon Integrated Circuit (1959). Unlike a slightly-earlier IC iteration from Jack Kilby (2000 Nobel Laureate) at Texas Instruments, the monolithic silicon IC could be mass-produced cheaply. Noyce died in 1990 so does not share the Nobel with Kirby since they are not awarded posthumously.
Some other types of transistors which are of crucial importance here that I won’t get into are Field Effect Transistors, which combine many electronic signalling properties of vacuum tubes but with higher frequency responses and higher power handing capabilities. Some of these like MOSFETs or insulated-gate FETs lend themselves well to extremely-compact chip designs but are extremely sensititve to static electricity.
According to “Moore’s Law,” named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, transistor density on silicon chips tends to double every couple of years, so it seems that the sky is the limit ─ although with modern silicon chips with electrical traces that are only a few atoms wide, a physical limit must be reached at some time. Silicon chips are still increasingly doing more for less costs.
My Dad was a statistician and reliability engineer who worked for Thiokol on the reliability modeling for the solid rocket engines on the 1961 Minuteman ICBM, and later the SRBs for the Space Shuttle after it exploded in 1986.
The Minuteman (LGM-30) had a digital guidance computer that was built out of discreet transistors and other components. You can see this guidance computer displayed at various aerospace museums such as the one at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. It had 75 gold-plated circuit boards, weighed approximately 62 pounds (28 kg), contained 1,521 transistors, 6,282 diodes, 1,116 capacitors, and 5,094 resistors (LINK).
Between 1961 and 1965, NASA’s Apollo program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuit chips.
In 1971, Intel developed a silicon IC chip with a 4-bit digital computer etched onto it called a “microprocessor,” the Intel 4004. It was cheaply outsourced and could run things with simple dedicated programs like adding machines, traffic lights, and microwave ovens.
In 1972, Intel released the 8008 and then the 8080 microprocessor, which was an 8-bit chip that made user-programmed “software” and Home Computers possible. In a couple of years (ca. 1977) Radio Shack and Apple were selling “home computers” like the TRS-80 and the Apple II.
The 16-bit Intel 8086 was launched in 1978 and forms the basis for the x86 family of Microprocessors. The 1981 IBM PC (Personal Computer) used the 8088, a variant of this chip.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) or “Big Blue” did not want to mess with the home recipe collection market and so hired Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Harvard dropout friends with an “astroturfed” software development company to write an “operating system” for the PC and basically handed them billions of dollars.
Xerox Corporation made the same mistake in late 1979 when they showed Apple’s Steve Jobs how a “graphical user interface” GUI worked.
Interestingly, the Iowan IC pioneer, Robert Noyce had a brother, Gaylord Noyce, who was a Congregationalist theology professor at Yale Divinity School who got arrested in Alabama while taking part in the 1960s “Freedom Rides,” the procession of Liberal and Jewish students who rode to the South trying to stir up the Negroes in revolt.
Yale paid the bail for the good professor.
🙂
Scott, you wrote an excellent overview of the great modernization of American business. I lived it in the trenches in the oil business. We used to joke about it – “A computer on every desk, and we engineers all became typists and spreadsheet wizards. ”
You might add the transition from slide rule to the hand held computer. There were 2 camps: the HP and TI . I could use either one, but preferred the TI.
And then the cell phones showed up. Why are they giving us these fancy phones? We soon found out. We all had been put on an electronic leash.
I used a cheap plastic slide rule very briefly in High School in the 1970s. Immediately thereafter, the school got some smoking deals on Casio and Texas Instruments scientific calculators for like twenty bucks or something like that.
I got the Casio FX something since it had an LCD display and the keys were less clunky than the TI-30. I ditched the slide rule and today don’t even remember how to use it. One version of the Casio pocket-sized calculator would even do graphing for analytic geometry, but it was a little more pricey.
In college electronics in the 1980s, I think I used a TI-55 II scientific calculator which had an LCD display, but it had clunky keys that you needed to be very careful with or it would botch your answers. I guess it taught me meticulousness in calculating things.
Today I just use a cheap TI-30x scientific calculator just so that I don’t have to relearn the wheel. The keys are still somewhat clunky but I rarely need to replace the batteries. It is almost cheaper to buy a new one. I don’t like solar-powered calculators since I have had to calculate too many things in the dark.
My Dad actually did have work experience with a slide rule. It was a high quality one that he probably bought at the BYU book store, but I don’t remember what brand exactly ─ maybe a Keuffel & Esser.
He graduated in Mathematics & Statistics in 1960 and finished his Masters in 1964 after Thiokol laid him off. In those days, the Engineering students carried their slide rules in leather holsters strapped to their belts. You could either carry it on your right hip or on the left hip in a cross-draw, LOL.
Dad gave his old slide rule to my nephew when he graduated in Mechanical Engineering and went to work for some rocket company in the People’s Republic of Colorado. Anyway, the last Keuffel & Esser slide rule was made in July of 1976.
https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/Calculators.shtml
In the 1960s, my Dad also used a mechanical computer on the job called a MonroMatic, sort of like a CSA-10.
http://oldcomputers.it/parts/m/monroe/csa10/docs/john_wolff/Monroe6N-575-IMG_2438-5.jpg
In the 1970s, he found a used one at a yard sale and brought it home, but it was clunky and I never really got it to work. In Amateur Radio we call things like these “boat anchors.”
http://oldcomputers.it/parts/m/monroe/csa10/docs/john_wolff/Monroe.htm
In late 1970, my Dad was working on the Supersonic Transport (SST) at Hill Air Force Base before the project was cancelled and he brought home a desktop electronic calculator called an “Electronic Slide Rule.” It was “Made in Japan” and I think it was a Dietzgen ESR-1, although Casio and Remington made branded versions of the exact same thing. This earlier one had a neon Nixie tube digital display.
http://www.calcuseum.com/scrapbook/BONUS/14203/1.htm
I was fascinated by this electronic “computer,” but was not allowed to use it for my math homework. Also, I was studying fractions then and it would only do those if you converted them into decimal format first. Later in the 1970s, Casio came out with a handheld calculator that would actually do common fractions as such.
In the mid 1970s, my Dad’s work at Aerojet issued him a handheld HP calculator that cost several hundred dollars. That is when he dropped the slide rule for good. It might have been an HP-35 scientific calculator. I did not like it, however, because Hewlett Packard calculators did what I called “Inverse Polish Notation,” which I never got comfortable with. My Dad loved it, though, and won’t use anything else besides HPs.
🙂
The world does not need America as a world cop. And America itself does not want to be a world cop anymore. We will get another one world cop anyway, but maybe not so soon, for some times there will be many regional cops.
The industry in the US is lost, because Chinese bribes were so lucrative.
Restoring deterrence in the West is difficult due to sacrifices it would entail. Shattering the consumerist dream is the first major price to pay. Attempts to institute a substitute ethos of sacrifice already failed with green policies and related consumer luxury fads. Bringing back conscription and expanding military industry will cause the liberal electorate to sour on the establishment.
Here is the dilemma:
The proponents for the current US-Iranian war make their arguments in a seemingly rational, measured way:
_ Iran has been at war with the United States since the Hostage Crisis of 1979.
_ There has been low level warfare conducted by Iran against the US and its allies in the Persian Gulf for decades.
_ The possession of nuclear weapons by the Ayatollahs would create future threats to US national security.
_ And to get back to the first point, the US has to avenge that Hostage Crisis.
But what is not being brought into the equation is this: Does the United States have the combat power to gain its military goals against Iran?
Instead, the proponents seem to assume that the current war can be resolved to victory by a series of airstrikes backed by rah-rah-Go-Team-America media rants. Have any of these people actually conducted an order of battle analysis for both sides, or mapped out contingencies to include the logistics of fighting a war in the Persian Gulf?
Behind the combat power deployed into the Gulf there has to be an industrial base, supply chains, weapons systems research & development, and so forth. Yet there appears to be little in the way of consideration of these factors (aside from books like the one reviewed here).
Vague pronouncements about winning that war against America which started back in 1979 is not a substitute for strategy. In a rational world all this would discredit the Neo-Conservatives but we are not necessarily living in a rational world.
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