Wednesday, August 22, 2007

When is 1500 the same as 3900?

When the Republicans promise to buy something that our troops can use to stay alive.
Defense officials say fewer than half of the new blast-resistant vehicles being built this year to give troops better protection from roadside bombs will be delivered to Iraq by year’s end.

At least 1,500 will be in Iraq by Dec. 31, according to Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. But the figure is less than half of the 3,900 an official previously said would be delivered.
What a sad state this country is in when a corporation can move lickety-split to get a corporate welfare subsidy and slow as molasses when it comes to producing something.

Comments:
Ramping up an assembly line isn't something that can be done overnight. It takes lead time. Especially if you're going from producing something that was pounded by hand over a wooden mold to something that is properly stamped in a sheet metal plant, going from something that was produced in quantity 10 via sand casting to something that is produced in quantity 1000 in a real casting mold, etc. It takes time to do all of that.

I designed an assembly line a couple of years ago. We could make 20 machines a day. That's it. More than that, and our infrastructure was completely maxed out. Finding more space, training more workers, adding new processes that scaled better, finding suppliers who could supply us parts in greater quantity, all that would have taken over a month to get going, and the new lines would take another month to get to the speed of the original line.

Manufacturing isn't easy, and since we've outsourced so much of our manufacturing infrastructure overseas, the infrastructure isn't here anymore if you have a government mandate to use US-produced components for national security reasons. What little manufacturing infrastructure still exists in America (outside the automotive industry) is focused on small batches of specialty items, and really doesn't scale well. Frankly, I'm surprised they're getting as many machines delivered as is happening, given the difficulties of scaling the processes used by a small specialty shop to produce larger quantities.

- Badtux the Manufacturing Penguin
 

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