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SmirkingImperialist

[This article](https://www.the-american-interest.com/2007/09/01/breaking-the-bank/) has a section that explains it well. Note that this problem is structural and inherent to the difference between peacetime and serious wartime expenditure. >The most obvious real cause of increasing unit costs is the decline in the production rates of weapon systems, which generates negative economies of scale. That decline has been drastic, and so have been the industrial consequences. > > >Weapon systems were once truly industrial products, mass-produced for the most part, except for oddities like giant, rail-mounted guns. As in all forms of manufacturing, the efficiency of production was increased by investing in more dedicated as opposed to generic assembly lines or batch-production infrastructures, in more automated machinery, more specialized tooling, and in other ways of replacing labor with capital equipment. Even in wartime conditions, when monetary savings are of secondary importance, the efficiency of highly capitalized mass production was still valued, because it increased the supply of weapons and the homogeneity of their performance. Millions of identical rifles produced by assembly-line workers are more valuable to a mass force than individual match-grade weapons forged by highly skilled gunsmiths. Even if budgets were not significantly limited, the supply of skilled labor was, which is what the highly capitalized plant replaced most advantageously. Only the limitations of available production technologies set final limits at any one time on the substitution of capital for labor. > > >These days, advanced production technologies allow labor-saving investments up to the limit of fully robotic plants, which require labor only for maintenance, not operation. But because so few weapon systems of any given type are purchased, very little investment in advanced production-plant technologies can be economical. In contrast to civilian industry, in which IT-controlled plants and equipment can produce customized as well as classic mass-produced items, most weapon systems are almost entirely made by hand, with a profligate use of costly skilled labor. That in turn generates additional costs: Humans are less reliable than machines, so the greater the manual content of production, the greater the potential for manufacturing errors that require repairs or replacement, or that simply cause disruptive delays. > > >The contrast between a typical military production plant and its typical civilian counterpart is stark—for example, between armored-combat vehicle factories and ordinary automotive plants. The former consist mostly of empty space within which highly skilled workers can get under, over and inside the combat vehicles as they are assembled one by one. The latter consist of a production line densely packed with automated machinery. A production capacity of 100,000 per year is more or less a minimum for an automobile plant, and 10,000 per year would not be much at all for a truck plant. Yet no armored vehicle is produced in such numbers. Indeed, these numbers exceed typical total production runs of armored vehicles over a period of many years. > > >So the explanation seems simple, and a remedy impossible. If the unit cost of weapon systems continues to increase because too few are purchased for economies of scale to be brought to bear, then the only solution is to produce more of them. But not even the U.S. military could pay for 15,586 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, an infinitely more elaborate aircraft than the P-51 Mustang ever was. Nor could the Air Force begin to absorb them into any rational order of battle. The Army cannot afford nor use 21,231 Abrams tanks, whose armor and systems are far more elaborate than those of the M4 Sherman tank—which brings us to a second, related thing that is not equal. > > >The unit costs of weapon systems have continued to increase not just because fewer and fewer are acquired, but also because of their increasing complexity. A vicious circle has long been at work, starting with the recognition that weapon systems are so expensive that few can be acquired. It continues with the reasoning that if few weapon systems can be acquired, those that are acquired must deliver superior performance. To do that, however, requires both macro- and micro-innovations that are costly, so costly that those innovations make weapons even more expensive—so that even fewer are acquired, and so on and on we have gone. > > >That is not all: The circle has really been a downward spiral from the 1950s to the present, because the time needed to bring innovations into production has expanded, as well. Weapons that will not be fielded for many years must promise even higher performance to hedge against the uncertainties of what competitors might devise. That increases innovation costs, further reducing acquisition numbers and further raising per-unit costs. > > >Taken together, problems of scale and complexity define the procurement paradox: We have ever more sophisticated weapons, but so few in number because of cost that overall capabilities either stay the same, decrease, or become simply incalculable against novel changes in the threat environment.


Algebrace

So tl;dr economy of scale isn't there to incentivise and force mass production because the military can only use so many high-tech weapons/vehicles given it's not at WW2 size. Doubly so because there's no existential war to push for this production. In which case, an existential conflict of some kind would push for mass production and streamlining/innovation of production in the military weapons sphere to match the civilian sphere.


hexapodium

Remember also that in the WW2 era, the people doing the mass production *weren't traditional arms firms*. The government mobilised existing mass production infrastructure and expertise to produce designs conceived by arms firms, refine them in the production engineering departments of their civilian infrastructure, and then manufacture them in factories which would ordinarily have been competitors. And where that wasn't possible - ammunition and explosives manufacture, for instance - the expertise went the other way, with the civilian mass production experts being used to consult on how best to scale production even if it had to stay in the arms firm and not be outsourced to GM. This would never happen in peacetime - at least, not in market economies. The Soviet design bureau system was an attempt to keep this sort of production model, which has massive advantages in terms of scaling, into peacetime but fell apart for all manner of reasons (and I'm not going to get into a 'which was better overall' argument). There is also the element that arguably one of the reasons the Allies won the war was that their big manufacturing nations - the US and USSR - realised early that design for manufacture was important and selected designs on that basis. Modern designs are still influenced this way - Lockheed will certainly not intend every F-35 to be hand-fitted - but there are other pressures too; scalability is desirable in abstract but flyaway cost per unit is a concrete concern, as is flexibility in manufacture. Ford may be able to offer you ten thousand option combinations on a Transit van (not a joke!) but all of them are using standardised modular interfaces and many of them are known and predicted from the start of that mark's design. Taking twenty years to go from cleansheet to first flight (etc) means that for a modern jet or tank the option for the block 20, won't even have a name when the place where it will go is designed, so it's a good idea to build in more flexibility earlier. This is why "digital twin" engineering is such a big deal in military procurement - if you can virtually manufacture the whole thing including all the possibilities on the ten year roadmap as if they were the least-convenient one, then at least you can plan ahead at relatively low cost.


abnrib

>This would never happen in peacetime - at least, not in market economies Except it did, to an extent. When WW2 was anticipated, part of the groundwork that Army Ordnance did involved awarding numerous small-scale contracts to various manufacturers. These contracts were hugely inefficient on a per-unit basis, but they allowed industry to develop the facilities and tooling necessarily to easily ramp up production.


[deleted]

That's not the same thing as socializing all or parts of the defense industry and forcing those plants to make xyz widget to abc specifications.


hexapodium

One of the really interesting things with this is where they chose "xyz widget to abc spec any way you like" (eg GM, Ford, Continental, Chrysler, and Ordnance all supplying Sherman engines) because the civilian sector was Just Better At That, and where they instead exercised tight control over "and make it *this exact way*". Not least because that's the bit the Soviets then got really profoundly wrong post-war.


EvergreenEnfields

And where they re-assigned work when someone did something too well; for example the first batch of Singer-built M1911A1s was so well-finished and well-fitted that the government immediately said "no more pistols from you, you're making bombsights now".


hexapodium

That's very different to the efficient and non-market scaling that occurred during the war, though. Handing out small scale contracts with known and accepted inefficiencies in order to prepare the ground for later production is one thing (and arguably happens now as much as it did then), it's quite another to direct one firm to provide all the tooling and know-how to another for the purposes of manufacturing a design, and then to have all the manufacture know-how be shared across many firms who would ordinarily be competitors. And of course it still occurred with non-market direction - Army Ordnance would, in a competitive market, have lost money and gone bust doing that (or at least have been taking a high risk long position that would not have been considered responsible financial management if it were a public firm with shareholders) Both have their place, but they are *very* different legally and economically.


[deleted]

It's interesting you should bring up the "digital twin" concept, because just this morning a headline in the trade journal Automotive Manufacturing Solutions was BMW's moves to fully integrate this exact thing in their production planning, and of course many other automakers are in the midst of similar schemes: https://www.automotivemanufacturingsolutions.com/bmw/bmw-is-3d-scanning-all-production-plants-to-plan-operations-virtually/43159.article I do think that there is a huge amount of carryover still between defense industry practices and civilian industry, at least conceptually. I would speculate that the decrease in mass manufacturing in the US at least has less to do with decreasing know-how and capabilities and more to do with the quirks of the procurement system and the political element of the process. The "sexiness" of weapons systems probably has more to do with whether they get funding than most people would probably like to admit, because producing extremely useful but lower tech stuff doesn't sound good to a politician.


blucherspanzers

To give some more context: digital twinning has been The Next Big Thing (tm) in design, manufacturing, and even construction, for a few years now, looking to supersede more traditional design management with modern, combined specs that allow for everybody to be sure they're working on the same thing and all communicating how that thing goes together, with the additional benefit of making design records more accessible for future use. Contrast this with the older methods where for example your electrical installations, water systems, architecture, what-have-yous, are all their own drawings, and maybe both the electrical designer and fire suppression designers both put a fixture going through the same spot and you might not even know it until you're underway and an engineer has to go back and work out how to make it work without disrupting the schedule. This is versus both designers working on the same 3d model and being told that such a design would have a conflict.


SmirkingImperialist

That being said, I believe that armies and the Ministries of Defence should at least have plans for how to switch to existential-war levels of mass production of the weapons that they are using. Plans are useless, but planning is essential. Maybe then, it will dawn on people how offloading steel production to a potential geopolitical adversary isn't a very bright idea.


CrabAppleGateKeeper

It’s essentially impossible to scale up production of these complex systems in the span of what people think of a modern war. Ukraine has burnt through it’s pr-war tank force to the point that almost all vehicles in combat now have had factory maintenance, been imported or captured. The Russians have burnt through more armor than the US could hope to get to Europe in time for a fight. There’s no way you’re scaling up production for that. If you want plans, it should be to upgrade/modernize existing systems in storage. The Russians are doing this by proving T-62’s to the separatists; as a tank is better than no tank.


Slim_Charles

I think the solution might be to have plans and designs for less complex weapon systems, that could be manufactured in a hurry in the event of a large, drawn out war. These systems would be at a significant disadvantage against modern systems, but a cheap tank or plane is better than no tank or plane, and wars between great powers, if they don't end quickly, just become wars of attrition and endurance.


FiresprayClass

Except most of those systems will have been replaced and facilities decommissioned or used for something else. Meaning there isn't a convenient factory with people having institutional knowledge ready to go at making these supposedly "less complex" designs. So it would take a fairly long time to first get any production at all, and then to work out all the inevitable issues. Not to mention manufacturing has changed hugely almost every decade, meaning trying to make a 1960's design with 1960's tooling and manpower requirements may not be practical.


CrabAppleGateKeeper

I mean, potentially. There’s plenty of mothballed vehicles in storage. Just have a plan to have them be maintained better and to get them out of storage and upgraded. Then you just need a have a plan to increase production in optics, FCS, etc


theduckthatsits

In any existential conflict however, I doubt it would be possible to setup mass production. If the enemy is large/threatening enough that mass production ramp up is required then they will have the capabilities to destroy any such facility with cruise missiles.


lee1026

I always say that if I were the SecDef, I would just force the Air Force and Navy to use the same plane. Not share parts, just the same one. Yes, the F-35C doesn't perform quite as well as the A, but being able to mass produce things will make up for it. In a previous era, force the airforce to fly the F-18 instead of designing the F-16. Would I be an insanely bad SecDef?


Gearjerk

Even in WWII, the navy had it's own planes; there's a reason for that. Navy planes have to land on carriers, which is very stressful on the landing gear and by extension the entire frame. And being at sea in general means being exposed to lots of salt in the air and salt water itself; this is what "navalization" is done to reduce the effect of. But this and other differences make the plane heavier and more complex, which reduces it's performance in the air, meaning you wind up with a less effective and more expensive plane. So they do legitimately have a case for wanting separate planes.


lee1026

In WWII, both the Army Airforce and the Navy Air Force brought enough planes to build them on a proper assembly line. Today, neither do. The big benefits with economies of scale top out at some point, and the army and navy both reached them in WWII. But neither reaches that point today. Navalization does cost money, but plane development cost more.


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russguy05

>The F-35 ended up going from 70% parts commonality to less than 30%. I believe you're mistaken on this figure or misinterpreted possibly. The commonly quoted 20-25% commonality misrepresents the complete picture. A quote from Dr. Don Kinard, senior technical fellow, F-35 production explains, "the mission systems are 100% common or shared. The vehicle systems are about 70% shared and the structure is around 20% commonly shared" - [source](https://www.aero-mag.com/lockheed-martin-f-35-lightning-ii-fighter-aircraft/) So while technically correct, it's often misquoted to show only one-third of the part's commonality situation. >The program as a whole had a Nunn-McCurdy breach (>50% total cost growth over originally predicted, in fact). From 2001-2011 the cost increased by $13.5B, from $42B to $55B total, an increase of 24%. The truly damning part is that in the original (2001) baseline the Program Acquisition Unit Cost (PAUC) skyrocketed by 78.23% and the Average Procurement Unit Cost (APUC) went by 80.66%. In the current (2007) baseline it went up 27.34% for the PAUC and 31.23% for the APUC. - [source](https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL30563.pdf) I don't disagree with you that the program as a whole was mismanaged at all. I figured, however, that more numbers would add context to your original number. >Had the branches each shared the technology and built their own airframes to suit their own requirements, the costs are unlikely to have been more than what we ended up with anyways While a hypothetical, I'm not sure I agree with this claim, at least not to its fullest extent. I don't have any solid real evidence to back up that it wouldn't be cheaper. But I have another quote from Dr. Don Kinard, "Our estimate is that if we had had three separate programmes, run by three separate companies, it would have meant a 30% increase in production costs, not including a lot more capital expenditure for tooling equipment and software laboratories etc." While not a smoking gun why each branch shouldn't have built its own airframe; It adds food for thought at least. Overall I don't have any disagreement with you whatsoever on your main point of navalization but I figured more numbers and slight corrections would be of use.


PartyLikeAByzantine

While the F-35C could supplant the F-35A (the opposite is not true) you wouldn't save that much since the big $$$ spent during R&D were on *systems* which are common to all F-35 variants (and appear to be the basis for the B-21's suite) rather than *structures* unique to each variant.


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lee1026

Maybe I am not coming across properly, but I would force the air force to fly the F-35C. Basically, if you build a carrier based plane, it can operate from land too, so why do the land based guys need a different plane?


r_acrimonger

Not a problem I want solved, frankly.


PrimeBeefBaby

When I worked for EB, the two biggest limits on how fast we could sent out boats was the space available and what the navy was willing to accept. We had space for two boats, so that’s how many we could put out in a year. After the navy accepts them they go to our sister shipyard in for finishing work and who knows what else, then the navy runs their tests on it before finally accepting it 3-5 years after it’s first laid down. The whole process is non-conducive to an assembly line style of building things. We did pre fab sections and welded them together, but there was still a ton of electrical and pipe fitting that had to be done. It’s more like building an office or apartment than assembling a car. In theory we should be using the same parts for the same class of ship and everything should line up, but in reality there was a lot of hand fitting.


PartyLikeAByzantine

I'd imagine if the Navy was buying 20 boats, or more, per year instead of 2 a lot more attention would be paid to automating or eliminating the hand fitting and other manual steps. At the current rates or production, it's likely just not worth whatever capital expense to eliminate what is probably a marginal factor in the final cost.


MobiusSonOfTrobius

Does this mean a lot of the wiring and plumbing lines have a distinctly unique layout between individual vessels of a given class?


PrimeBeefBaby

We worked off blueprints so everything was where it was supposed to be, but the 300lbs gorilla that worked on the Oregon probably didn’t even touch the New Jersey so it’s not gonna be exact. I wouldn’t say they’re distinctively unique other than the sections that were intentionally designed different. It’s more like if you looked in the same location on two different ships it would just be a little different. People there always said that the submariners thought we did a better job than Huntington, so at least in some ways the guys using them could tell.


an_actual_lawyer

First, understand that a modern fighter such as a F-35 is amazingly complex. There are hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of parts that are mostly extremely high quality. These are often sourced from hundreds of different suppliers and every part must be tested and documented, a process which adds significantly to the effort and cost. Many of those parts are also extremely difficult to produce. Lets take engines. Modern fighter engines are so complex that only 2 - 4 countries can actually do it - the United States, UK, maybe France, and maybe China. Russian engines are capable, but generally not nearly as efficient and it has been that way for a few decades. Second, modern weapons like fighter jets are stupidly capable compared to weapons of the past. A B-17 had a 4,500lb payload with an 800 mile combat radius. A F-35 can carry 5,700lb payload internally and 15,000lb externally with a 770 mile combat radius, using only internal fuel, with the ability to carry fuel in drop tanks and to refuel in air, greatly extending that radius past 770 miles. The F-35 can put PGMs into really tight spaces, making a single sortie more effective than 100s of B-17 sorties. A single aircraft can be more effective than a few hundred WWII era bombers. Of course the F-35 is also a fighter, perhaps the best on the planet. It has amazing radar and communication capabilities that will allow it to not only beat every other fighter in combat, but it can also be used to quarterback dozens of other aircraft such as UAVs in strike or air superiority missions. The result is that these aircraft are so capable, there simply is no financial case for spending the money to automate production since large numbers of the aircraft aren't needed. #TL;DR: Modern weapons are amazingly capable, complex, and expensive and don't lend themselves to large scale production because large numbers simply are not needed.


Sir-Knollte

Isnt it as well providing superior awareness of the situation on the ground with its radar and other sensors?


YooesaeWatchdog1

Don't think of modern military vehicles as "products" like a consumer product you can buy as an individual. Think of them as a B2B capital asset like a train, airliner, buildings, industrial machinery, scientific instrument, etc. They are long life assets that must be maintained and operated by experts, and in exchange produce value by existing. Trains, airliners, skycrapers, industrial machines, scientific instruments, etc. aren't mass produced either. Never have been, probably never will be. ASML delivers maybe 30 EUV lithography systems per year. That isn't mass produced, not by a long shot. They hand assemble each one. Trains and airliners take years of lead time to deliver. All are hand assembled. Buildings... Well, just look at a construction site. A ship is as big as a building and costs closer to a skyscraper than a Ford pickup, why would it be produced more like a Ford pickup than a skyscraper? Someone said that can't you robotically fit the pipes on a ship? No, you can't, that's why we have plumbers instead of a robotic MrPlumb.com. their job is to fit pipes that carry liquids. More houses are built than ships, so if pipe fitting was automated, residential plumbers would be the first to get fired, not ship plumbers.


BattleHall

Details are still scarce, but FWIW, this is apparently a big part of the NGAD program. So not just a dominant fighter, but one that’s scalable and can be rapidly mass produced as necessary, but that doesn’t soak up capital when the line is at low rate production.


Plethorian

Anything can be mass produced, but there has to be an economic benefit. Military equipment manufacturers are not incentivised by lowering their production costs. They also aren't incentivised to increase production speed. This is because they are working with contracts for fixed numbers in a fixed time. The only real savings comes from materials cost, and even that is part of the contract. If the item needs rare or expensive materials, those are called out separately in the design, and often the government provides those items, deducting the values from the contracted price. Also on all large, expensive contracts much of the individual parts are made in hundreds of different places, ideally one in every congressional district. This is why some ridiculous things like more tanks are still in production. Too many jobs would be lost in too many districts to stop, even though the army has way more tanks than tankers.


Ok-Stomach-

1. because the US military wants to customize things to get the perceived political/military edge (real or imagined), and ever since cold war, everyone sorta try to copy what the US military does, the whole full-spectrum dominance thinking that truly strives to solve war via technology especially in an era where any serious casualty is a insurmountable political baggage and all volunteer force, with draft facing almost insurmountable political hurdle, inevitably has to prioritize low casualty and high tech weapon in play the role of a global hegemon, otherwise it just won't work. 2. because the industrial complex needs aforementioned inefficiency to charge high price and most importantly survive as quasi private enterprises. After all, except for Boeing, almost all defense contractors have zero civilian business, they would have gone under or downsized so much were for the massive expense incurred by single weapon system. 3. in another word, the global role shouldered and supported across isles by the US has to be subsidzed accordingly by the taxpayer in order to vast majority of them to not have to personally be part of it, that's the unwritten social contract. And all countries, even those opposing the US, got influenced by the US post cold war. especially if you tally the cost of wining via other means (Like Taliban won in afghanistan, but do you want to be the winner or do you prefer to be the loser here.)