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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

This is the price we pay for outsourcing our manufacturing capabilities. We should have kept in-house manufacturing alive, there is plenty of capacity for it here in the States.

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> Leo Liu, a sales director at Haigong Machinery, a Chinese company that assembles the machine parts for melt-blown lines imported from the US, Germany and Japan. "Everyone is considering mask manufacturing, but they don't understand the process. Once they learn the cost of these machines, they give up."

FTA. The US does manufacture some part of the whole mask making process, but I think no country can do it alone.

3M makes these masks in the US and around the world:

https://news.3m.com/blog/3m-stories/3m-responds-2019-novel-c...

I am not so sure because the cost of keeping the in-house manufacturing is also high. Consider military industrial complex, a bunch of companies had been kept alive through exclusive government contracts for 60+ years [1]. The result are companies optimizing for lobbying for maximum government dollars instead of efficiency or innovation. For example spreading the supply chain across every state: https://twitter.com/VP/status/971876888447725568?ref_src=tws...

I believe fragmentation costs of the supply chain are incredibly high. Especially when the supply chain is top down and sources complex components. A problem with the supplier causes the whole project to be delayed. I think this is a major contributing reason of some recent mega-project delays (SLS, F35, James Webb [2], your favorite mega-project here[3]...)

1. Since 1961 per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

2. Nobody built one before, but I feel like a lot of the screw ups could have been avoided.

3. Being a little facetious, mega-projects are hard.

Is there any reason to think that had that kind of manufacturing skills remained in the US that the situation would be better?

The claim is that China is hoarding N95 masks at least according to NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/business/masks-china-coro...

Easy to say now, but there's just not enough manpower to make _everything_ in house that we deem strategically important. And if the price isn't viable on the free market, how is it justifiable long term? I generally agree with your sentiment though.

Not enough manpower at the moment, for sure, but we should create it through education and social investment. It's generally a strategic advantage to have manufacturing capabilities no matter what discipline; it's less that we are reliant on China for this one particular thing and more that we have allowed our once-strong manufacturing muscle to atrophy. We subsidize gas heavily because it's a strategic advantage to the nation; call it a hunch but I think there are more knock-on benefits to being able to make stuff than is readily apparent (and I thought such a view would be more popular on Hacker News to be frank).

I think you are bang on with capabilities vs capacity. We should have one factory for anything critical so that in case we can’t get as much as we need on the free market we can ramp up capacity by building more of the machine that makes the product. If you don’t have all of the know how that is in that machine or plant design already in your one factory making the product you are starting from zero. Hence why all of China’s cheap labour deals had technology transfer riders.

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