This spare capacity can be maintained on the cheap.
"Spin up production for X units of Y product for Z weeks per year and we'll give you $N. In the event that we need you to swap over for a national emergency, we'll pay you $M per week of production."
It's like my company. We used to have a robust DR capability. We replicated our data to another site, and could have that site up (with all the servers/services running) within a 24 hour period. We had plans and equipment for running our call centers, for staffing at the secondary site, everything all bolted together in an annual exercise that helped us catch changes.
Then new IT management comes in and sees what they think is wasteful spending and view the annual exercise as disruptive. So they start to gut the entire process, instead relying on sandbox exercises for specific applications. Not taking a holistic view of our computing environment.
So now this manager gets promoted 2x for reducing "unnecessary costs", as well as improving productivity because IT no longer has to focus on that wasteful DR stuff...
> On March 1, 2018, Trump announced his intention to impose a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum imports. > Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to impose a 15% tariff for 150 days if there is "an adverse impact on national security from imports
>NAFTA originally required automakers to use 62.5% of North American-made parts in their cars to be imported duty free
You can just require that 25% of PPE purchased by the government has to be made domestically. That would give you 3-4 factories. You make a requirement so they are 1000 miles away from each other and be able to 4x capacity within 2 weeks.
You can't run long-term planning like this in a country where one party has short-term gains as one maxim, and limited government as the other.
Just throwing pasta against the wall here.
There are plenty of people who foresaw this. But there are hoops to jump thru which deterred those people from being proactive. I'd like any post-mortem to propose structural, systemic remedies. So we're not just reliant on savvy leadership for future crisis.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-25/3m-double...
This is 3M’s moment, one for which the staid, 118-year-old Minnesota manufacturing giant—the maker of Post-its, Scotch tape, touchscreen displays, and scores of other products—has been preparing for almost two decades. Coming out of the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, the company realized it wasn’t fully equipped to handle unexpected explosions of demand in the event of a crisis, or what it calls an “X factor.” It decided to build surge capacity into its respirator factories around the world.
And with terrorist groups and state actors realizing that animal viruses are potent biological weapons, and legitimate research centers working on making viruses airborne - chances of another screeching halt in the next 10 years due to malice or incompetence are not that low.
How do you imagine this to be implemented in reality? Does the Federal government send a random selection of people a letter that they are to be relocated to Wyoming for the next 3 months? The US is not a command economy.
No. They offer a solid wage to anyone who wants a job and is willing to be trained. Like we did by the millions to build our national parks, dams, roads, and other infrastructure in the 30s and 40s.