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While the government absolutely should have fixed the incentives, I am a little puzzled why a huge private equity firm or a Bill-Gates-like figure didn’t fund more N95 machines when the government failed to. (Or at least, I haven’t heard that anyone has.) $25-100M for machines to help get the whole economy back on track seems like an obvious move on both economic and humanitarian grounds.

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I'm confident that the very tiny number of people with the expertise to build/maintain these melt-blown fabric machines is extremely busy right now. This is very different than building a tank where most of the parts can be built in basically any machine shop.

Typical machine shops do not have the capabilities to make composite armor, gas turbine engine components, aluminium oxynitride vision blocks, night vision equipment, thermal IR sensors, encrypted radios, targeting computers, MEMS/laser ring gyroscopes, high precision servos, or range finders. Without these parts, you have a target rather than a tank.

All modern production has bottlenecks. For items that governments consider important, they find ways to manage bottlenecks.

The issue with US N95 availability is that no one in authority considers the problem important enough to be worth fixing.

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