America is back in the factory business
wsj.com
wsj.com
Interesting to see this migration of manufacturing back to US+ now that Chinese manufacturing costs have caught up to Mexico (which is a MASSIVE compliment btw - a lot of North American high value manufacturing such as in the automotive, medical robotics, and IC space is done in Nuevo León, and China has caught up).
https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2003-11-12-33-mexico-s-6729...
Plasticky goods probably yes, but for electronics assembly, it's already USD 2500 a month for a good experienced assembler.
The supply chain to manufacture generic plastics (most concentrated around Guangzhou and moving to Northern Vietnam) is different from the supply chain needed to manufacture generic pharmaceuticals (mostly concentrated in Himachal, Hyderabad, and central Maharashtra) is different from the supply chain to manufacture medical robotics (concentrated around Tijuana).
Cost of labor isn't the only variable when these decisions are made. Decisions need to take into account business continuity, availability of expertise, availability of suppliers, etc.
This is why low value manufacturing began moving from Guangdong to the Haiphong Delta in the mid 2000s and 2010s, and is now moving to Laos+Cambodia.
And this is why intermediate parts manufacturing (the kind which china is very competitive in) is returning to Mexico - incomes and costs in China have caught up to Mexico, which was the proto-China before the Peso Crisis and China's entry into the WTO. If I'm paying the same in labor in both China and Mexico, I may as well save money in logistics and taxes by reopening my plants in Mexico.
The story of manufacturing returning to ASEAN and India is the same - the factories that South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese companies built in the late 90s/early 2000s moved to China by the mid-2000s, but started either returning to Malaysia (electronics, plastics, automotive), Thailand (electronics, plastics, automotive), and India (plastics, pharmaceuticals) or began opening greenfield such as in Vietnam (electronics, plastics).
The return of manufacturing in South+SE Asia was due to trade wars the Chinese govt initiated against Korea (bought THAAD against NK, PRC didn't approve which sparked a mass boycott against Korean products in China), Japan (Senkakou/Diayou Islands standofd which caused a massive boycott against Japanese products in China), and Taiwan (a major Taiwanese origin KPop singer began pushing for Taiwan Sovereignty which sparked a mass boycott against Taiwan in China) in the 2012-2017 time period.
This led South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to initiate their "Look South" policies to decouple their economics from China. SK and Japan largely succeeded, but Taiwan lagged behind due to internal political acrimony.
Even if you paid for everything other than rent for a low skill worker, America and Canada are priced out of manufacturing based on rent/housing alone.
This is a huge reason why low skill labour can't come back.
Which is ridiculous given how much space they have
And low end is hardly coming back. This has be said many times in the past during brief alignments, then by the time we’ve tooled up the rug is pulled out from under us and a new 3rd world nation is doing it for 1/10th the cost.
This is not easy for me to believe even with the desire for a rosy outlook. Those who know know this was bs before.
There are fewer and fewer of those all the time, though. Manufacturing is now starting to move to Africa because Asia has become more expensive. I don't think there's anywhere left to go after Africa.
If I can get an ePacket from AliExpress for a $0.50 item without paying shipping (and presumably where the shipper didn’t eat the shipping+tariff costs either, those costs not being worth it to make at most $0.50), presumably there’s a way around both of these things.
Also, insofar as your argument would seem to generalize to any country’s domestic imports, this makes it “too strong”, and therefore suspicious as economic theory. There are plenty of markets outside of North America that can be served overland or with not-so-powerful ships from developing-country suppliers. (Africa can sell to itself, and to Europe, and the Middle East. Many South American nations can sell into Brazil. Obviously, you can drive a truck of t-shirts from Thailand or Vietnam straight to China. The Philippines can ship pretty cheaply to Japan and Taiwan. Etc.)
So why do these countries still have domestic factories? Why does Germany still make cars? Why isn’t China outsourcing electronics production to Vietnam? The same arguments should apply to them, even more strongly than it does to America. But we don’t see the same effect.
I remember there was drama[1][2] around it during Trump's administration.
It might not be so ridiculously cheap once 2025 comes around and they've finished phasing in price increases.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/trump...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#2019_Ex...
Anyways, long story to say that anecdotally prices haven’t really gone up at all. At one point they started charging VAT on orders (21%), but the switch to private delivery hasn’t seemed to increase prices.
He said that the Garment District is "never coming back." I suspect that this could be extrapolated to many other industries, for the same reason.
The issue is that the infrastructure is gone. Not just the physical and logical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure[0], as well.
Social infrastructure is ignored by everyone, but I think that it's the most important type of infrastructure, and the most difficult to [re]build.
I think you can find a few who still do such things in maker spaces, as well, but it only seems to be taken up by people who are already gainfully employed in things that make a lot more than low end manufacturing work.
Maybe you mean people who do or used to do it professionally?
How many people do you know that could turn raw fabric into a dress? I have can do the simplest repairs and even used a sewing machine a few times but that’s not particularly useful to a garment factory.
Sewing/dressmaking is a lot like woodworking. Being able to visualize things well in 3D is an asset, but also having good tools helps as well.
It's fairly obvious that people think that these folks can be replaced by software, but they say the same thing about engineers.
Also, entire communities were built around textile mills and transportation/consolidation/intermodals. When we shut down the Garment District, and shipped all the work overseas (and my friend freely admits his company did the same), it destroyed these communities. Lot of skilled labor left, and stopped training the next generation.
And, to answer another question, I don't have to "prove" anything. I was simply telling something that I heard from an extremely relevant source. I'm sure as hell not going to ask my friend to "prove what he said," for the convenience of Internet randos.
Basically, it's the social structure that is built around a community's Raison D'etre, or reason for existence.
This is schools, housing, curriculum (there's a reason that RIT is based in Rochester, for example), as well as oral and learned tradition.
"Tribal knowledge" is a dirty word to efficiency nerds, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and is highly effective, for a reason.
There are entire districts, known for the finest $WHATEVER. Lübeck, Germany, is known for marzipan (I don't really like it, but lots of others do). Bordeaux is known for wines and cooking, Afghanistan has some of the best opium, etc. Some of these are due to climate and soil, but others can be lost to other areas (Sonoma, for instance).
They may have great soil, but they also have great farmers, who have been handing their skills down, for generations, etc.
Once that is gone, there ain't no making new ones.
You haven't made a single compelling argument as to why we cannot also rebuild social infrastructure.
Much of this social capital requires lots of folks being interested in something since they were young and "playing" at it. Play is an important way to learn and understand it. Also I believe social capital requires adults to respect and take interest in the item, as children often take their cues from that.
That said, I wonder if industrial clothing manufacturing requires that much social infrastructure? That industry seems to move very couple of decades to a new country with the cheapest labor.
...and I don't have to.
Have a nice Easter/Passover!
For our own sanity we have to believe we have at least some handle on the reality unfolding around us - but even a cursory examination shows this cannot be true. Our lives are so brief, so localised, when set against the totality of all that is, was, and will be. Instead, as we shape the world, the world shapes us, and it is this emergent collective consciousness that conspires to give us all that we have.
How easily do you think a new team of the same size could come in and restart operations? Most likely it would take a long time and a lot of capital before that company was productive again.
That's what the parent means by social infrastructure: institutional knowledge--all the stuff that isn't written down anywhere.
The NASA-industrial complex that built the Saturn V rocket is largely gone: The engineers, factory workers, etc., who had the necessary knowledge — much of it tacit — are retired or dead.
But even if you fixed that the sub component infrastructure isn’t there. The raw fabrics are simply not available here so even if you did pay labor of 160/$ a day you would still not be able to get raw materials
We should greatly simplify the pipeline to raw textile to end user.
Give people something todo in the evening but passively consume other’s emotional dynamism via TV, YouTube and TikTok.
We make it cheap in fiat dollars to use up a shit ton of resources on enriched middlemen roleplaying American civic life.
It’s gonna cost a lot because their buying power isn’t going to get deflated, that’s for sure. Keep public access to commodities mired in legal obligations of recent history, yet more roleplay in accordance with tradition, which tons of money is put into reminding us we must obey.
We’re such a wacky culture of willful ignorant while proclaiming to be data driven and science minded.
Same with New Balance. Their shoes compete with Nike made in Asia, and are MIUSA.
We've just become addicted to cheap crap shoveled into Walmart and Amazon.
You fail to show what exactly in a social infrastructure inhibits clothing manufacturing or other industries.
One example that may come to mind is a possible cultural refusal of jobs offering low wages - yet there exist societies in which it is difficult to find personnel for menial jobs and yet clothing manufacturing still thrives.
Define “strategic.”
If you mean a vital military asset, remember that clothing factories were an important industry during the wars (including the Revolutionary and Civil wars, in the US).
Military uniforms are critical. Ask any soldier. Just a couple of days ago, a friend that is an ex-marine, was telling me about the marvelous gear he had for winter exercises in Lake Tahoe. Watch any show about the siege at Stalingrad, to see what improper uniforms can mean.
If you mean a vital financial asset, then think about the economic vitality that is created by any industry. All the factories, brokers, marketers, transporters, etc. Lots of busy little ants. The garment industry is huge. My friend is extremely wealthy from a fairly small, undistinguished corner of it.
If we think of “fashion,” as a flighty, will o’ the wisp “hobby,” then consider the amazing amount of money sloshing around the world, from it. I’m not a fashionista, and the company that my friend owns isn’t really a high-fashion outfit. They do high-quality “every[wo]man” clothes, for reasonable costs. If you spent an hour, talking to him about the logistics of his operation, your jaw would hit the floor.
Many folks would argue that alcoholic beverages are an unnecessary, and possibly immoral, product, but, once again, we have an enormous industry around it. I have a couple of other friends and acquaintances that are fairly wealthy, from selling booze. Prohibition taught us a pretty big lesson.
Many folks would say that advertising, mobile games, and “vanity apps” are “not strategic,” but I’ll bet there’s a ton of folks here, that would take issue with that statement.
I sometimes wonder whether that’s long-term truly the case. When I see various advanced aramid weaving processes and techniques designed and built in the US, I wonder if they had to scale a dizzying skills and operational mountain by themselves with the lack of a US domestic textile industry, or whether there isn’t much of a cross-fertilization in the entire journey from R&D through scale-out mass manufacturing.
I’m personally inclined to believe an innovation-oriented, Burkes’ian Connections-style society is only feasible when the Brownian motion of ideas occurs within a dense fabric of interplaying, fractally-complex industrial relationships between a massive number of different industries.
Turns out textiles is sort of the cheapest industry. It’s unique in that it requires capital in the form of machines, but doesn’t require a high skill labor force and the machines tend to be highly portable. So it ends up being an industry to follow if you want to know where the cheapest labor is. Basically what happens with textiles, is that every so often the standard of living in a country goes up, and the factory owners look around to try to save on labor, and hope to find a cheaper place to move to. What’s sort of interesting is that there aren’t many places left that have enough political stability that owners are willing to risk moving equipment to that are cheaper than bangledesh. This was like 10 years ago though, I’d be curious where textiles are located now.
The Bangladeshi textile industry will continues to remain for the foreseeable future, but textile manufacturing has started to return to India now that unskilled manufacturing wages are starting to reach the $150-200/month mark globally. When Bangladeshi and Indian unskilled labor starts going for $300-400/montn it will move to Nepal and then Eastern Africa (or Pakistan+Myanmar if their politics stabilizes).
Read “How Asia Works” for how things actually work in industrialising a country and its stages.
Countries actively choose to seek to develop an industrial base and they start with textiles. Then they evolve their industrial base to a higher income industry, and they let go of textiles over time.
That’s how it happens in an organised industrial development plan. In disorganised industrialisation, you have everything going on at once and you get Brazil.
There are so many layers to this. At $15 per hour minimum wage the math simply does not add-up. People are not willing to pay enough for clothing to be able to support mass US or European manufacturing. That cork was put on that bottle a long time ago. This, BTW, is the case for lots of other sectors, not just clothing.
“ Grupp [ the owner] is publicly committed to Germany as a production location and advertises that all raw materials for the clothing are purchased in EU countries, that all production takes place in Germany, that there has been no short-time work or layoffs for over 30 years, and that Trigema guarantees employees' children a job or apprenticeship.”
Quality is pretty good.
At a certain point of automation, America’s energy-cost and proximity advantages outweigh its cost of labor and regulation. This tradeoff as a whole occurs against margin, which is why we’re seeing middle manufacturing reshoring.
Shipping things via train or boat is stupidly stupidly cheap, even across the planet both ways.
Totally agree on shipping. There are other benefits to proximity, from lower geopolitical and supply-chain risk to tighter integration with design and the customer (due to enhanced information flow and lower latency).
Unfortunately, human hands are still much cheaper than machines.
I see a fair bit of manufacturing in Chicago, and I don’t see any of these equations changing in the way that this article purports them to
There's a reason why low-end manufacturing is not heavily automated no matter where it occurs - automation would likely be more expensive than using humans.
Also importantly automation tends to be expensive to reconfigure - for stable product lines where the same general processes are in use for years at a time, and product variability is low (see: cars) automation is highly successful. But for product lines that are more fly-by-night (see: most fast fashion) the reconfiguration cost of automation makes it even less practical.
Retraining a group of humans is vastly cheaper and easier than reconfiguring a fully integrated automated assembly line.
Totally agree. Just pointing out how the trade-off is rebalancing the margin at which reshoring makes sense down, and that this is a trend one can expect to continue as industrial robots get better and cheaper.
The real limitation is still programming and training the robots. I'm just entering this field, and its fun but yah it takes a team of expensive talented engineers to do it. Especially if you're automating to a higher degree. The progress with AI has been huge but I'd guess on the order of a decade before its commonplace.
Drive and cam shafts, bearing sleeves, rebuilds and reworks are all still unmatched in quality and remain largely american. Waiting 4 months for pajeet or Mr wong to float the parts over from a scrapyard masquerading as a machine shop versus sending a skilled onsite mechanical maintenance tech to rebuild an excavator blade or bucket sleeve is a no brainer.
Petroleum and mining industries have zero tolerance for a service or product without a stateside relationship
Terrible scripting and faked moments, but still interesting for the good and the bad.
The USD couldnt function as a reserve currency (from the perspective of the US) if the US didnt run a massive trade deficit on purpose (import way more than you export). That's very hard to do if your manufacturing isn't happening outside of the US in countries that you want to be dependent on the USD.
The day manufacturing actually makes a significant comeback to the US is the day that the US lost it's status as the nr 1 world power: the day the USD will stop being a world reserve currency. It would be extremely bad news for the US geo-politically and economically.
The next frontier will likely be electricity price affecting OPEX. ( it has always been the case but never gotten media attention ) For the rest, read [1] alephnerd's answer.
I was (or maybe will?) sysadmin their SCADA/IoT stuff.
The article is behind a paywall I can't pierce so I didn't read it, they may have mentioned that but I'll never know.
Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation. Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars.
The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation.
So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.
Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product.
Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.
One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.
I was educated in eastern Europe through grade 10 as a bright but somewhat lazy B+ student. I then completely sailed through grade 11 and 12 in Minnesota as an A++ student (battling for 1st GPA), and NOT due to my own brilliance :). We simply covered USA grade 11 and 12 material in greater depth in grade 10, whether physics or Shakespeare (calculus was the only thing slightly new so I took grade 12 2nd semester calculus in grade 11, then again grade 12. These were ap and ib courses in usa too). By the end of my North American computer science university, I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends from the old country. I could barely understand what they were talking about. Today I am reasonably successful, and have a job that's a multiple of their salary, but I would never claim it's due to my education or that I am smarter / better educated - I just live in a "better place" (for that very specific criteria).
That's personal anecdata of course, but by most metrics, USA education is a poor return on the money invested whether compared to fellow developed or other countries. I've rarely seen education brought up as our competitive advantage. In fact there's a sibling post on front page right now detailing the myriad issues with usa education system and how far we are falling behind the global norm :-(
A Production Tech who is maintaining, cleaning, and repairing electronics would attend a vocational program/community college in the US. Admissions to such a program doesn't need knowledge beyond Pre-Calculus/Algebra and basic literacy.
American education really shines at the Tertiary level, which matters more to US competitiveness. We need people to design automation (physical and computational) for existing processes, develop new technologies and processes, and manage said technology and processes.
All that comes from a college education, training programs such as within the armed services, research programs and labs within the federal government, or vocational programs taught by community colleges (which are almost free in most states).
All these educational programs in the US teach and remediate the skills deficiencies that you pointed out at the high school level. A lot of the differnce is also due to the fact that High Schools in the US increasingly don't provide vocational education, whereas Central and Eastern European educational institutes too.
Also, did you go to a vocational high school or a gymnasium equivalent school? In the US, Vocational Education and Gymnasium/College-Track education is clubbed into the same program in high school. To specialize in either a vocational or white collar field, the American system forces you to directly go to some form of tertiary education, whereas in the CEE educational model, you can jump straight into skilled trades after graduating vocational high school.
Based on your username, I'm going to assume you were from Croatia. The Croatian educational model (which is ultimately based on the German model) sorts and places students in White Collar and Blue Collar tracks around Grade 8, with competitive exams to enter Gymnasium (so realistically you start prepping around grade 6 or 7). The North American system (US/Canada/Mexico) doesn't do that until Grade 12.
I did go to gymnasium in Bosnia and Croatia. To your points, some of my friends went to electrical or medical or navigational high schools.
I do find in some states and provinces, there is informal division between schools and formal division inside school - the core curriculum vs advanced curriculum or ap / ib programs. But agree it's not as segregated or pronounced as in Croatia and some other places in Europe. I moved around and studied at 3 universities in North America. Nowhere near top schools but nowhere near bottom either. Average places e.g. University of Toronto. I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting, though there's downsides.
Some school districts do adopt informal tracking (college track, vocational track, normal track) but this is very much at the discretion of the local school district.
IB is occasionally included at local public schools in the US to help drive up rankings because College Board AP classes would require more staffing (3-4 AP physics classes can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB Physics track, and AP Stats/Calc AB/Calc BC can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB SL/HL track. In essence, you can hire 2 teachers with a Masters Degree instead of 4-5 for AP classes just in Physics and Math alone).
> I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting
The classes that are 400 levels in a Bachelors program in North America should be comparable to those taught in the first year of a Masters program. Depending on how many credits you came into college with, you may have never had enough free slots open to take those interesting classes.
Second, yours is a true logical statement, but I feel if we are talking of our North American education system as a competitive advantage, then we are inherently talking about comparative and relative performance. Which countries have worse educational system? I can name a few, certainly, but if we look at our economic and geopolitical competitors, how does our education actually compare? Not favourably has always been my impression. I'm curious to see any stats to otherwise, and especially when it comes to efficiency I. E. Money invested vs educational results (understanding measuring educational results is a tricky and controversial area)
Does anybody believe that Russian, Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese Indian etc etc etc (pick a meaningful economic competitor) education is worse than American?
The easy-to-remember alternative would be if (a) you got credits for your AP classes for specific college courses and (b) the faculty was not impressed with your results.
There's ongoing STEM/skilled shortage for existing demand for years. US education system is "great" to small/medium tier countries but not relative to her needs. Even immigration leaching talent from world isn't enough to plug gap so far. IMO overall underperforming and one of the weaker but more resolvable issues.
There are two paths in this industry though, work for the factory itself, very cushy job, sometimes unionized. You’re responsible for fixing small things as they come, but overall I don’t think much is expected since you’re one of the few in the factory who can program those machines so if you give a time estimate there’s nobody to argue. You likely stay in the lower end of the pays scale.
There is the consultant route, which can be gruelling, but you make closer to the higher end of the pay scale. Here it’s just a programmer shop, much is expected of you because you’re billing by the hour, also you will travel about 1/3 of your time, because you need to go from factory to factory to fix/install new code or machines.
- Tech multinationals are moving out of China fast. Apple is mandating Foxconn to move 50% production lines to India by 2024. And anticipates 50% iPhones out of India bu 2027 https://techwireasia.com/2023/01/india-is-anticipated-to-pro.... Most of the downstream apple supply chains in China have all left for Vietnam. Dell is going to cut all ties to China by 2027 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dell-made-in-china-us-exit. HP and LG is quietly exiting as well. Samsung has already left China a while back.
- China factories are closing left and right, and there's actually a long line of labors going back to countryside to farm, or waiting to go to Vietnam to work. You can see in Chinese citizens videos such as https://www.youtube.com/@ZGQSL https://www.youtube.com/@realchnrecord or English channels like https://www.youtube.com/@chinainsights4458
- According to the office for national statistics in China, for jan/feb of 2023 http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/202303/27/t20230327_38464161..., car manufacturing profits is down 41%. non-metal products manufacturing profits is down 39%. chemicals manufacturing profits is down 56%. electronics manufacturing profits is down 71%!! In fact, all businesses have dropped 22% in profit. This is supported by empty malls in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, as well as 50% collapse in real estate prices in Tier 1 cities.
- There are 7 stories high stacked shipping containers in all major ports in China. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3210870/c...
1. Apple is moving some of its assembly capacity out of China but the article itself mentions that they’re still dependent on component imports from China.
2. Dell has a plan to move manufacturing of products for the US market out of China. That’s hardly cutting ties.
Similarly Samsung may no longer have assembly plants in China but that says nothing of where the components are manufactured.
I can't say there's anything wrong about it. Do we want people in developed countries toil in sweatshops?
ANY system with numerous, complex, and hidden dependencies is fragile and higher risk. Covid, Russia/Ukraine, and now the BRICS/de-dollarization are making many of those dependencies explicit.
At the same time I don't think we should expect any factories coming to the US to provide massive amounts of jobs as they did in the past. Companies that manufactured overseas quite commonly had their administrative divisions either in the US already, or some other country, and as a huge amount of that is remote style work it will remain fungible.
The 'never coming back' mantra was mostrecently the unfortunate cry of the democrats during the 2016 election cycle. A shame because it cemented in the minds of the rural working class that they are unwanted.
We value diversity but then make these claims that our economy doesn't need this.
Stupidest thing economists got people to believe. That it's a good idea to export industries like manufacturing that benefit highly from technological progress. While keeping those most subject to Baumol's Cost disease.
Bonus: Prioritizing overhead industries like adshit, finance and insurance.
War is probably the argument by absurdity that disproves the above though.
Total BS.
Lol, that is stupendously overgeneralizing.
Shockingly, same narrative as Russia has been pushing in Ukraine for a long time (except for Kiev rather than DC). Unfortunately, it has worked really well for them and we all know the grim events that followed.
Ever used a computer running an Intel or AMD processor?
Ever worked at a company with Microsoft Windows or enterprise Linux servers (IBM RedHat)?
Ever connected to the internet or a cell tower? They use Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc technology.
Almost all large tech companies in the US and tons of smaller startups have active contracts with the DoD/DHS/DoE or with contractors and suppliers for them.
Congratulations, you're part of the defense industry. Last I checked, most of my coworkers and and peers voted blue, like most other people in the Bay Area.
The core Saudi-Iran national security concerns continue to persist with continued conflicts between both countries partners inside Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. [0][1]
The moment Iran gets the bomb, Saudi and the UAE would readily enter a hot war with Iran. This is a big reason the KSA and UAE are pushing forward defense pacts with Israel [2][3]
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/13/china-middle-east-d...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/06/china-saudi-iran-de...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-17/israel-st...
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/21/saudi-mbs-biden-israel-...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-led-coalitio...
[5] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/04/18/...
> The U.S. is low on rockets and artillery shells. Congress is funding a huge arms buying spree, but U.S. factories can't produce munitions fast enough. Price gauging is also a concern.
> Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposed a U.S. national security problem. The country can't make rockets and artillery shells nearly as fast as they get used when two major countries go to war. That's triggered an effort to speed up munitions manufacturing in the United States. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.
---
We may be, but at the same time we're realizing that we don't have the capacity for the current rate of use in Ukraine.
I've been saying for a while, if everything you do goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.