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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not convinced that outsourcing it to private enterprise is bad.

Counterpoint:

In every war that involves a substantial conventional component, there has been a huge ammunition shortage. Even though people know this, the phenomenon still exists.

Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.

It's possible that a sort of public-private partnership could exist where the government pays companies to maintain huge excess capacity, but I don't really see a substantial difference between that and the government just owning everything.

And it's important that this excess capacity gets used often, otherwise there's a big risk that it won't work when it's eventually called upon.

Which isn't to say that there's no place for private enterprise to supply ammunition to the government. Just that it probably shouldn't be the only source.

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> Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.

not in the US, many ammo providers have substantially expanded production in response to civilian demand, and only recently have prices come down

so if you limit your worldview to 9mm and .556, the US is far more capable of producing in volume than anywhere, perhaps well beyond the rest-of-the-world

Based on what happened with the Strategic National Stockpile [1] right before COVID hit, I don’t have much confidence in government run capacity either:

> From 2017 to 2019, the Trump administration failed to replace masks and other supplies used in earlier disasters. In May 2020, in a House subcommittee meeting, whistle-blower Dr. Rick Bright, previous director of Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, explained that the Trump administration had ignored his early warnings to stock up on masks and other supplies to combat the coronavirus.

I’d like to think that we’ve learned our lesson with COVID and we can blame it all on the-administration-that-must-not-be-named but that’s naive. The supply problem has been growing in magnitude for decades and is likely caused in part by the same policies that lead to anticonsumer consolidation in the rest of the market.

Bring back trust busting!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile

Maybe we shouldn't elect presidents who make it their mission to destroy anything the previous administration built?

Depends entirely on precisely what the previous administration built, don’t you think?

We had a similar situation in the UK where most of the emergency supply of masks, etc. had expired when covid started. The obvious way to handle this seems to be to make a deal with a big wholesaler or wholesalers where the government pays them to maintain a much larger buffer than they normally would. This would ensure the stock was always being rotated. The pre-covid scheme of paying some randoms to keep a warehouse full of mouldering stock seemed doomed to failure.

One problem with masks is that they are statically charged and that charge depletes pretty rapidly. So it's not as if you can create a bunch of stock for 'some unspecified time in the future', you'll have to continuously renew it at that level every couple of months. This is certainly going to raise eyebrows if there isn't a demand for a longer period of time and someone figures they can cut that cost without impacting safety. Which works. Right up until the next pandemic and then you're back where you were before. This sort of vigilance is very costly and it is hard to get everybody to agree on the appropriate level over time.

> Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity.

IMO, private industry produces, the government buys and store it. I'm thinking wrongly here?

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