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America won WWII on factories
What worked in 1941
A World War II bomber was simple enough that the government could hand it to Ford and let them figure it out. The country could pivot because its commercial manufacturing base was enormous.
Jobs that disappeared
Today's systems are far more complicated, and there is no commercial capacity left because it was offshored. Defense manufacturing jobs were cut by 63 percent just after the Cold War ended. The average age of a skilled worker is early 60s, and no one is coming up behind them, because the jobs were killed for 40 years.
Where rebuilding starts
Kids in the 80s and 90s were told that without a four-year degree they weren't worth much. Munitions and ships today are built on specs from the post-Cold War industrial base, and a commercial manufacturer could not take them on even if one existed. So the rebuild starts with the defense industrial base, and the commercial base follows.
How did Ford build a bomber an hour?
Ford's Willow Run plant in Michigan was designed to build B-24 Liberator bombers on a moving assembly line like the ones used for cars. The main building was more than half a mile long. At its peak in 1944, it turned out roughly one bomber an hour. Willow Run produced more than 8,000 B-24s by the end of the war.
Why did defense jobs fall after the Cold War?
The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and the Pentagon's budget shrank through the 1990s, a drop often called the peace dividend. In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry told defense executives at a dinner that fewer companies would be needed, and consolidation followed. Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin.
Why did a college degree become the default goal?
Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz documented in their 2008 book The Race between Education and Technology that the wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates widened sharply from about 1980. That widening made a four-year degree look like the surest path to a good income. Goldin won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2023 for her work on women's labor market outcomes.
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