Our security and our ability to develop future battlefield capabilities are dependent on potentially unreliable supplier nations who might not have our best interests at heart.
If you’ve ever had the privilege of visiting the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, you may have seen the RB-47H stratojet parked inside the museum’s Cold War Gallery.
It’s an impressive piece of 20th-century history, and one that holds a very personal significance for me. At the height of the Cold War, my father, Lt. Col. Norman Paul (U.S. Air Force, retired), served as the navigator in that very jet.
My father spent many hours airborne, serving his country in missions that, to this day, he won’t disclose. He loved his flying days, and I’m grateful that his sturdy B-47 was constructed with the top-notch parts and the cutting-edge electronics of the time that kept him safe in sometimes unfriendly skies.
But from the vantage point of the 21st century, I am forced to question whether America’s manufacturers could produce a similarly reliable and high-tech equivalent today.
There’s a problem with our modernized fighting force: Our armed forces have grown alarmingly reliant on suppliers in countries like China for vital military components.
Recall the daring night-time raid by troops equipped with night-vision goggles that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. Or consider how often American soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan depend on air support equipped with Hellfire missiles.
Would you believe that the U.S. now depends on China to supply the rare earth metal lanthanum that’s required for those night-vision goggles? Or that we also depend on China for the propellant in our Hellfire missiles?
There’s much more, though. The U.S. has no domestic production of the high-tech magnets required to manufacture military-grade Humvees, Apache helicopters, or Virginia-class submarines. And there is only a single domestic manufacturer of the large-diameter copper-nickel tubing used in U.S. Navy ships. The sole alternative – a European conglomerate – has been cited for anti-competitive practices, including price fixing and dumping.
According to a new report by retired U.S. Army Brigadier Gen. John Adams, this near-total dependence for critical components and raw materials creates worrisome risks. For example, Beijing could withhold access to lanthanum or other rare materials to force up the price, or pressure the U.S. to resolve disputes on terms favorable to China.
Our security and our ability to develop future battlefield capabilities are dependent on potentially unreliable supplier nations who might not have our best interests at heart.
These are serious gaps in our armor. But we didn’t reach this position of dependence overnight. U.S. manufacturing has gradually migrated offshore. And though U.S. manufacturing remains highly productive, and accounts for nearly 70 percent of all private-sector research and development, the fruits of our R&D (like the smartphones in our pockets and the GPS navigation in our cars) are often manufactured overseas.
We’re now learning that our nation’s defense industrial base – the domestic companies that make our weapons, vehicles and essential military hardware — have weakened in lockstep with the wider manufacturing sector.
The Obama administration has acknowledged the severity of this problem. Its “Sector-by-Sector, Tier-by-Tier” program, for example, is a necessary effort to examine and understand the complexities of some of America’s most essential defense supply chains.
But there are plenty of other steps we must take to shore up our defense industrial base.
We should increase stockpiles of vital raw materials and strengthen efforts to resume mining and producing them in America. We should properly apply, enforce and, in some cases, expand existing domestic sourcing preferences for the Department of Defense.
We should increase long-term federal investment in high-tech industries so that the distinguishing attribute of the U.S. defense industrial base – its technological innovation – remains intact. And we need to expand the collaboration between government, industry and academic institutions that trains and retains our specialized, high-tech manufacturing workforce.
The United States fields the strongest military in the world, thanks to the committed and capable men and women who make up our fighting force and the sophisticated equipment they carry.
But weapons that can’t be built can’t be fired. We must address the vulnerabilities in our military supply chain and fill in our defensive gaps. Nothing less than our national security is at stake.
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