It’s complicated.
Give the fact that the premise of the premise of the question is counterfactual, shouldn’t this be moved to IMHO, or maybe just directly to The Pit as there can be no factual response?
Stranger
Moderating
There have been a number of factual responses. If you wish to comment on the premise further, you are welcome to start a new thread in the forum of your choice.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Working within the industry (albeit not for any of the contractors directly affected by some hypothetical deal which could be affected) I do have a postion, but not one that can be presented without addressing both the falsity pf the primary claim and the general dissimulation of the industry in general that would verge upon or extend into the realm of ostensible (but informed) opinion. The question as stated can no more have a factual answer than can the question, “How fast does Superman fly?”, and for essentially the same reason.
Stranger
Then start a new thread in IMHO or the Pit and link to this one.
Meh…not worth the effort.
Stranger
Which is what I wondered when I posted it.
In some sense I suppose my ostensible question was really a surrogate for an associated, or perhaps a ‘meta-question’, i.e. does the question posed even have an answer. Indeed, quoting myself:
“. . . the answer to my question may be equally elusive if not non-existent”.
Indeed, as you and others made clear, the answer to the meta-question is no. So, thank you.
Yeah, even if the purported deal were legitimate, it still wouldn’t be possible to have a definitive answer because it isn’t a zero sum proposition. Even if no one else were purchasing those weapon systems (and it is pretty rare that weapon systems manufacturers are operating at significantly less than planned capacity to any active contract, which should tell you a lot about the inelasticity of the global arms market) it is not to say that the pool of available labor wouldn’t be employed doing something else, particularly given how difficult it is to hire qualified technicians and engineers in many of the pertinent fields. Anybody building F-15 avionics assemblies could likely get a job working at, say, Tesla (if they didn’t mind moving to Fremont) so you really have to look at the level of underemployment in pertinent sectors to make an informed guess about whether and how many jobs might be ‘lost’ by cancelling sales to Saudi Arabia.
Stranger
‘Jobs’ gained/lost is always slippery, and depends how far you scope out or zoom in to frame the picture. A bit ago there was one on the impact of entitlement spending on ‘jobs’. At that wide a scope it’s a pretty ridiculous question IMO.
In the long run the general level of employment has next to nothing to do with one particular spending policy or another (spend on entitlements, defense, or don’t collect that money in taxes to begin with).
However in political debates over narrow projects there are specific people working for specific companies and they may very well lose their jobs, sooner, if a particular program/contract doesn’t go through. They aren’t going to be much comforted by being told their job was doomed eventually anyway, nor that they could get another quite different job, or even a fairly similar job, in a generally robust employment market. They’d much rather keep their current job, seniority, place in the organization, bird in the hand generally.
And in big ticket capital item businesses (which includes defense procurement) the situation often really isn’t that another contract would come along. In fact if another one came along the company could do both, and the prospects for people already at the company would further improve. And again bird in the hand.
There is likely some meaningful impact on employment at some particular contractors if the US broadly pulled back on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. In rough order of magnitude I’d guess it’s probably 1,000’s over a period of some years, so maybe some 10,000’s person-years of employment in particular companies? Once you start adding the people the local eateries, car dealerships etc. for whom business would be slower because of fewer jobs at ‘the plant’, that’s when it’s starts to gradually more dubious the further you scope out. But even for a community it’s not imaginary, and more important the people there care about it a lot.
Whereas the broad millions, to the extent they care at all about what the US does with Saudi Arabia, in many cases just want a political cudgel to bash the administration, whatever administration. Some big foreign policies in the past have become legitimately political (like Vietnam broke the previous bipartisan consensus on an activist anti-Communist foreign policy). But how to deal with Saudi Arabia isn’t really a left/right philosophical issue and beyond foreign policy experts few people really care that much…except people whose jobs depend on it or a lot of jobs in their communities do, the jobs they have now, the ones they want to keep for now.
Just as side note on F-15 the most likely prospect for extending that production line beyond the ones for Qatar, to be completed as early as 2022, is Israel. Israel is the first combat operator of the F-35 and that’s consumed a lot of money. But the IAF now also believes it also needs more non-stealthy ‘bomb trucks’ and a (US financed) buy of further new F-15’s is a real possibility. Nine retired US Air National Guard F-15D’s went to Israel last year for extensive modernization, the first in many years since new and used F-15A/B/C/D’s and the Israel-specific F-15I were acquired from 1970’s to 90’s.
The new F-15SA’s and modernization kits for older Saudi F-15’s will be complete by ca. 2020, already well along. It’s theoretically conceivable the tail end of F-15SA would be denied to SA, and purchased by the US govt for the USAF or IAF instead, if such a drastic action were taken, though I doubt it would be. Boeing is not likely to lose orders for whole new F-15’s due to action v Saudi Arabia. After market support maybe.
What’s the link to F-15s? The Saudis already own 170 F-15s, and is there any evidence they’re going to buy any more?
There’s some evidence the Saudis are interested in the THAAD anti-aircraft system, although apparently not enough to make a deadline to sign a contract for the deal back on September 30:
There’s the deal for 4 Multi-Mission Surface Combatants, which has been knocking around since 2015:
Other potential deals include a potential deal for up to 150 Blackhawk helicopters, but the actual number for which the Saudis have agreed to pay for so far is 17 helicopters over the next 4 years:
It seems Gyrate has hit on some similar points.
I remain skeptical that a number can be quantified because a large number of the deals involved seem to evaporate when they’re looked at.
Yep. The headline number of 500,000 jobs is nonsensical, but as with any specialized industry, there are many chains of subcontractors below the prime contractors. So the actual number is probably larger than we think. I’d ballpark the number as about 1 worker-year per $1M of the contract. But that’s a very gross estimate.
A week or two ago, Paul Krugman addressed this in an op-ed piece in the Times. He made two points. First that there is no $110 B contract, just an intention to buy maybe that much. And second that some of those jobs would be in Saudi Arabia. Then he guessed (freely admitting it was a guess) that it might go up to a few tens of thousands of jobs at most.