Or better put: why doesn’t the U.S government make their own weapons? I mean, why contract a new fighter plane to Lockheed Martin when they can turn around and sell the same thing to another country that hates us? Wouldn’t it be better (and cheaper) for the government to use their highly skilled government workers to make their own weapons in house (e.g. Manhattan Project) to insulate technology from theft and intelligence leaks?
Thanks
It’s not quite like that- foreign military sales are HIGHLY regulated by the government and DoD. Suffice to say, US companies aren’t selling any weapons that we care about to our enemies.
Second, what would make you think that the Federal Government can manufacture things better than private industry? They certainly can’t do it cheaper, not with Federal pay scales and benefits.
It’s much easier and cheaper to contract with private firms to manufacture weaponry and ordnance, and to then regulate the sale of similar things to other countries, than to try and hoard it all in-house.
because private corporations will build a better product with less expense than the government can do themselves.
If you like an idea of how the government might possibly build planes and other weapons, check out the VA scandal, or check out the lines to get a license, or any other government function they actually do.
And keeping that little escapade secret from the Russians worked so well didn’t it?
There is not much a government can do better than a private company that specialises in an area. That said, there are many companies whose greatest skill is extracting the maximum amount of money from governments for their services.
The relationship between the US government and defence contractors is complex at best. Almost symbiotic.
I can’t add much to what bump already side. These companies (Colt, FN Herstal, Lockheed Martin etc etc) already have the facilities, equipment, and expertise to produce the equipment. There is no advantage for the government to try to buy these three things when these companies already have them in spades.
Also keep in mind that while some projects are government-sponsored, many manufacturers take the R&D costs on themselves in the hope that they will find an organization that will buy their weapon (or camo pattern, or whatever).
I am not terribly familiar with modern export processes, but historically the export versions of equipment are stripped down and highly inferior to the version they keep for themselves. Google “Soviet Monkey Model” and you’ll see what I mean…
Hence the phrase, “Military / Industrial Complex.”
Because it’s always been done that way.
It’s not a matter of price (private manufacturers have a long history of overcharging and price gouging), but because, in the beginning, it was easier to use existing manufacturing infrastructure instead of the government building its own factories from scratch. The government also had a very small standing army for decades, so a factory would sit idle most of the time if it didn’t have nongovernmental customers.
It wasn’t until after WWII that manufacturers could be assured of full-time government contracts, as things like planes and tanks and missiles became essential to security. Since that was how it always was done, that’s why it was done that way.
Whether using government plants would be an improvement is a moot point, since the industries who depend on military contracts already have an army of lobbyists who would kill any proposal.
BTW, anyone who thinks the big businesses are more efficient than government agencies have never worked in a big business (I was at GE; their efficiency is more mythical than a mermaid.)
Nicely put. This is my view as well.
Yes. The regulations are there so that we don’t sell F-14s to Iran, or A-4s to Argentina.
Eh. Not today’s direct enemies, perhaps, but the sales certainly contribute to global violence. We sell to the Israelis and the Saudis and the UAE, hardly best friends, and to Turkey and Greece, India and Pakistan, despite widespread corruption and human rights abuses in many of those countries. We sold weapons to and trained Afghan forces, which were later used against us (to little effect) when we invaded their country.
Such decisions ostensibly led rise to groups like Al-Qaeda which, whose leader was explicitly pissed off at our profiteering meddling in the region. So we may not be selling weapons we care about to our enemies, but we’re certainly creating new enemies by selling weapons we don’t care about to countries we don’t care about. Most of our arms sales recipients are not very ideologically aligned, meaning they’re not democratic Christian or secular countries, and we arm them at our own risk. But look, shiny!
But is that really the case? I was under the impression that both in the US and elsewhere the arsenals of old had genuine development and manufacturing capability.
Do you really want to rehash this? 
(Emphesis added)
Do you live in the same world as the rest of us, or in some alternate universe in which “government workers” are “highly skilled”? Seriously, nearly every complex system or product developed for use by the Department of Defense (conventional weapons and equipment, strategic civil works), Department of Energy (nuclear weapons, enrichment facilities), Department of Transportation (domestical logistical and management systems), Department of Commerce (satellites and survey systems for NWS, OAR, NOAA, NESDIS, National Geodetic Survey, et cetera) has all been produced by private manufacturers, and it is the exception rather than the rule that the United States government has run any kind of production fabrication capability.
Aside from the Manhattan Project and the follow-on “Super” (thermonuclear weapon development) the only major government production facility I can think of off the top of my head is the Springfield Armory, which was closed in 1968, and even then was largely a final assembly house for components sourced elsewhere from private fabricators. Even the large government labs like Sandia, Fermilab, LANL, and LLNL are managed by private contractors at the behest of the DoE. Nearly all systems in aerospace (aircraft, missile and weapon systems, space launch vehiucles) have been developed, built, and largely integrated by private contractors working for the government. For instance, while the Saturn system was integrated and operated by NASA, all of the stages and Command/Service/Lunar Modules were fabricated by Boeing, Chrysler, Douglas, Grumman, and North American Aviation. Ditto for the Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”), manufactured by NAA (later Boeing) for the Orbiter Vehicle, Chrysler (later Martin Marietta, then Lockheed Martin) for the External Tank, and Morton Thiokol (later Alliant Techsystems) for the Solid Rocket Boosters, and integrated and operated by the United Space Alliance (USA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed from 1995 until the Shuttle program was retired in 2011. USA is also largely responsible for running ISS operations and maintenance, running the now-defunction Constellation program, and is bidding to be the prime integrator and operator on the SLS program.
The US government and its executive organs have neither the capability nor expertise to manufacture or even perform cradle-to-grave engineering support and secondary maintenance on complex weapon and warfighting systems. If you want examples of government-operated manufacturing industries, you can look no further than the Soviet-era weapons bureaus (in which production was dominated by political power rather than need or quality, resulting in the largely craptastic products)
or companies like British Leyland Motor Corporation, legendary for building some of the worst automobiles available on this side of the Iron Curtain. By procurement of systems and support services from private contractors, the goverment can focus on the contract management and system-level requirement management, which they also suck at, but at least it doesn’t involve maintaining physical facilities or maintaining inventory.
Stranger
places like Rock Island Arsenal still exist. though maybe now run by private industry for the government.
Perhaps because it’s supposed to be the government’s job to, you know, govern. And not make weapons.
Can you imagine the hysteria that would flood the internet if the government announced its own internal weapons manufacturing system?
Yes, especially for manufacturing warships and heavy ordinance, the Venice Arsenalis a famous example.
But of course in the feudal era the distinction between “private” and “government” production didn’t make much sense. A knight was expected to outfit himself and his men, and there might be smiths and armorers who lived and worked at the knight’s castle, or the knight might purchase arms from elsewhere. Armories directly controlled by the monarchy existed, but when the king called up his vassals he expected them to show up already equipped. The directly controlled armories and shipyards outfitted units directly controlled by the monarch rather than through his vassals.
And this is why in the UK they have the Royal Navy but not the Royal Army. The army evolved from a collection of feudal units outfitted and commanded by local bigwigs. The navy evolved from ships built by and for the monarch/kingdom.
I recall an article about cold-war weaponry that mentioned that even the Soviet Union had competing (government owned) conglomerates that bid against each other for major equipment like advanced aircraft. There may be only 2 or 3 companies capable of building an F-22 or a Foxbat, but they beat out a competitor or two by designing a better product.
IIRC, the 747 and the Galaxy C5A were competitors for the heavy-lift cargo category. Boeing lost, but the money put into the design process by the government allowed them to dominate the jumbo market for decades.
One other factor is that the government simply isn’t very good at hiring and laying off people, but industry is. It isn’t like there is a set amount of workforce with general skills that could be employed for a career building weapons: engineers for ships are very different than engineers for satellites, and the demand for ship and satellites is not constant over time.
Over the last couple years, the defense industry has laid of tens of thousands of workers simply because they needed to downsize in preparation for smaller defense budgets. Does anyone think that the Federal government could have done that sort of restructuring?
Here’s another example: the Avondale Shipyard near New Orleans built quite a few Navy ships over the last few decades, but work there was starting to dry up. So the owners, Northrop Grumman, decided to close it and consolidate operations at another shipyard at Pascagoula, Mississippi. The good effects of that is that the government will pay less for ships because the contractor has less underused infrastructure, the bad news is that lots of people lost their jobs. But considering that the US military has been unable to close a significant domestic base for nearly ten years, whether or not they are really needed, one can be certain that if the government owned both Avondale and Pascagoula, both facilities would be open today, and the taxpayer would be bearing the associated cost.
To be fair to the BRAC program, they’ve managed to close more than 350 installations since 1989, in spite of the heavily politicized nature of closing military bases. The program is on hold for the immediate future, though.
Buying weapons from private contractors is actually not ‘how it’s always been done’. In the 19th century the US Army mostly made its own weapons, at the federal arsenals like Springfield and Harper’s Ferry (small arms) and Watervliet (cannon). And the USN built almost all its own ships at the Navy Yards. Weapons were purchased from private contractors generally only in war time when production had to be ramped up quickly.
In the 20th century (or starting in the ‘New Navy’ era from the 1880’s) the arsenals and naval shipyards (and for example the Naval Aircraft Factory) co-existed with regular peacetime purchases from private contractors, which of course dwarfed those of the govt facilities in the big mobilizations of the World Wars. Government manufacture of conventional weapons only became rare from around 40 yrs ago, when the naval shipyards built their last new warships, and Springfield armory closed down. Watervliet still produces parts for cannon.
I also think with due respect your statement about big businesses being as inefficient as the government must stem from a similar limited or shallow experience as your historical survey. The USN conducted study after study in the long period of fighting over the future of new construction at the naval shipyards, and always found the same thing: it was substantially more expensive for the government to build warships itself than contract it out. Inefficiency is relative. You’re far from the only employee at a big company who thinks it’s really inefficient. And compared to some ideal of perfect efficiency you’re probably right. But compared to the actual results you get trying to do manufacturing in a government agency, it’s a different story.
And back to the OP, the Manhattan project was principally an advanced applied research project, albeit which eventually manufactured weapons and which involved big facilities. And despite the failure of the Manhattan project to secure its secrets, a significant caveat to its overall success, it’s possible to argue that it’s relatively easier to secure extremely sensitive secrets in government only compared to govt/contractor projects. The US government never turned over nuclear weapons manufacturing to private contractors.
The point wasn’t that we don’t sell arms, but that say… Lockheed Martin can’t just go sell Paveway II bombs and Javelin missiles to just anyone whenever they want, since the government regulates those sales. Ultimately the decision of who or who not to sell to is a political one, not a business one, and that’s what makes the difference.