Weapons of the Week #9: Red Glare
A Mesquite ammunition update to go with your barbecue and fireworks today. Read to the end to see me say something nice about Jake Sullivan.
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It’s our first Fourth of July without Toby Keith (RIP). Below, you can see him in Baghdad leading the troops in his most immortal lyric “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A/We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.”
Unfortunately, I think this is a really good song, on technical grounds. The man was talented enough that you can overlook the fact that he also wrote a song about an Afghan family who hit the road (“We should do real fine out around Palestine or maybe Turkmenistan”) after they’ve been liberated by American bombs. That song is called “The Taliban Song.”
Most people who don’t want Trump to be president—your correspondent very much included—are worried about what will happen next in the US and the world it still largely dominates. One implausible and unhelpful reaction has been to attribute Biden’s crisis to some kind of pro-Trump media bias. Incidentally, this complaint also brings me back to the peak years of the Global War on Terror: remember when elites said the Iraq War was unpopular because “we see only the bad news, not the good”? Donald Rumsfeld even blamed bad press on “al Qaeda media committees,” though he sensibly added that he couldn’t “take a string and tie it to a [particular] news report and then trace it back to an al-Qaeda media committee meeting.”
Over on Twitter/X, I was especially struck by one attempt to highlight positive news about America: “Lots of stuff to celebrate as we fight to preserve democracy and attain a more perfect union…The Pentagon opened an ammunition factory in Mesquite, TX that will produce 30k shells per month. Bringing back public enterprise to defend democracy abroad.”
If you’re a reader of this newsletter, you’ve heard a lot (maybe more than you’d like) about 155mm shells and the plant in Mesquite, which is the first new factory to open under the sign of Bidenomics. As I’ve laid out here, the actual details of the investment aren’t especially encouraging as regards an American manufacturing revival: the plant moved into an existing business park, and all of the capital equipment was shipped over in crates from Turkey and installed by Turkish workers. Not only is this questionable as “reshoring,” anyone with any knowledge of the current Turkish government will also question the description of this investment as part of an “Arsenal of Democracy.”
In a previous newsletter, I had asked: “The equipment came from Turkey. But could you buy similar equipment in the US?” We finally have an answer, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:
General Dynamics selected Repkon, whose headquarters are in Turkey, to supply the presses because no U.S.-based vendor could meet the deadline of having the plant up and running in two years…U.S. companies could have duplicated a lot of the machinery, but not quickly enough,” said John Kelly, CEO of the U.S. arm of [South Korea’s] Hanwha Defense.
But it gets even better (worse?)
The robots are made in Germany by Kuka. The firm was bought in 2016 by Midea, a Chinese appliance maker. The equipment isn’t subject to any of the sanctions imposed on some Chinese machinery and raw materials, an Army spokesperson said.
So the first jewel in the crown of Biden’s anti-China defense-industrial base features production lines designed and installed by a Turkish firm, using capital goods produced in Germany by a multinational Chinese conglomerate. So much for the multiplier effect! This would be perverse enough by itself. But the WSJ article also suggests that top US brass barely know what’s going into their own billion-dollar investment projects:
Walking past new hydraulic presses and orange robots handling semifinished artillery shells, U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth had a question for a manufacturing company executive.
“Do the Russians have this technology?” Wormuth asked Ibrahim Kulekci, chief executive of the Turkish firm that designed and installed key machinery in the plant.
Kulekci said they wouldn’t get it from his firm. “Keep it that way,” Wormuth responded.
If anyone in the Office of the Secretary of the Army wants to keep on what’s going on here, they could apparently do worse than just subscribing to Weapons of the Week. If I can’t answer questions definitively, I can at least raise relevant questions. For example, if the deal “was not a technology transfer,” does this mean “Repkon’s process and equipment are proprietary.” If so, “[w]hat if they decide to pull their automated assembly lines out?”
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Factories take a long time to open, and anyone with eyes can see that there has been a genuine boom in plant construction spurred by the CHIPS Act. If people eager to defend Biden’s economic record bring up an example like Mesquite, it is not for lack of real achievements they might point to. It is because they want to help construct a common sense definition of the popular interest in which militarism and domestic economic progress are complementary, if not mutually dependent.
Here, I think we could all take a page from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, at least the pre-2020 version of him who participated in the Carnegie Endowment studies on Foreign Policy for the Middle Class. In addition to discussing trade politics, the report recognized “strong support for sustaining or increasing defense spending that provides an economic lifeline for working families and communities,” and declared it “understandable why politicians on both sides of the aisle fight to preserve what amounts to the United States’ only national industrial base…because of the economic benefits their constituents derive from it.”
This much is basic military Keynesianism. But the report also made a more notable, and commendable recommendation:
Use of the defense budget for domestic economic benefits deserves to be the subject of a genuine national conversation, rather than treating it as an open secret and conflating it with debates on the substantive defense requirements.
The administration and its enthusiasts have apparently forgotten this advice. “Genuine national conversation” (better: debate) is precisely what is being avoided when the White House decides “to sell the war efforts abroad as a potential economic boom [sic] at home,” or still more ludicrously when they claim that EV tariffs are an infosec measure against the risk of computerized Chinese smart cars becoming “spy cars.” “Conflation” is exactly what goes on when liberal bloggers accuse a Republican congressman who voted against military appropriations of “thumbing his nose at a good chunk of new manufacturing jobs that [local] leaders fought hard for.”
We should take the old Jake Sullivan (and the old Joe Biden, for that matter) at his word: We should have explicit debates about economic planning and about American power. We should reject any convenient sleight-of-hand in which a consensus on one issue is used to sneak through controversial action on another.
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The new plant in Mesquite provides one example of what this means. Anyone who wants to celebrate the factory as both a triumph of industrial policy and a substantive contribution to global democracy needs to acknowledge that the capital equipment came from abroad and that some of the deadly material produced in Mesquite will go straight to the IDF, which is currently waging a war which even Joe Biden has described—in his flashes of lucidity—as “indiscriminate” and unnecessary. Until we’re ready to have that conversation, the rest is noise.
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