Yes, you can't just turn a Range Rover Factory into a tank factory.
But if you wanted to build a tank factory from scratch, you'd find it much easier to do so in a country that already had car factories in it. Otherwise you aren't just building the tank factory; you are building a tank factory and all the supply chains and all the ball bearing factories and so on.
And if I was hiring people to work in my tank factory I'd much rather hire people with experience of the Range Rover production line than supermarket shelf stackers or fruit pickers. The processes won't be the same but they must be closer.
I'm coming round to the view that having at least one loss making car factory in the country still running is worth a bit of subsidy: not to "preserve jobs" in the car making industry, but to preserve supply chains and skills so that they are there if we need to pivot to tank-making in a hurry. Any cars they actually sell that defray these costs would be a bonus. I've recently learned the term for this is "sovereign capability", which is suddenly relevant in a world where we can't even trust the Americans to sell us what we might need.
"I'm coming round to the view that having at least one loss making car factory in the country still running is worth a bit of subsidy: not to "preserve jobs" in the car making industry, but to preserve supply chains and skills so that they are there if we need to pivot to tank-making in a hurry"
And what skills do you think a car factory has, to make tanks? How many people do you think there were in the welding team at Honda in Swindon? How many of them ever did a weld vs the number that were planning upgrades to the robots? Can the robots be upgraded to weld thick steel? Do the quality control people who currently test pressed panels suit testing armour plating? What about the suppliers of steel panels? Can they make armed panels?
Do you need all the people who check for rattling dashboards, or small paint bubbles? Or are you just trying to get large numbers of killing machines out there? There are huge numbers of people focussed on the paint of cars, because it's one of the biggest bugs when cars get their final check.
A huge amount of manufacturing jobs in the UK are not bashing things together. They aren't even near the line. They're about improving an automated process. Something that takes years to get going and get right and is gradually improved over time. Once you get it right, it's amazing and you get cheap cars. But you won't quickly switch a modern factory to making tanks. You won't find that many people in a car factory to be that useful to making a whole different product with different priorities.
If you suddenly wanted to make a load of tanks, you'd rope in the people in specialist engineering and manufacturing companies. The people who make one-offs to a specification and still have people who do manual welding. By the time you got automated tank making up and running, the war would probably be over.
And the problem with "sovereign capacity" is that you're always going to end up fighting the last war. Government doesn't move that fast. The USA and the UK have huge budgets for arms but got our asses handed to us in Afghanistan by a load of guys making explosives with weedkiller.
On the modern battlefield a tank is only a very heavy death trap. A country with war-waging ambitions should concentrate on missiles and other aimable munitions. I should think that the required know-how, technologies, supply chains and so on for these differ quite substantially from making Ford Pumas and Nissan Qashqais. Drones of the Reaper type, well, possibly.
That's the Nolongerverytorygraph to you, sunshine!
Yes, you can't just turn a Range Rover Factory into a tank factory.
But if you wanted to build a tank factory from scratch, you'd find it much easier to do so in a country that already had car factories in it. Otherwise you aren't just building the tank factory; you are building a tank factory and all the supply chains and all the ball bearing factories and so on.
And if I was hiring people to work in my tank factory I'd much rather hire people with experience of the Range Rover production line than supermarket shelf stackers or fruit pickers. The processes won't be the same but they must be closer.
I'm coming round to the view that having at least one loss making car factory in the country still running is worth a bit of subsidy: not to "preserve jobs" in the car making industry, but to preserve supply chains and skills so that they are there if we need to pivot to tank-making in a hurry. Any cars they actually sell that defray these costs would be a bonus. I've recently learned the term for this is "sovereign capability", which is suddenly relevant in a world where we can't even trust the Americans to sell us what we might need.
"I'm coming round to the view that having at least one loss making car factory in the country still running is worth a bit of subsidy: not to "preserve jobs" in the car making industry, but to preserve supply chains and skills so that they are there if we need to pivot to tank-making in a hurry"
And what skills do you think a car factory has, to make tanks? How many people do you think there were in the welding team at Honda in Swindon? How many of them ever did a weld vs the number that were planning upgrades to the robots? Can the robots be upgraded to weld thick steel? Do the quality control people who currently test pressed panels suit testing armour plating? What about the suppliers of steel panels? Can they make armed panels?
Do you need all the people who check for rattling dashboards, or small paint bubbles? Or are you just trying to get large numbers of killing machines out there? There are huge numbers of people focussed on the paint of cars, because it's one of the biggest bugs when cars get their final check.
A huge amount of manufacturing jobs in the UK are not bashing things together. They aren't even near the line. They're about improving an automated process. Something that takes years to get going and get right and is gradually improved over time. Once you get it right, it's amazing and you get cheap cars. But you won't quickly switch a modern factory to making tanks. You won't find that many people in a car factory to be that useful to making a whole different product with different priorities.
If you suddenly wanted to make a load of tanks, you'd rope in the people in specialist engineering and manufacturing companies. The people who make one-offs to a specification and still have people who do manual welding. By the time you got automated tank making up and running, the war would probably be over.
And the problem with "sovereign capacity" is that you're always going to end up fighting the last war. Government doesn't move that fast. The USA and the UK have huge budgets for arms but got our asses handed to us in Afghanistan by a load of guys making explosives with weedkiller.
On the modern battlefield a tank is only a very heavy death trap. A country with war-waging ambitions should concentrate on missiles and other aimable munitions. I should think that the required know-how, technologies, supply chains and so on for these differ quite substantially from making Ford Pumas and Nissan Qashqais. Drones of the Reaper type, well, possibly.