Wake-Up Call for a Sleeping Giant

China is engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history. It has both Washington and world domination in its sights. To prevent the cataclysm of great power war, the United States must revamp its industrial base and once again prioritize manufacturing.

So argue Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart in their new book Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III. Sankar is the chief technology officer and executive vice president at Palantir Technologies, where Hart is a deployment strategist.

Mobilize asks an important question: What went wrong with America’s defense industrial base? And can it be fixed?

These aren’t small questions. Indeed, the fate of America and the free world hinges on answering them.

With the Cold War’s end, the triumphant West indulged in what Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently called "dangerous delusions." The United States and its compatriots believed that every nation would eventually become a liberal democracy, that trade and commerce would be liberalizing forces, and that "international law" and not military force would be the final arbitrator.

All of these beliefs have been proven false. China and Russia and their allies in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere don’t want to join the family of nations. Rather, they want to tear down the American-led global order. While the United States and its allies pretended that the basic rules of geopolitics didn’t exist, their enemies knew otherwise.

The West was outsourcing a key component of national power—manufacturing—that China wholeheartedly embraced. Beijing made itself the "factory of the world" using its industrial power to gain leverage over huge swaths of the globe, the United States included. And that leverage comes with a steep cost.

While we believed that manufacturing and tech could be separated, China was busy building. By some estimates, China now has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity that America possesses. In 2024 alone, it's estimated that one Chinese firm built more ships by tonnage than the United States has in the eight decades since World War II. We now find ourselves in a place where, according to most war games, this country would run out of key munitions in a war with China in mere weeks, perhaps even days.

The Allies won World War II thanks to America’s fabled "Arsenal of Democracy." We outproduced the Axis powers, fielding munitions and weapons that were essential to a hard-fought victory. In 1943, Joseph Stalin acknowledged as much, toasting "American production, without which this war would have been lost."

The victors of that war knew something that future generations in the West would tragically forget: Industrial power wins wars.

In February 1941, 10 months before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into that conflict, Winston Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress. While Britain battled alone, Churchill made his pitch to an isolationist America. "Give us the tools," he pleaded, "and we’ll finish the job." Now, eight decades later and facing another great power war, it is America that is short on tools.

Sankar and Hart explore why. They could use the occasion to throw their hands in the air or point fingers, but thankfully they don’t. Instead, the authors use historical case studies to highlight where things went wrong. They avoid dogmatism and partisanship, tracing the roots of America’s defense industrial decline back decades, before the Cold War’s end and the consolidation of prime defense manufacturers in the 1990s.

Indeed, Mobilize stretches all the way back to the interwar years and the Great Depression to highlight systemic flaws in how the military builds and acquires platforms. Several well-known figures, such as the first secretary of defense James Forrestal, come in for opprobrium. Well-meaning reforms enacted during the 1960s by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his "Whiz Kids" forever changed procurement at the Pentagon, and largely for the worse. "The Pentagon," the authors note, "has tried to centrally plan its way to success" and "to no one’s surprise, it has found that Americans are bad commies."

Yet the heroes have their day in the sun, too. Sankar and Hart also take a look at those who fought to get key weapons into the hands of America’s warfighters. To do so, they had to be people of vision, proudly unorthodox, and willing to buck the system. The risk averse need not apply. The heretical, they note, are often the heroic. Thomas Jefferson, they observe, put it best: "A little rebellion every now and then is a good thing."

And the Pentagon itself is often standing in the way. Andrew Higgins, the man who built the landing vessels that made D-Day and Allied victory possible, spent years fighting the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. Higgins had the foresight that staid, status quo-loving commanders at the Navy did not.

The Navy initially dismissed the winning boat design as the work of "some nut." As Sankar and Hart observe, "Many GIs owe their lives to the fact that a couple of nuts were willing to learn from experience on the battlefield." This too is another theme in Mobilize: the value of being forward deployed. Great engineers and designers have to be on the front line, not just walled behind some far away office.

Mobilize is peppered with plenty of such lessons. The authors are clear that the fight with China isn’t lost yet. America has a homefield advantage in innovation and capital. But it must make rapid and far-reaching changes to avert a looming disaster. And rebels, visionaries, and yes, private industry, must be at the tip of the spear.

Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III
by Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart
Bombardier Books, 384 pp., $30

Sean Durns is a Washington D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst and the deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner.

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