FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Biggest Threat to U.S. Defense Is Collapse of Skilled Labor Force and Industrial Base
June 1, 2018, 2018 (EIRNS)—The “Annual Industrial Capabilities” report to Congress was “quietly released” on May 17 by the Pentagon’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy, according to Defense News. While EIR has not yet reviewed the full report, Defense News’ May 22 summary of the report’s findings makes clear that the United States defense is not threatened as much by foreign powers as by our own policies. Decades of post-industrial, rock-sex-drug culture, “information theory” replacing Classical science, remains the greatest threat to national security, and has resulted in more youth on drugs than capable of skilled labor and engineering.
“The greatest challenge that could harm domestic defense capabilities is the demographics of the workforce. Only 39% of the current workforce is under the age of 45. And while jobs in the aerospace and defense sectors are seen positively by the majority of young professionals, only 1.5% of 25- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. have a science degree,”
Defense News wrote in its coverage of the report.
Those figures are taken from Figure 1 in the report, which states that aerospace and defense
“companies are being faced with a shortage of qualified workers to meet current demands as well as needing to integrate a younger workforce with the ‘right skills, aptitude, experience and interest to step into the jobs vacated by senior-level engineers and skilled technicians’ as they exit the workforce.”
The U.S. likewise does not have a diversified industrial base, and therefore lacks the design and production capability neede
d to develop new systems. For example, the report warns that “the biggest risk for the aerospace sector is its ability to sustain the design and manufacturing skills and capabilities needed for future aircraft design and manufacture,”
according to Defense News.
Defense News summarizes the report’s findings for sectors such as shipbuilding, which faces “potential consequences if something were to happen to the small, highly concentrated industrial base.” The danger referenced is the lack of a workflow necessary to ensure those industrial capabilities do not go under—although not said, a danger stemming from the rule of Wall Street “markets.” Likewise, “the age and condition of the naval shipyard infrastructure, which is on average seven years older than industry standard” is also critical, leading to significant work stoppages every year.
