Here is William Hartung on the DOD industrial report, “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.”
It’s also the product of an “interagency task force” made up of 16 working groups and 300 “subject matter” experts, supplemented by over a dozen industry “listening sessions” with outfits like the National Defense Industrial Association, an advocacy organization that represents 1,600 companies in the defense sector…
First, were you aware that the Pentagon even had an Office of Defense Industrial Policy? It sounds suspiciously like the kind of government organization that engages in economic planning, a practice anathema not just to Republicans but to many Democrats as well.
The only reason it’s not a national scandal — complete with Fox News banner headlines about the end of the American way of life as we know it and the coming of creeping socialism — is because it’s part of the one institution that has always been exempt from the dictates of the “free market.” The Department of Defense.
Second, how about those 300 subject matter experts? Since when does Trump consult subject matter experts? Certainly not on climate change, the most urgent issue facing humanity and one where expert opinion is remarkably unified.
More good insights at the link. I’m also very suspicious of industrial policy. Seems like the US got through OK without the industrial policies of Japan, South Korea, or France. But Hartung was not so suspicious of experts per se as he was of the 300 experts chosen for this study, who would be biased towards the status quo.
I think that a status quo bias is basically an inevitability whenever someone talks industrial planning. Only insiders who’ve worked the system for years understand it, only they are “expert,” and it is they who are least likely to discover better ways of doing things. How will the system reform itself and take risks?
So I disagree with the statement “Industrial policy should not be a dirty word.” That implies there is a single policy. Competing perspectives might be debated, but it implies that there will not be programs that genuinely compete because that would signal wasted resources.
It is only through redundancy and competition that we can spot errors. That’s why, despite the F-35 appearing like such a failure, we cannot actually say so because there was no alternative program to compare it to. What outcomes a different institutional context would have made cannot be known. We have a data point of one over the last decade.
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