Mobilization impotency of the United States

Why can we quickly manufacture guns and bombs, yet cannot supply face masks and ventilators?

Germany and Japan did not lose World War II due to the supremacy of allied armies, they lost due to the allied ability to mobilize resources faster and more effectively. It is shocking that the seemingly well-organized, disciplined, authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were completely outmatched by the production capacity of USA, UK and USSR in terms of tanks, aircraft and guns. However, it is even more shocking that the US lost this mobilization ability in the last decades, as alarmingly illustrated by the current pandemic crisis.

By 1942, the US was producing liberty-class transport ships to maintain the critical Atlantic marine supply route for Britain. The production rate was so high that the phenomenally skilled and efficient U-boots of Kriegsmarine could not sink them fast enough.

Also in 1942 (its first full year on a war footing), the US produced 5 times more warplanes and over 3 times more warships than Japan, such that even if Japan were to stage one Pearl Harbor every year, America would have still prevailed in the war due to the sheer power of these production numbers.

Without air superiority, allied commanders estimated that they needed 3–5 tanks to overpower one German tank. They could afford it. In 1941 (even before American industry fully mobilized) Germany produced 3,800 tanks while the USSR, UK and USA combined fielded over 15,000.

Throughout the war, America produced an average 90,000 tanks and planes a year — large, massively complex machines, hugely expensive, and difficult to handle and transport. However, today even with all the technological progress of the last decades, wizardry of Silicon Valley and 3D printing, we find ourselves unable to quickly manufacture 100,000 ventilators that the US healthcare system so desperately needs.

Even today, the US is able to scale up production of munitions and armaments at a staggering rate, yet cannot provide its hospitals with trivial-to-manufacture personal protective equipment or its supply its population with sanitizers.

Why are we so good in producing equipment to kill each other, and we always have a stockpile of tools allowing total annihilation of humanity many times over, but are organizationally impotent when it comes to helping each other in this time of crisis?

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