In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. realized it needed bombers, lots of them. It signed a contract with Convair to buy as many B-24’s as they could build, 39 per month. As the U.S. entered the war, it realized it needed more, so Convair doubled production by building a new plant in Fort Worth (that’s why locals of a certain age still call it “the Bomber Plant”, even though it has built fighters for almost 60 years).
Knowing that still wouldn’t be enough, the Army signed Ford to build bombers in their Willow Run plant (war time rationing pretty much starved civilian car production). The Convair engineers struggled to conceive of higher rate production, while Ford engineers struggled to imagine production as slow as a bomber per day. By the spring of 1944, 2.5 years after Pearl Harbor, Willow Run was completing one B-24 per hour, 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Each B-24 weighed 18 tons, empty, had four engines and tens of thousands of hand bucked rivets.
That was 80 years ago. This year, we are about to see a different kind of motivated development program, as the U.S. takes on the AI challenge from China.
We have seen Lunar missions planned and executed in 10 years. We have seen a vaccine to a novel virus developed in eight months.
Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about (but I think I do). It wasn’t funding that kept the U.S. (or the UK, or Germany or France) from matching Russia in artillery shell production (remember- the Russkis had to ramp up to their current level). It was funding and commitment.