29 March 2006

GM, Ford and the DOD

General Motors and Ford have seen better days. They are rapidly downsizing. Tens of thousands of workers are losing their jobs.

Iraq is a conflict with too many ill suited Humvees, and not enough vehicles designed to handle IEDs and gunfire. The shortage is in the thousands or tens of thousandds of vehicles.

There are about a dozen proven designs for vehicles that would do the job.

Two commentators here put those pieces together:

#10 from Brian on March 29, 2006 06:48 PM
Both Ford and GM have excess manufacturing capacity. If the pentagon wanted they could easily get a whole factory tooled up to produce whatever vehicle variant they decide upon quickly. The biggest delay would be the tooling changes required and ironing out the supply chain to the plant.

Both Ford and GM would leap at the chance to produce vehicles and avoid laying off part of their work force. But neither Ford nor GM could design a vehicle operate in that kind of environment. They no longer have the engineering experience with combat and explosives.

#11 from Joe Katzman on March 29, 2006 06:55 PM
Brian,

Licensed production works.


It is potentially a classic win-win situation. Here's hoping someone with the power to make that kind of thing happen is reads this post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Andrew,

Again you come up with a winning idea. Only that you are living today. Unless your like that young adult who hotwired a school bus to transport New Orleans refugees to Houston, good ideas die on the vine of bureaucractic rules and regulations. I was astounded when an emergency management director stated on air that in his county, he could not use school buses in emergency situations.

Most would like to blame liberals, but in my experience it is a capitalist looking to soak the state.