Sorry, but this just isn't true. It was far more difficult to manufacture an M1 Garand in 1940 than it is an N95 mask in 2020. There was a huge amount of custom Pratt & Whitney machinery built just to produce the rifle, some of which is still used today to produce other things btw!
I have a small lathe and mill sitting in my office right now. With those, I have everything technically necessary to build a Garand. Don't get me wrong - it would take a long time, and I would have to make substantial improvements to my tooling - I'd need to build a button rifling machine, for instance - but I have everything necessary to bootstrap production of M1 Garands in my office.
No amount of time or hacking would let me produce the fabric necessary for disposable N95 masks. I'm quite confident of this - I worked on the issue for quite a while, as I was unemployed at the beginning of this pandemic. The best solution I found was making filter cartridges for existing reusable respirators from HEPA furnace filters and 3D printed parts.
You can make a M1 Garand, maybe, assuming that you don’t get the heat treat wrong and it wears out or blows up. What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Nor any of the other firearms used, nor the literal mountains of ammunition required to train and equip all of the men who would eventually carry just that one rifle into combat.
The US effort for WW2 consumed damn near the entire manufacturing capability of the United States, required that civilians ration almost all consumer goods to make the war possible, created record breaking debt, and involved the mass training of heretofore economically excluded demographic groups in order to keep it going. Individual sub components of that war effort might have been “simple”, but at scale they are not simple at all. Comparatively the effort it would take to spin up half a dozen factories to produce PPE doesn’t come anywhere close to the mass efforts this country has sustained within living memory.
> What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced.
Correct - reasonably, I could produce one in about six months of work with subsequent ones coming faster after having built up the tooling and knowledge. My point is that there are millions of people like me and that the tools required to do that are common.
More to the point I could produce a working, reasonably polished firearm in a couple of weeks or less if I were doing so full time and were not restricted by US federal law. If I were basing my design off of something like a Sten submachinegun, now we're talking days at most and rapidly ramping up production speed after that.
There are no alternate designs for N95 masks that will meet the needs of healthcare workers. There are no alternate materials that are "good enough" for expedient use. This is not a product that can be reasonably manufactured in a distributed fashion.
The question is not “who is capable of doing this”. The question is “what percentage of society’s resources must be focused on this task in order to fix it”. It’s kind of obvious that there’s a difference between making a firearm and a n95 mask, but that was never my point.
Yes, making an M1 Garand is simpler than making PPE. But the process of training tens of thousands of machinists, many of whom had never had an industrial job before in their lives, in order to make millions of firearms in a short order is a huge undertaking that literally changed the entire fabric of American society. And that is only one tiny sub portion of a gargantuan effort that saw entire industrial centers dismantled in order to feed the war effort. As another example, the Swiss are only “famous” for watches because American watch factories were dismantled in order to make bomber components, giving the neutral Swiss an opportunity to take over from what had historically been an American lead industry.
The level of societal change that WW2 created was so massive that there are literally country bars in Chicago to serve the former residents of Appalachian states who were moved around due to the war and decided to not return to their original states; just the industrial aspect of that war deeply changed who we were as a society, and affected everything.
Compared to the gargantuan effort required to do all of that, creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing. All that needs to be done is rebuild a few factories to recreate a product that until 2000 or so was almost entirely made in the US. Yes, it’s more complicated than making a small number of firearms, but in the scope of resources that America has poured into other problems, recreating a factory or two doesn’t even register on the scale.
Also, whatever happened to American optimism? This is not a hard problem to solve. We invented the damn N95 mask in the first place, why is everyone so down on our ability to redo something that we did without even thinking about 20 years ago. This is not a problem of capability, this is a problem of public will.
We're obviously "speaking different languages" here :).
I don't disagree at all with what you're saying about the scale and nature of wartime production. I get it, and we're totally on the same page there.
> creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing
Creating the factories is straightforward, as is hiring and training the workers. Expensive, sure, but that's not the problem. The problem is that there is a single material used in N95 masks for which we have limited sources and for which expanding the manufacturing capacity is very slow.
> Even established companies are having trouble boosting production because they can't simply buy more machines, according to Dave Rousse, president of INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry.
> "There are only five or six companies across the globe that make these machines, and they're not inexpensive. These are sizable machines, a lot of technology, a lot of air handling, a lot of electronics, a lot of precision moving parts," Rousse said. "Normally it's nine to 12 months before you could get a machine delivery."
My understanding is that even if you can obtain the tooling, they're very difficult to keep operating - there are lots of variables to tweak and every batch has to be independently tested to verify that they meet the filtration standards. If they don't, that material ends up being used as "dust masks" and such. I would expect that means that training machine operators would be both time-consuming and expensive as well.
The bottom line of my point here is that the problem we're facing isn't one of resource allocation or of commitment to a goal - it's the tooling required to scale production significantly is slow to produce, and we don't know how to make it faster. The problem that needs to be solved isn't mask design, it's improving the production and testing equipment necessary to make the filtration media.
It’s not like the machines to make the base materials for PPE are magical items brought down from olympus to be used but never recreated. Literally everything I’ve said applies to those machines too. We could use the DPA to create more of those machines, but we’ve decided not to. The issue isn’t that any step of the chain is insurmountable, the issue is that we’ve decided as a country to just ... not bother.
You won't be able to produce materials neither for M1 Garand nor for masks. But at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance if any of the commonly used ones isn't available and complicated stuff is only testing filtration properties of the material with cheap test equipment (you can even make test equipment yourself, it's relatively simple for such purposes, "dust sensor" kind of stuff). Everything else is way more primitive than lathe and mill.
> at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance
Can you name any? That would literally be world changing right now.
As far as my research has revealed it is literally only melt-blown fabric that can meet N95 standards and the vast, vast majority of melt-blown fabric does not (we use tons of the stuff in sofas and mattresses but that stuff isn't anywhere near N95).
And no, your dust sensor will not meet lab requirements for N95 testing unless it had a very large price tag.
What is your hypothesis on why the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Russia, China, etc. have all been relatively unable to dictate sufficient capacity into existence? Even if the US is uniquely sucking, why can't we just buy it from all these other countries which should hypothetically have been able to create production also?
They have been able to, and Chinese respirator masks in particular are abundantly available in the US. But they use different industrial standards, so the Chinese masks are KN95s, and some health organizations don't want to use them.
