Of course, that brought another issue to mind. Of the Departments of the US Government, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and the Directorate of Central Intelligence were all run under contract by The Targeteers. The Democrat Party had come to power quietly determined to change all that. Some wanted to do so because they honestly felt it was wrong for major parts of the US Government to be in the hands of private companies. Others resented the loss of patronage and the power to award plum, well-paid government jobs to favored cronies.
LBJ himself had entered the Presidency determined to return to the old ways of doing things. Now, he’d changed his mind. Compared with the other parts of the US Government, the parts run by The Targeteers were models of smooth efficiency. The reason, of course, was simple, if they didn’t run smoothly people got fired until they did. The Business, as the Targeteers called themselves, recruited and trained their staff and provided the Department as a functioning package. The Executive appointed the Secretaries to head the Department. Three of the four were working smoothly and the Secretaries in charge had been converts to the system. Only Robert and the Department of Defense were in constant conflict.
LBJ sighed. He knew what the problem was. Over in State, the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk had established perfect co-operation with The Business people running his Department. He told them what his policy was, where he wanted his Department to go and together, they’d explored all the consequences of the new policies. Then, once Dean had made the decisions, The Business had followed through and made sure they were carried out. Smoothly and efficiently.
In contrast, McNorman had treated his staff the same he treated everybody - like dirt. He’d given abrupt, preemptory orders without considering the consequences of what he was doing. The Business people running the DoD had worked hard to limit the damage his attitude was causing, but they couldn’t intercept all of it. LBJ thought grimly that McNorman would have to go. The problem was he was a favorite of the Kennedy family and they still ran the Democrat Party.
And that was yet another problem. When planning for a Democrat-run Government, it had been assumed that American industry dominated the world the same way American military power did. In the run-up to 1960, and then in 1964, they’d imagined American businessmen going around the world, doing what they wished, where they wished, in the same way SACs bombers flew where they wanted. Only it wasn’t that way at all. While not precisely in crisis, American industry was facing problems all of its own. The Democrat economic planners had made a certain series of economic assumptions and based their tax and development plans on those. Unfortunately, those basic assumptions had been wrong.
The basic problem was simple and had literally stared everybody in the face, only none of them had seen it. They’d looked at a map of Europe with the big black smoking hole where Germany used to be and not realized that the same big, black, smoking hole was where most of the world’s precision machine tools had been made. Before the Second World War, German industry had been the world’s major source for top end high precision machine tools. The total destruction of German industry had left a gaping hole in that market, one that was proving very hard to fill.
There were some bright spots, Swedish machine tools were almost as good as German and the Germans themselves had re-equipped Polish and Czech factories to make the tooling. That hadn’t been altruistic of course, the German plan had been all final assembly was done in Germany. Nevertheless, Poland and Czechoslovakia were becoming suppliers of good-quality machine tools. The catch was that they just didn’t have the production capacity to make up for the incinerated German factories. So, the supply of high-quality, advanced machine tools was a seller’s market with high prices and long delivery times.
This had some curious effects. One of them was that a whole industry had grown up, modernizing, reconditioning and rebuilding pre-war German machine tools. Another was that the machine tool issue had a direct bearing on how SAC operated. One of the reasons why SAC’s bombers were so aggressively deployed and so prominent in international affairs was to give the impression that they represented an industry that was at the cutting edge of technology and free of the constraints that were crippling other industries. That wasn’t true, the United States was as badly affected by the machine tool shortage as everybody else.
McNorman wouldn’t accept it but that was yet another reason why his demands to shift from bombers to missiles wasn’t possible - missiles required much more precise machining than aircraft and the tooling to do it in the numbers required just wasn’t there. The same applied to tanks; it was all very well to demand the construction of huge numbers of tanks but how were the turret rings to be made?
It wasn’t just the military sector that reflected the machine tool bottleneck. American cars were derided because of their big, lazy and inefficient engines. The Europeans with their smaller and more economical engines were held up as being the way of the future. The catch was that those small, efficient engines required much more high-grade machining than the bigger American motors. If Detroit went to European-style designs, they’d have to re-equip with the scarce advanced machine tools and that would impact directly on the rest of US industry competing for the same equipment.
It was a worldwide problem. American sources inside the new Triple Alliance aviation program had revealed that both the Arrow and TSR-2 programs were dropping behind schedule due to the shortage of high-end machine tools. Apparently, there were only four slide-way grinders (essential for making big machine tools) in Australia and the biggest grinder in the Southern Hemisphere was a 1930s German import. The Russians were being hit as well, even though they’d captured some equipment when they’d re-occupied the western parts of the country. The shortage of machine tooling was crippling their recovery from the Second World War and Treasury estimates were that it would be the end of the century before that problem was overcome.
It was also a simple problem, German machine tools were undoubtedly the best but they weren’t around anymore. The easy answer that ‘America would take up the slack’ just wouldn’t cut it. The American industrial genius was in production methods and machines, not the basic tools of engineering. Engineers would take a rebuilt 1930s German tool over a new-built Polish, Czech or Swedish machine any day and they’d take any of those three over an American one equivalent. The world may run on love, or so the kids said, but it spun on bearings and bearings were in short supply. A study done by The Business had suggested that The Big One’s destruction of German industry had set the world back at least a decade in the key areas, and that was cascading through the whole industrial production system.
LBJ sighed. Running America had seemed so simple when the Democrats had been in political exile. They hadn’t had a clue what the real problems were or how intractable they could be. Perhaps this was the lesson that they’d forgotten, that some problems don’t have solutions, all you can do is work around them and find other routes to where one wanted to go. Yet everything linked into everything else, change on thing and it echoed through the systems and turned up in the most unexpected of places.
He caught himself in the car’s driving mirror, he could see that the strain of the job was already aging him. The Presidency was a killer, Both President Dewey and President LeMay had been aged beyond their years by the strain of the job and it had, quite literally, killed President Patton. As his car swept through the White House gates, LBJ reflected that at least his “Great Society” plan wouldn’t impact on the problems caused by the machine tool bottleneck. He’d thought the Presidency would deal with the great issues of the day and initiate sweeping changes in the Great Scheme of Things. He’d been right too, only he hadn’t known that the great issue of day was the supply of machine tools and The Great Scheme of Things ran on bearings.