The Western industrial base is facing a critical loss of specialized knowledge that threatens both physical manufacturing and software development, according to a report from techtrenches.dev.
Recent defense shortages highlight a pattern where decades of workforce retirement have left critical production lines unable to scale during crises. At the 2023 Paris Air Show, Raytheon’s president described the struggle to restart Stinger missile production.
To restart the line, the company brought back engineers in their 70s to teach younger workers how to build missiles using paper schematics drawn during the Carter administration.
This loss of institutional memory has direct consequences on the battlefield. RTX CEO Greg Hayes stated that ten months of war in Ukraine burned through thirteen years' worth of Stinger production, according to the outlet.
The cost of consolidation
The decline follows a 1993 Pentagon directive that forced defense contractors to consolidate or perish. The industry saw fifty-one major contractors collapse into just five, while the total workforce fell from 3.2 million to 1.1 million people—a 65% reduction.
This consolidation created single points of failure across the supply chain. The report notes that one manufacturer for 155mm shell casings is located on the San Andreas Fault in California, and a single Canadian facility provides propellant charges.
These bottlenecks prevented the EU from meeting its March 2023 promise to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine within twelve months. While the official goal was set, actual European production capacity sat at roughly one-third of those claims.
The million-shell target was not reached until December 2024, nine months behind schedule.
National production capabilities have withered over decades of disuse. France halted domestic propellant production in 2007, and a major Nammo plant in Denmark had to be restarted from scratch after closing in 2020.
In the United States, there has been no domestic TNT production since 1986.
This decay extends to highly specialized materials. A GAO report cited by techtrenches.dev found that when the government attempted to reproduce 'Fogbank'—a classified material for nuclear warheads—it discovered that almost all staff with production expertise had retired or died.
The project required $69 million and years of reverse engineering to recover the lost process.
