Supply Chain, Labor Woes Confound Military, Industrial Base.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

-- A nationwide labor shortage and problems with the supply chain continue to disrupt the delivery of materiel to the military and its industry partners, logisticians at a recent conference said.

As the United States seeks to send weapons and goods to assist Ukraine, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Maxwell, vice director of logistics at the Joint Staff, said obsolete parts and limited capacity on production lines are two challenges the Pentagon is facing.

Some factories "are clearly not postured to be able to be on a war time kind of rapid building and manufacturing scale that we are finding ourselves in," he said during a panel at the Sea-Air-Space conference at National Harbor, Maryland, recently.

That's not "across the board," he said, but it does effect "very unique" items that he didn't name.

Kurt Wendelken, vice commander of Naval Supply Systems, said the COVID-19 pandemic did bring supply chain issues to the fore for consumers, but the military has a different set of problems.

"The products that we're dealing with are very complicated. They're not Pert shampoo. They're not Snickers. They're not things from Amazon ... It can take [industry] a year or two years to go make those things for us. And that's assuming that they understand what our demand signal is," he said.

About 80 percent of his command's suppliers are "single-source," meaning there is no other company that can produce the item.

Exacerbating the lack of materials and goods is a labor shortage.

Abby Lilly, vice president of the global supply chain for Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems, said when "you think about the great resignation that has happened in this country in the last several months--and the number of people who have left the workforce--that is impacting the defense industrial base."

She has heard of 15 percent to 20 percent turnover in recent months at some of the defense industry giant's suppliers.

"Those companies are struggling to hire new workers to train them to do what we need to do," she added.

"Labor availability is one of the key things that we're concerned about in the defense industrial base," she said.

The other problem is some of the company's sub-suppliers' lack of alignment with the defense sector.

Companies that were established in technology boom of the late 1990s and 2000s are not necessarily 100-percent in tune with Defense Department needs as they make nonmilitary items as well, she said.

Yet they are manufacturing items that are...