One point I think gets overlooked is that industry responds to the signals it receives. Companies aren’t going to spend millions expanding facilities, buying equipment and hiring skilled workers if procurement quantities swing wildly every few years. When demand becomes unpredictable, suppliers close their doors, experienced machinists retire, subcontractors move into commercial work, and critical manufacturing capability slowly disappears. Years later, we act surprised when production can’t keep up. It isn’t because industry suddenly forgot how to build jet engines. It’s because we’ve allowed pieces of the industrial ecosystem to disappear, and rebuilding them takes years, not months.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion blaming manufacturers. Some criticism is certainly warranted. Quality matters. Delivery schedules matter. Accountability matters. But government also has a responsibility to provide stable procurement strategies and predictable demand. Industry cannot build long-term capacity around short-term thinking.

This isn’t unique to jet engines, either. We’ve watched similar issues emerge in munitions production, shipbuilding, missile manufacturing, and other critical sectors of the defense industrial base. Every time demand spikes, we discover we no longer have the surge capacity we assumed existed. The uncomfortable truth is that surge capacity isn’t something you create during a crisis. You build it years before you need it.

That’s really the lesson here. The article is about engines, but the real story is much bigger. Jet engines are simply where the symptoms are showing today. The underlying issue is that we’ve spent decades treating our industrial base as a cost to manage instead of a strategic capability to preserve.