A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands…
… The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.
A beautiful microcosm of American manufacturing. We get to read all about the slick ambitious businessman running after contracts like a dog after a car tire. Just to the periphery of this story are:
the nepo babiy execs who used a good chunk of the no bid contract to do stock buybacks [after typing this I checked, and 2022 was the highest stock buyback year for General Dynamics this decade - https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/GD/cash-flow/repurchase-of-capital-stock-annual]
overconfident cookbook engineers who are all blaming the failures on someone else
that one guy whose dwindling team has been making everything work for the past few decades, the one who was hired as a line worker back in '79 and worked his way up the company back when that was something a person could do, who handed in his retirement notice the day this factory plan hit his desk - who was too old for this shit
Make America Great Depression Again