In WWII we tooled up to make tanks, ships, and planes in less time than we've now failed to tool up just to make masks. Which, needless to say, are less complex than tanks, ships, and planes, and our level of manufacturing technology is now much higher too.

Manufacturing has changed. Back then everything was done by hand - vast changeovers were much easier..

Plus the machines already existed. They weren't making tanks in textile mills....they were making them in car plants.

Making rifles involves literal tons of highly specialized tool machines that are only used for making rifles. Just look at a barrel or action and try to figure out how these were machined accurately in the 1920s.

Absent those specialized machine tools (like a rifling machine), any machine shop could produce components.

And rifles continued to be made by.... armories.

The government could also simply pay for the whole deal, from the design of production facilities to their eventual removal, and tack on a nice profit for the vendor. That's called "cost plus" and with the appropriate performance bonuses, other incentives, and some redundancy would probably solve.

We've demonstrated this repeatedly with military spending and NASA contracts. It doesn't always go well but if made sufficiently lucrative and performance-based (think wartime footing), with appropriate oversight, it certainly can get results.

We just don't have leadership at the moment, it seems, that has the intellectual capacity to consider these levers and pull them.

DoD spent a large chunk of their COVID money on weapon system components, not on pandemic response stuffs (stockpiling materials like masks or investing into vaccine research). So they could do it, and they should have done it (or obligated the money to it), they chose to ignore their directive.

> Government certainly can change this reality (perhaps via the defense production act) by agreeing to buy masks off the line for a time after the immediate demand has been met. Or whatever.

Of course, but it seems the vaccines had priority, to the point of ignoring masks:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/08/08/feds-sp...

August 8, 2020: "Federal spending on COVID-19 vaccine candidates tops $9 billion, spread among 7 companies"

To compare, the OP article writes:

"Why is the world’s richest country still struggling to meet the demand for an item that once cost around $1 apiece?"

The sad aspect is, if it turns out that even vaccinated people can spread the virus (as in: "they can still become infected and only get less sick"), and that is estimated as very probable by the experts at the moment, the existence of other vaccinated people will not protect the high risk groups -- the so-called "herd" will never protect them, only the vaccine, and only if it works for them. Which they won't know in advance:

The experts also don't expect too high protection of the vaccine, as it is known that vulnerable are only some percentages protected by the similar vaccines (sometimes even less than 50%). So the masks can turn out to remain more important than we hope at the moment: then, the estimated protection if both the infected and the vulnerable wear a good mask could be higher in many circumstances than a vaccine. That was the sound basis for this claim:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/cdc-director-says-face-masks...

In Redfield's own words:

“If I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me,” he said. “This face mask will.”