I don't disagree at all with what you're saying about the scale and nature of wartime production. I get it, and we're totally on the same page there.
> creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing
Creating the factories is straightforward, as is hiring and training the workers. Expensive, sure, but that's not the problem. The problem is that there is a single material used in N95 masks for which we have limited sources and for which expanding the manufacturing capacity is very slow.
From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-fi...
> Even established companies are having trouble boosting production because they can't simply buy more machines, according to Dave Rousse, president of INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry.
> "There are only five or six companies across the globe that make these machines, and they're not inexpensive. These are sizable machines, a lot of technology, a lot of air handling, a lot of electronics, a lot of precision moving parts," Rousse said. "Normally it's nine to 12 months before you could get a machine delivery."
My understanding is that even if you can obtain the tooling, they're very difficult to keep operating - there are lots of variables to tweak and every batch has to be independently tested to verify that they meet the filtration standards. If they don't, that material ends up being used as "dust masks" and such. I would expect that means that training machine operators would be both time-consuming and expensive as well.
The bottom line of my point here is that the problem we're facing isn't one of resource allocation or of commitment to a goal - it's the tooling required to scale production significantly is slow to produce, and we don't know how to make it faster. The problem that needs to be solved isn't mask design, it's improving the production and testing equipment necessary to make the filtration media.
Yes, making an M1 Garand is simpler than making PPE. But the process of training tens of thousands of machinists, many of whom had never had an industrial job before in their lives, in order to make millions of firearms in a short order is a huge undertaking that literally changed the entire fabric of American society. And that is only one tiny sub portion of a gargantuan effort that saw entire industrial centers dismantled in order to feed the war effort. As another example, the Swiss are only “famous” for watches because American watch factories were dismantled in order to make bomber components, giving the neutral Swiss an opportunity to take over from what had historically been an American lead industry.
The level of societal change that WW2 created was so massive that there are literally country bars in Chicago to serve the former residents of Appalachian states who were moved around due to the war and decided to not return to their original states; just the industrial aspect of that war deeply changed who we were as a society, and affected everything.
Compared to the gargantuan effort required to do all of that, creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing. All that needs to be done is rebuild a few factories to recreate a product that until 2000 or so was almost entirely made in the US. Yes, it’s more complicated than making a small number of firearms, but in the scope of resources that America has poured into other problems, recreating a factory or two doesn’t even register on the scale.
Also, whatever happened to American optimism? This is not a hard problem to solve. We invented the damn N95 mask in the first place, why is everyone so down on our ability to redo something that we did without even thinking about 20 years ago. This is not a problem of capability, this is a problem of public will.