There are a couple of stories that seem unrelated but are very related. They show the story of a country that used to build things and has decided, without ever quite admitting it, that building is too hard.
Start with the missiles. Rep. Mike Turner was on television last week talking about letting Ukraine license our Patriot technology and build the missiles themselves, because the threat is spreading and our defenses must spread with it. He is right. Think how strange that is. The most powerful country in history is handing another nation the recipe for our best defensive weapon because we cannot make ourselves enough. It is outsourcing American security because our industrial base cannot keep up.
Here is what ought to keep you up at night: Ukraine is at war, bombed every single night, and it is out-producing us on drones. We have about 100,000 drones in our arsenal. They build them by the hundreds of thousands a month. A nation bombed daily is out-building the nation nobody is touching. That should embarrass every one of us.
So why can't we do it?
For years we blamed consolidation in our military-industrial complex — the mergers leaving only a handful of contractors. We misdiagnosed it. The consolidation was not the disease. It was the immune response. We spent decades strangling these companies with labor law and unions and regulation, and the only way they survived was to grow a thicker neck so the hands around their throat could not quite close. You cannot run an arsenal that way or deter Iran with it. We boxed ourselves in with paperwork.
Now a different story that is really the same story. Lake Mead, the reservoir the Hoover Dam created, has dropped so low a monument a Depression-era country threw across a canyon because it decided it would soon be unable to keep the lights on. Millions down the Colorado River could run out of water and power at once.
Why not build a desalination plant on the Pacific and pump the water inland to refill it? A large number of people say this is ridiculous and too absurd to do. It is actually ridiculous to tell three million people in the desert to abandon their cities because we could not be bothered. We do not have a water shortage. We have a freshwater shortage, and next to the West lies the largest body of water on the planet. The Romans moved water hundreds of miles from the Alps with hand tools and no electricity, and we have convinced ourselves that we cannot lay a pipe from the ocean to a lake.
We have not built a new oil refinery in this country since 1979. We sit on an ocean of oil and have not built the thing that turns it into fuel in over half a century. That is not a resource problem. It is a will problem.
That is the thread tying the missiles and the dam and the refinery together. We lost the ability to do big things in the private sector, and we lost it on purpose. We buried the builders under regulation, labor law, and layers of government, and worst of all, we sapped the profit motive that made anyone want to try. We used to put a man on the moon. Now we can't, not because we forgot the math but because we forgot the nerve.
I am not asking government to build any of this. I am asking it to get out of the way and hand the profit motive back to the people who know how to build and let them get rich doing it. Washington will let desert cities go dry and wipe out our missile supply rather than let anyone earn an honest dollar solving it. We have talked ourselves into treating success as the crime and shortage as the virtue. We used to be the people who did the big thing precisely because it was hard. Now we are the people who explain why it cannot be done. I would like us to be that first country again. We just have to decide that we want to.