What WW II Can Tell Us About Battling Coronavirus-- Part 5: About That Mile-Long Assembly Line

The U.S. government also pressured companies into sharing intellectual property so production wasn't limited by the capacity of a single company.    When the military needed more B-17 bombers than Boeing could produce, it hired Lockheed to pick up the slack, requiring Boeing to pay Lockheed modest licensing fees.

Also during the war, FDR's administration eased back on antitrust enforcement.

These same sort of moves could now help in ventilator production, so desperately needed for the worst infected.  When this was written, President trump had not enacted his 1950 Defense Production Act which he has since done.

During WW II, the U.S. government paid to build plants, owned them, hired companies to run them  and bought all the output.  That allowed companies to expand their footprint  without worrying about a return on their investment and ensured that the government got what it needed, when it needed it.

That's how road-building  company Brown & Root ended up with a $90 million Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and how Ford got  the mile-long assembly line at the Willow Run bomber plant.

--GreGen