Weapon makers contend with decline in U.S. manufacturing.

Manufacturers of military hardware worry that a shortage of skilled labor in the United States is impinging on their ability to deliver high-tech equipment to the Defense Department. The situation progressively has worsened during the past five years, when nearly 3 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have vanished, experts noted.

In a recent survey of defense contractors, 70 percent of the companies cited shortages of skilled labor as an impediment in serving their customers, said John S. VanKirk, president and executive director of the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining, in Latrobe, Pa.

The Defense Department established the NCDMM in 2003 to help military agencies and defense contractors improve manufacturing processes and inject new technology into production facilities.

While manufacturing jobs are down, the demand for skilled labor in the defense sector is way up, VanKirk said in an interview. "We are not filling the current demand."

The decline in U.S. manufacturing also has resulted in a diminishing pool of expert technicians who can assemble components that are made of new materials such as aluminum alloys and plastics, which are replacing steel in modern weapon systems, VanKirk said.

While many commercial manufacturers have shifted their operations offshore, defense contractors and military depots are bound by so-called "Buy America" laws to produce most of the contents of a weapon system domestically.

Defense contractors and military depots increasingly are seeking help from the NCDMM in areas such as worker training, machine tool upgrades and advice on how to increase the efficiency of their assembly lines, VanKirk said. "Our business is growing ... We see triple-digits growth every year." The center's revenues--including both government funds and private industry contracts--have soared from $1.1 million in 2004 to $5.2 million in 2006.

Army depots, which had to rapidly surge their production capability for the war in Iraq, are among the NCDMM's biggest customers. Some of these depots not only operate outdated equipment but also became highly inefficient during the past several decades because they lacked enough orders to run at full capacity. A dramatic surge in the demand for vehicles, weapons and other gear is now forcing depots to become more efficient and to upgrade their machining tools. A case in point is the Army's Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., where the service makes ammunition for howitzers, among other things. One of the components of the munition was taking 40 hours to machine, VanKirk said. "They could not make it fast enough ... We showed them how to operate the tools differently and reduced the time to eight hours." After the Army purchased a new machine tool, he added, the time was slashed to 1.5 hours.

The Letterkenny Army Depot in Chambersburg, Pa., designed custom titanium plates to armor humvee trucks, but did not know how to go about getting them produced. "We figured out how to make them," VanKirk said. "What you need is a parallel path so you design and plan for the manufacturing at the same time. If we can get involved earlier, it's much more cost effective."

Many depots use tools that are 20 to 30 years old, VanKirk said. "There's a lot of opportunity to bring them up to the state of the market ... That applies to most depots and shipyards, as well as private sector defense firms." Additionally, he has found that at least 50 percent of the tools are misapplied.

Knowing how to operate modern tools is critical in defense programs that employ advanced non-traditional materials, he explained. "Typically advanced materials have properties that are harder to machine. They are more difficult to form and harder to shape." Ceramic materials currently being used in aircraft engines, bearings and missile components, for example, are "very hard and cannot be machined like steel."

Fiber-reinforced composites used in modern combat jets require new tools and techniques to cut and trim, he added.

One recent project was the machining of composite wing skin material in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is made by Lockheed Martin Corp. The company's conventional machining method required 24 tools per wing skin and caused excessive delamination of the composite material.

NCDMM engineers suggested a different way of using the cutting tools and reduced the number of tools per wing skin from 24 to 2. In doing so, the company trimmed the cost of each aircraft by $80,000. Based on a projected order of nearly 2,800 aircraft, the Defense Department could end up saving $222 million, VanKirk said. As of September 2006, he noted, NCDMM projects have saved the Defense Department and its suppliers $435 million in manufacturing-related costs.