AUSA Winter: US industrial base facing reductions
The defence land systems manufacturing base in the US is facing rapid downsizing as the wars, first in Iraq and now Afghanistan come to a close.
Speaking at the AUSA Winter 2014 conference in Huntsville, Alabama, Mark Signorelli, BAE System’s VP of combat vehicle systems, said that since the peak for wartime production ‘we have experienced a 75% reduction in staff’.
However, he noted that this was not all just because of the wartime peak and that ‘from 2013-14 we will see a 45% reduction in manufacturing hours and a 61% reduction in engineering hours’.
He said that the levels
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