Writes Greg Privette:

Lew,

I have been reading the Political Theatre posts from several people who observed military vehicles now showing up in green camo and wondering if this is a precursor of things to come. It reminds me of something in my experience from years ago. I have spent my entire career in and around manufacturing in one aspect or another. In the late 80’s to about 90 or 91 I was self-employed. Among the things I was involved in I was selling and servicing machine tools. The distributor I was selling for was located in Florida and one of their customers was a large machine shop. One of their contracts was making 1,000 pound bomb racks from aluminum extrusion. They would do machining operations to the extrusion and then I believe they welded it together to make the racks. I can no longer remember the exact numbers involved but for years they had been making maybe 50 units a day or week. Suddenly in the late 80’s the customer they were under contract with (maybe Honeywell?) began doubling the volume every few months. I went to their plant once to help the guy I was selling for install 6 new high speed machining centers for machining the extrusions all at one time. I can’t remember how many total machining centers they wound up with just dedicated to the racks. Eventually they were making so many racks that I heard they were selling $10,000 a week worth of aluminum shavings to the local scrap recycling company. At the time we were joking about the fact we must be getting ready to bomb somebody because it was virtually certain someone was making 1,000 pound bombs for every one of those racks. While I can’t remember the exact timeline this all occurred long before Saddam showed any sign of invading Kuwait. I remember one time, long after we bombed Iraq into a sh*thole, thinking back to the bomb racks and realizing someone, somewhere up the food chain knew we were going to attack Iraq long before there was any indication Saddam would invade Kuwait. Of course I’m sure the whole thing was probably just one big coincidence.