National emergencies bring out American ingenuity and a willingness to shift gears—like the couple in Maine who wrote recently in The Washington Post about retooling their company to make masks instead of hoodies. Most often invoked as precedent is the rapid conversion of auto factories to turn out tanks for World War II.
That national emergency morphed into a long-term Cold War. Though that war did eventually end, the concentration of national resources on the military has not. We continue to allot more than half of our federal budget—the part that Congress votes on every year—to the Pentagon, and more money, adjusted for inflation, than it ever got during the Cold War.
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