Taiwan increased their production of N95 masks from 100,000/day earlier this year to over 20 million/day now.

Asia can build N95 plants, starting with concrete foundations, in <14 days and 3M hasn't managed to start up any new production lines in existing facilities since announcing them nearly a month ago.

I'd like to imagine this is primarily a leadership issue. I'd like to think that if money was given to the right highly motivated people that it wouldn't matter than "we don't have melt blown fabric machines" because we could design and manufacture them from scratch in our machine shops.

Sometimes though, I do worry about a potential domestic shortage of skilled machinists and manufacturers. And of our ability to allocate either public or private capital to the right entities during national emergencies. I'd imagine $10 million could go pretty far right now, but I haven't heard of any millionaires trying to work outside of the capitalist systems by building something philanthropically. I also haven't seen anyone try to crowdsource money for some plants here.