This article raises many good points. I do think that advocating for conversion or a "just transition" has to be done very carefully, however, because it can easily be turned into an excuse for uncritical support for military weapons workers. As mentioned in the article, reformist electoral attempts to convert simply failed, as it is not aligned with bourgeois party interests. How many people threw away their efforts by supporting that and weapons workers at the same time? Didn't all of their work actually help secure weapons manufacturers as desirable places to work? A material defeat and a moral victory (if it can even be called that) is in service of the material victor and echoes many sheepdogging campaigns by liberals towards anyone to their left.

Really, it sounds like the bad things happened and the good things didn't and the main lesson to learn is that this approach didn't help.

So, if one were to consider a new "conversion" plan as a way to justify supporting military contractor workers, I'd want to see something different where they are actually organizing themselves out of a job as part of a dedicated cadre that won't lose momentum after the support of socialists has been extracted and the painful work of organizing against your own industry starts to sink in. Or there has to be a valid, cynical strategy to make it unfeasible to manufacture in the states through high labor costs, but that's also fraught imo.