> War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity
A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build our planes. General Dynamics, Oshkosh, and others build our tanks. Raytheon makes some of our missiles. In fact, here's full list of who's building our defense tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_... -- As you can see, it's mostly home-grown and home-based American companies. We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states.
It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside. Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle. Forcing consumer goods to be manufactured in the U.S. would dramatically drive up their prices, and in effect be an indirect tax on the American consumer. Moreover, the U.S. is nearly at full employment. Who's going to staff the factories that will make consumer goods? With the extreme hostility to immigration we have under the folks in charge now, I don't see any new immigrants being let in to work at these new factories. Companies would be forced to build fully automated factories (due to labor shortage), and there'll be jarring period of high consumer goods prices while software engineers write code for new robotic/automated manufacturing of basic goods. Maybe in the end, this newly written software will (with its development cost amortized over time) allow us to undercut the prices of even low-wage human-requiring manufacturing and become a reigning manufacturer of all sorts of things -- but that benefit feels fairly remote, far-fetched, and hard-to-achieve.
> A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US...We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states.
I'm aware of this, but I'd assume that they're all setup for peacetime manufacturing rates and would have difficulty scaling up. My concern is more about a lack of slack manufacturing capacity (and skills!) that could be repurposed in wartime.
IIRC, the US's slack manufacturing capacity was one of main things that won the war for the allies in WWII.
> It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside.
That's true for some things, but not others. I'm thinking specifically about consumer electronics and some related areas. Where the capacity could be redirected towards military products (e.g. electronics for smart bombs and drones).
Even more broadly, consumer manufacturing may carry with it supply chains that are more militarily useful to have than the consumer product manufacturing capacity itself.
> Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle.
I think we've been letting this consideration drive too much of our decision making. It's one factor, but not the only one that matters.
Also, you have to think about the day when Vietnam or China runs out of people who are willing to work cheaply enough feed a system of labor arbitrage.
>his has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure.
Is this true? I am under the impression that the US still has loads of high end manufacturing, it's just the low end stuff that no longer exists and even then it's partially due to automation
> I wonder where the US would be if we had focused on manufacturing growth instead of offshoring production.
Probably poorer for one. Every American working in a state-subsidised manufacturing role is one less American working in an industry where the US has a competitive advantage, like software or energy production.
Of course if war breaks out that goes out the window.
> Are there people in the US that want factory jobs?
The only way to make manufacturing at home competitive with overseas is full-scale automation. It won't create jobs to bring it back onshore - nor should it for exactly the reasons you specify. Instead, it would be a strategic investment.
> If the U.S. still had a strong manufacturing base
What's this "if?" I've worked my entire 30+ year engineering career for companies that manufactured things. From the 6-person company I started at to the $4bn corporation that owned 80% of their market, they've all been based on making things.
There's nothing wrong with the US manufacturing base. We just don't focus on low-margin consumer goods. Even the company I worked at which also did consumer electronics, farmed that part of their manufacturing to Viet Nam. Higher margin stuff was built here.
>I’d rather we focus on making things we’re good at, rather than taking random stuff, slapping “Made in America” on it, and hoping someone is willing to pay a premium for that text.
Why not make everything you can make? Would there be a problem is the US manufactured CPUs and phones as opposed to sending them to be made in China/Korea/Taiwan/etc?
To outsource externalities (e.g. environmental costs)? Or to stifle any labor demands (by moving your production to wherever you like any time they are raised somewhere)?
> It's not about tanks or numbers its national resolve and there each side can vastly misread the other.
Agreed, but to be perfectly honest, I would be 100% happy to see the US pull all manufacturing out of China and put it back on US soil. The US has gained a temporary price reduction in labor that is now evaporating, gained no access to the Chinese market or influenced China to open further, and has lost the actual ability to manufacture far too many goods.
If that means things will get more automated because of expensive labor, great! Then we should build our own robots, too. If things will get more expensive, then perhaps we will start throwing things away less and start worrying about longevity more.
And, you know, the US has a lot of unemployed people who will need jobs very shortly.
> it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves
I don't think that right. It still means goods are being produced in America, which means:
1. Greater security of production against geopolitical threats, and
2. More goods being produced overall, meaning cheaper goods.
Even without significant employment, those are good things!
> ... Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) was looking to industry for a “cutting-edge, automated 3D scanning system,” specifically intended to replicate aircraft parts that are no longer in production, including at maintenance depots.
You see the real issue? Even if they have the blueprints, it will be difficult to even manufacture the parts here.
There's so many more problems like this coming down the pipeline. We've effectively lost (or rather acquiesced) almost all manufacturing skill to other countries. This was a result of the largest corporations taking advantage of labor arbitrage and then flooding their home market out of business.
If we really want to reverse this, we need to do what it takes to bring manufacturing back to the United States. It's a painful reversal of the open-trade policies of the past. Honestly, Trump was right to fight so hard for this, even going so far as to remove us from NAFTA.
I don't have a good strategy for this, but probably some set of minimum manufacturing of everything should happen within our borders, say 10%, and accomplishing that target with a combination of sticks and carrots.
> This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US.
I've seen it first hand. I've talked with people that have been impacted by it. I've also seen the corporate slight of hand that tries to disguise it. Components manufactured in China, shipped to Mexico for assembly, then shipped to the US to have some decorative panels and stickers slapped on so they can put a "made in USA" sticker on the side.
Go grab virtually anything from around your house (excluding food) and it's more likely than not that that thing was manufactured in whole or in part outside the US. That didn't used to be the case. Coming out of WW2 it was rare for people to own non-domestically produced goods.
This isn't a case of US manufacturing just being so ridiculously efficient that you just don't need many companies making things. That might hold water if most goods were still manufactured in the US, but they aren't. Cars are about the only manufactured consumer good still made in the US, and even they are quite often assembled in Mexico. Pretty much any electronic device is made in China.
Here's a case study, Ikea which is a very popular furniture manufacturer (among other things) mostly assembles their products in Mexico and China. They do have some US manufacturing, but that's largely because they acquired rights to some large swaths of woodland and it makes sense to process and assemble that on site.
To be clear, you mentioned agriculture, and yes, the US does have a thriving agriculture sector, but agriculture isn't manufacturing.
The US screwed up badly when it let basic manufacturing get outsourced. When the factories making screws and transistors are all based in other countries, eventually all the other factories are going to follow them.
It never left. The US manufacturing output steadily increased from the 50's to the recent recession. Right now, it is at an all time high. The idea of american manufacturing being shipped overseas is just false, and I'm sick of people repeating it.
What happened is that as wages got expensive, US labor was replaced by machines where possible, and by some cheap process steps overseas where not possible. Intel CPUs are a good example: They used to be made wholly in the US, employing a lot of blue-collar workers. To save costs, the factories were automated to the point where the only process steps left that employ a lot of people without advanced degrees are packaging and testing. And then those were shipped to Malaysia and Costa Rica. The high-capital process steps that create most of the value in the system are still in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico.
Manufacturing jobs, as they used to be, are gone. Not because of globalization, but because of robots. And the old kind of manufacturing jobs will never return -- it just doesn't make sense to pay people $30 a hour for what could be done faster, cheaper and better by a robot.
> And notice that the US is not now trying to return manufacturing home because of long-term plans, but because the people noticed that the bargain of cheap goods from China doesn't mean much when you exported the job
Most of those jobs outside of a few narrow categories were lost to automation. We make more steel, aircrafts, and cars than ever but with far fewer people.
China's history of planning has led to tons of misallocation of resources, and I'm not sure I'd want to emulate that.
>> There are a lot of jobs dependent on trade with China (our company was affected by the Huawei ban, for example), and the fantasy that you can just cut-over to US manufacturing without huge transition job losses is unrealistic.
Completely agree. I very much empathize with the author and this issue is the only one where I feel some sort of connection with the current POTUS, but the engineering-at-scale capacities in the United States pale in comparison to China for a variety of reasons - some due to a cheaper labor force and more "flexible" labor laws, and some simply due to culture.
We do not have this capacity now and it is dubious that we can build it quickly without serious governmental subsidies and efforts not seen since World War 2. I'm personally good with the change, but it will cost billions if not trillions of dollars in lost productivity and marginal costs over the next decade or two, and this is not something to handwave away.
> U.S. national security is weakened if the ability to build in the United States depends on materials and exchanges far outside U.S. control.
While true, this is odd. We’ve outsourced so much manufacturing that there’s a ton of different items we can’t build. We’re in the middle of a pandemic where we found we couldn’t make enough Ppe and there was literally a single American factory left for n95s.
Having the materials available is important but useless if we can’t do anything ourselves with them.
I highly doubt that is true. I mean, there are only 3 basic economics sectors, and you just stroke an entire one out of the question.
It is way more likely that the reality is more nuanced, and the US can not efficiently manufacture some things, while keeping the lead on some other things.
A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build our planes. General Dynamics, Oshkosh, and others build our tanks. Raytheon makes some of our missiles. In fact, here's full list of who's building our defense tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_... -- As you can see, it's mostly home-grown and home-based American companies. We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states.
It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside. Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle. Forcing consumer goods to be manufactured in the U.S. would dramatically drive up their prices, and in effect be an indirect tax on the American consumer. Moreover, the U.S. is nearly at full employment. Who's going to staff the factories that will make consumer goods? With the extreme hostility to immigration we have under the folks in charge now, I don't see any new immigrants being let in to work at these new factories. Companies would be forced to build fully automated factories (due to labor shortage), and there'll be jarring period of high consumer goods prices while software engineers write code for new robotic/automated manufacturing of basic goods. Maybe in the end, this newly written software will (with its development cost amortized over time) allow us to undercut the prices of even low-wage human-requiring manufacturing and become a reigning manufacturer of all sorts of things -- but that benefit feels fairly remote, far-fetched, and hard-to-achieve.
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