A new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology urgently recommends that the nation rebuild its “industrial ecosystem” of manufacturers, suppliers, research, and skilled labor to support multiple industries, not just clusters of companies dedicated to one particular sector.
The report, unveiled in Washington Friday, said manufacturers with the ability and talent to produce the ideas of entrepreneurs are in increasingly short supply, as US corporations have shifted production offshore and outsourced many other functions, such as research and development, over the last 30 years.
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It's wrong to call manufacturing jobs "less skilled." A machinist is as skilled, or more so, than a programmer. It's just that the machinist does not learn the job in college.
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The industrial might of America was one of the principle reasons why we won WWII in relatively short order. Most people today really have no idea of the staggering amount of production that took place in those years. We built ships by the thousands and airplanes by the tens of thousands. There was an uncountable number of sub-contractors all over the country operating machine shops and just about every other type of manufacturing shops imaginable. All that stuff was efficiently moved 24/7 over a vast network of railroads. The U.S. was officially involved in WWII for only about three and a half years. Nowadays it would take nearly that long just to get the environmental permits to build a shipyard.
If we went to war with China we'd have to borrow the money from China and get most of our weapons made in China.