Anduril founder Palmer Luckey comments on the intentional offshoring of U.S. industrial capacity over the past 30 years and what it will take to bring it back:

PALMER LUCKEY: What’s interesting about the United States and our slip away from being a manufacturing superpower, which was the core of our military might… I mean, that was how we won World War II. It wasn’t building the best weapons. It was that we made so much that the other side couldn’t stand up to it. So how did we lose that? It wasn’t an accident or a failure. It was a decision by… I’m gonna sound like a conspiracy theorist, the elites. The elites decided that they were going to reform the United States in the image of what they wanted. They wanted us to move higher on the value chain. They said we’re gonna do more higher value. We’re gonna get away from the making and into the design. We’re going to make more music and more design and more services, and we’re gonna become a service economy. We’re going to move away from things like textiles and chemicals and metals. And the idea was that in a globalized, peaceful world with no conflict, that moving the things that were “lower value” to other people would result in a more prosperous nation. I think it worked for a little while. For example, allowing China into the World Trade Organization was a very profitable thing for our country. It allowed us to buy a lot of cheap stuff, some of it good, some of it bad, but definitely cheaper than it would have been to make it in the United States. Reindustrialization is really about recognizing that sometimes your own destiny doesn’t have a value that can be measured in dollars. If you rely on your strongest geopolitical adversary for all things that make the American way of life possible, and if divorcing yourself from them would radically lower quality of life for everyone in your country, how are you ever going to negotiate with them? How are you ever going to hold them into account? So reindustrialization, a lot of it is about making a new decision to bring back these critically important things, not because it’s cheaper, not because it is necessarily economically necessary, but because as a country, you need these things in order to not just be a vassal state to the people who actually make all of the things that you need. I think it’s gonna be really difficult. There are many people using reindustrialization as a buzzword to raise money, but they don’t actually really care about strategic independence. I see companies that talk about how they’re about bringing back U.S. manufacturing, and then they use all Chinese machines in their factory, relying on Chinese technical support teams to make all of that stuff work. We need to make sure that we don’t let these buzzwords gloss over a lot of the real problems. We need to hold people to account. If you say you’re about reindustrialization, you better be serious about it, or get called out. People should say, wait, wait, wait, are you actually just the usual way of doing business dressed up in a newer, more patriotic-sounding way?

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