Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think we should be able to be self-sufficient and manufacture everything ourselves. I think it is fine to import stuff. My bigger concern is, for some things, there just isn't a lot of options. I think its fine to buy some of the raw materials from Germany and China, but I'd also like to see a few more countries that they could be bought from.
If we suddenly had to, it would take billions of dollars and several months to spin up any real capacity.
All this stuff requires people. And we simply don’t have them. The folks who could be trained to build such stuff are still in primary school.
I really don't understand the FUD around US manufacturing capability, you'd essentially need to craft the greatest conspiracy ever to think that every politician, defense agency, intelligence agency, etc. is asleep at the wheel to not recognize this supposed threat and do nothing about it.
0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/where-does-us-ge...
Where do you think this originates from?
China ships a rather large amount of stuff to these countries to take advantage of the trade agreements. So much that you can find satellite images of large yards in Mexico that are used for this purpose with barely any effort.
These takes are much more doomer than I'm willing to bet the supporters of "bring everything back" realize. Do you have no faith in the US economy / populace adapting to a hypothetical all out war with China?
It’s not like WWII where you have a majority population that works on the farm or in a factory with their hands, and at home fixing stuff that breaks. That sort of population can be rapidly redeployed. We would need to start from the basics like “how to turn a screwdriver” for a huge portion of the workforce.
When you really start looking into things, nearly everything points back to China at some point. Pharmaceuticals? The APIs or at least important precursors largely originate there - even if they hit a middleman country first. Then you get into basic components and it’s the same story. That part from India or Mexico might not be available without China as a backstop.
It’s not an impossible problem, but it’s a problem that took decades and a generation or two to destroy. It’s far easier and quicker to destroy things than build them.