> Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here.
Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
> You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch
This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
We have a high dollar value of manufactured products, but volume is way down, and the supply chain is ragged or totally broken. If your factories are warehouses where you assemble Chinese feedstock with German tools, how much local expertise do you have, or is it just LEGO kit stuff for tariff evasion?
You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here.
Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.