Manufacturing is not something we can afford to just offshore. Captains of Industry, Arsenal apprentices and Machinists for the military are key. ⬇️
First Breakfast has a great short read on their Substack on ‘Laying the Cultural Foundation for Reindustrialization’ that we thoroughly recommend to you. The TLDR version is we need to make Manufacturing great again:
“For decades, the United States moved away from a culture of building. We outsourced manufacturing and changed the story we told ourselves about what kind of work is worthwhile. Over time, the story was replaced by a narrative that success meant distance from physical production. As a result, the foundation that allows an industrial ecosystem to function eroded.”
This sounds awfully familiar to Australians. In a recent post for the Sir Richard Williams Foundation, Dr Robbin Laird focused on the strategic imperative for early investment and sovereign capability for Australia. Like in the US (if not more so), Australia has spent decades disassembling manufacturing and our industrial base as Cold War I faded and then ended. We’ve built an economy leveraged to the hilt on globalised supply chains, just in time delivery and niche contributions to wars of choice that can be neatly scheduled:
“For decades, Australia’s defence procurement has followed a predictable pattern: prioritize efficiency and value for money, rely on market forces to shape outcomes, and expect industry to deliver capability improvements at the lowest possible cost. This approach, while financially prudent in peacetime, has led to a systematic atrophy of Australian defence manufacturing capacity.”
Laird identifies the challenge of being geared for the unipolar moment now that the world has returned to normal – a multipolar world where competition and conflict risks in our region are increasing:
“The logic seemed sound: why maintain expensive domestic production when global markets could deliver the same capability more cheaply? The answer, as recent global events have demonstrated, lies in the fragility of extended supply chains during crisis and the time required to build industrial capability from scratch.”
Time to make prudent choices about what we need to onshore and how we reraise an industrial base that increases sovereign capability, industrial capacity and national resilience.
Food for thought as always!
🖼️ via the US Office of War Information in 1942 and links to the articles mentioned are in the comments.