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In 2024, We Woke Up to the Need to Reindustrialize!
In 2024 we woke up to the need to Reindustrialize! Mike Slaugh, a key figure advancing defense tech, kicked us off through his convening of Reindustrialize in Detroit in June. Since then, there has been a flurry of other events, blogs, postings that amplify the call for us to pay attention to manufacturing again!
“Offshoring by American companies has destroyed our manufacturing base and our capacity to develop new products and processes. To continue our ability to innovation — the US must MAKE THINGS!
In Spite of the call at Reindustrialize, this statement was made not in 2024 but in 2019!
It went unnoticed. It appeared in a Wall Street Journal article jointly authored by Sridhar Kota and Tom Mahoney. Sridhar had been sounding the alarm for years at that point. The inventor of the Manufacturing Innovation Institutes, he saw first hand that technology development increasingly didn’t translate into great manufactured products. We no longer made things.
Without understanding the “feel” of making something with one’s hands, we cannot go back to first principles and redefine how we approach “the Make”. We won’t be able to automate as well as we should; we won’t be able to develop software at the precision that we need in order to make a difference in how we build!
