Unipolarity is dead. America ceased to be alone on top of the world the moment her ruling class forgot a simple truth: wars are won on the factory floor.
In the first few months of the war in Ukraine, the global cognoscenti declared the lesson of the conflict to be about Russian aggression and Ukrainian resolve. By the end of the first year, it was about the future of drone warfare. Today, we see the old has been made new: it is about production. Assembly lines. Factory floors.
For those paying attention, it is a warning for America: build or die.
Despite playing only a peripheral role, America is burning through its weapons stockpiles in the Ukrainian conflict at a rate that is alarming our military leaders. Russia, on the other hand, despite having an economy the same size as Italy, has been able to sustain its attack and even strengthen core pillars of its economy.
The fact that we are losing the War of Production to Russia despite having a GDP some 15 times larger should sound alarm bells as we look across the Pacific. While America’s industrial heartland sits vacant and rusting, China’s factories have never been busier.
China produces the equivalent of the entire Royal Navy every two years while America’s warship production has hit a 25-year low. Currently, China is acquiring weapons at a rate five-to-six times faster than the United States. Experts warn that should a conflict with Communist China break out over Taiwan, the United States would run out of essential munitions within a single week of fighting.
This disparity cuts across all manufacturing.
A single shipyard in China holds more production capacity than all shipyards in America combined. Cast products - a foundation of modern manufacturing - are also utterly dominated by China: it produces more than the next nine countries combined.
And if American policymakers once found comfort in the fact that our weapons are technologically superior, the emergence of DeepSeek AI is a wakeup call. China is now capable of remarkable innovation as well as producing at great speed and scale.
China has fully embraced what the United States has forgotten: a nation cannot have a defense industrial base without an industrial base. America was at its best when companies were commercial companies first, not defense specialists. Chrysler, Texas Instruments, General Electric, even General Mills (known to us today for brands like Cheerios and Lucky Charms), built the arsenal that won World War II. Profits derived from their commercial ventures would be reinvested in research and development that advanced the national interest.
The truth is that America is no longer the Arsenal of Democracy. That business model no longer exists. After the Cold War, shortsighted policymakers pushed corporations to shutter factories in America and move them abroad. Defense manufacturing was concentrated in five “Prime” companies that do nothing but defense work.
Conformity bred comfort; and comfort is always and everywhere the death of speed and innovation.
Today, weapons are produced at a snail’s pace and are enormously expensive. The cost of merely sustaining our F-35 fleet is $1.58 trillion. We aspire to mass-produce tens of thousands of drones to replace manned jets, but we’re not able to produce enough low-tech 155mm artillery shells to support a limited conflict, let alone an all-out war with an adversarial peer.
At the same time private sector manufacturing jobs have become scarce. As workers have exited the field, they have taken their knowledge with them, leaving an America that has literally forgotten how to build things.
The time has come for a national industrial renaissance.
America’s defense industrial base must reject specialization and sharpen its teeth in the commercial sector. Policy makers must steer between both Scylla (cheap goods abroad) and Charybdis (lobbyists selling expensive-and-outdated programs to future lobbyists). We must grapple with the political pathologies that brought politicians to deindustrialize in the first place.
President Trump ran on a return to American Greatness and understands that America’s greatness is inextricably bound to America’s industry. He has already issued executive orders removing barriers to American AI innovation, establishing a trade policy that enhances our industrial advantages while raising barriers to hostile foreign nations that wield unfair trade practices as a weapon against the United States, and encouraging domestic energy production to power our industries. Policymakers at all levels must facilitate reindustrialization by cutting senseless regulations and investing in strategic sectors.
The political winds are behind the reindustrialize agenda, but they won’t be forever. The wars of the future are being fought on factory floors today. It’s time for America to answer the national emergency and start building like a superpower again.
Austin Bishop, CEO of the New American Industrial Alliance, and Chris Power, CEO of Hadrian
