I would like to add some additional thoughts to Steve Williams’ View from the Middle, “Does America Need Manufacturing?”

 

America needs manufacturing not only to provide stable, well-paying jobs for its citizens but also to maintain and defend its strength and freedom in an increasingly competitive world. This very topic is a matter of serious thought and discussion in a recent white paper by the Manufacturing Division of the National Defense Industrial Association, www.ndia.org.

 

One of the points discussed in this white paper is maintaining a skilled manufacturing workforce. Based on my observations over more than forty years of industrial employment, we have probably lost an entire generation of U.S. manufacturing expertise. I recall reading an article in the July 1994 issue of “Popular Mechanics” magazine entitled “Saturn Revisited” on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first lunar landing. A quote from that article is even more appropriate today than it was then: “Contrary to popular rumor, NASA has not lost the blueprints to its mightiest rocket….What NASA has lost is its corporate knowledge. The rocket’s designers and mechanics have retired, died or moved on without passing on their skills to a new generation. Although it may be possible to follow blueprints, it’s impossible to relearn what was never written down.”

 

As a nation, we are rapidly losing many of the skills that are vital to our nation’s survival such as ship building and military communications systems design. The first is in danger of being lost because of the huge cost of new naval vessels and the second because of more and more reliance on COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) devices as a method of reducing costs.

 

Certainly, these and many other examples of waning, but vital, technologies could be topics for entire articles, however, I’ll leave those to Steve. The point that I want to make is that a strong manufacturing base is essential to our long-term, continued survival as a free nation.

 

I hope that my comments will not be viewed as just another extremist political rant. Rather, I would like them to be a starting point for discussing and understanding why American needs a strong manufacturing industry and what can be done by business and government leaders to regain and maintain it.

 

Yours truly,

Allan H. Reed, Ph.D.

Senior Research Electrochemist at Technic Inc. in Cranston, Rhode Island

 

*The views expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

 

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