Make no mistake, we spent the USSR to death. We made our military advances so expensive to stay at parity with that it simply overwhelmed their economic product

Make no mistake, we spent the USSR to death. We made our military advances so expensive to stay at parity with that it simply overwhelmed their economic production capacity as a nation. Sure, they did it to themselves, but we made the situation lose/lose by exploiting our position as an economic powerhouse. With the very sad state of US manufacturing, where just trying to buy US made bolts and nuts can be impossible, it is entirely possible that China could use the same play against us. We don’t have the critical skilled manpower to recover overnight, it’s at least a 5-8 decade process just to get enough qualified die makers to build the tools we need to build the tools and products we want. Die making is a skill that takes decades to master, and a master can only teach so many apprentices in a lifetime. This leaves us in a very vulnerable position. We need to buy the tools from China at scale in order to build the tools that we need to rebuild our capabilities. We cannot build them ourselves at scale. If we had a BRICS embargo against selling certain tools to the USA, like we used to have with China before Reagan, we would be well and truly up a creek without the proverbial paddle. Right now it’s almost impossible to manufacture in the USA at any significant scale, and cheap and easy to do in China. We can assemble, but manufacturing not so much. The people with the skills needed to rebuild this capacity now number in the low thousands or even high hundreds , and the average age of those that are left in the field is 64. Deregulation and outsourcing, kicked off in earnest during the Reagan years, cut us off at the knees. Pointing out that China is much better positioned than we are to lead the world in economic and industrial production isn’t unpatriotic. The first step to a solution is to recognise the problem. There’s an interesting video that is on this tangent: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q I believe he has made some headway since this video, but the trials involved in manufacturing in the USA even at a very modest scale are salient.