The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States
78 comments
·August 17, 2025nostrademons
patagurbon
There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.
nostrademons
I've been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous, but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev.
But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again.
My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s.
Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
johnnyanmac
>'ve been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous
Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree.
>Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
jppittma
Not sure where I fall on that one. In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Should low level manufacturing be a core competency of the US? Why? Turning steel into screws is certainly lower margin than turning screws and engines into airplanes.
snickerbockers
Because there's no higher power that can prosecute China for antitrust violations if they ever leverage our dependence on them against us. America is making the same mistake Europe made a few decades ago, which is constantly downsizing itself into irrelevancy because "helpful" countries are more than willing to take on the burden of economic domination. When we reach the point that all we make is fiat currency and software then we have nothing to offer the rest of the world and we become decadent and impotent.
Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
anonymars
In the pandemic there was a lesson I read somewhere that I will always keep with me and repeat: "efficiency" and "resiliency" are opposing points on a spectrum. Once you hear it I think you'll see it everywhere. What you describe is efficient but it isn't resilient.
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johnnyanmac
>it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same?
Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market.
If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
hollerith
Actually, low-value manufacturing is a US competency because it is highly dependent on energy costs, which are lower in the US than in most countries.
awesome_dude
All of the manufacturing economies have started out as "low quality", and "cheap" - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China.
All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota)
There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.
johnnyanmac
Nothing but a few rich people who have no loyalty to any country, no. With the goverments being paid to agree, of course.
echelon
This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore.
Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs.
We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it.
Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
johnnyanmac
>We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken.
2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage.
3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal.
Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
forgotoldacc
Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have.
And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
mc32
They jobs don't pay spectacularly well, but they pay better than Mickey D's and other service jobs, so they would be an upgrade to those jobs. Manufacturing tend to have union rep., if that matters. We have lots of underemployed and people working lousy service jobs --we don't really need to import labor that needs additional customs/social and language training.
Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
cogman10
I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) and they saw what you are describing first hand.
One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1.
And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes.
The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people.
What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.
bushbaba
Automation lowers costs, which increases consumption. We essentially trade time for dollars, and then dollars for goods that themselves took time to produce. While the exchange rate of time-for-time stays constant, automation means we now get more goods for the same amount of time worked. So it’s not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
magicalhippo
> I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase)
A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia.
He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories.
Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.
gonzobonzo
I don't think conclusion matches what we're seeing, though. Real output being flat while population and consumption have massively increased means that much more of our consumed products are being manufactured abroad now. It's not just automation at work. The original article even talks about that, where it mentions how high tech manufacturing is shrinking as a percentage of the economy.
It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.
alberth
My understanding is that this is all about cutting edge manufacturing.
E.g., in semiconductor fabrication - over the past decade, Intel’s chip production and process nodes have lagged 1–2 generations behind leading non-U.S. manufacturers.
nostrademons
That's true for chips but not necessarily for other high-value manufacturing sectors. Americans are still the world leaders in say metallurgy or nuclear engineering, for example: all the jet turbine blades are still made in America, and most nuclear reactors. Also ASML gets all the hype for EUV lithography, but Applied Materials (based out of Santa Clara, CA) is still a critical part of the supply chain for new semiconductor fabs. And the EV industry started in Fremont CA with Tesla, although they've since lost some of their edge to Chinese and Korean manufacturers.
alberth
Many Americans under estimate how good (and leading) China is in many manufacturing and engineering disciplines.
The top 2 universities to study nuclear engineering are both in China.
mattnewton
I think it’s as simple as the selective pressures in our democratic system push for this rhetoric.
Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot.
Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.
markus_zhang
That’s still fine. You gotta hire people to maintain the robots, the people to build the robots, and the people for all service companies to service all those people. Then there is infrastructure, entertainment, etc.
And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.
johnnyanmac
>And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots.
Not with these constant layoffs and high turnover. We're not working like a country that wants to last long term.
SilverElfin
The problem is there is no pipeline to get people into these highly automated levels of manufacturing. How can you learn about all the steps and how they’re done “manually” and all that, to be able to participate in the high end of manufacturing? It feels like an island. And once the current talent retires it may leave a void even for those highly advanced factories.
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givemeethekeys
Let's say we manage to bring ever more fully automated factories back to the US - wouldn't that create many more jobs to fix the robots?
hypeatei
With the US unemployment rate being so low, with birth rates below replacement levels, and with anti-immigration sentiment: how do proponents of "bring everything back" plan to deal with the human capital problem?
Besides that, bringing everything back would surely raise prices quite substantially and we've seen how voters reacted to COVID inflation.
d_sem
When I see data like this i'm reminded of the history of automotive manufacturing in the 20th century and the several waves of technological changes that re-wrote the role local labor played in building cars.
The question isn't, what are the absolute number of jobs in a given sector. The question is, what are the overall trends in productivity, robustness of supply chain, and relative competitiveness in the market.
alephnerd
Good callout.
Also, a major pet peeve of mine for over a decade now has been the lack of granularity in classifying "high tech" jobs.
Most studies use BLS codes, but those are extremely dated - they still treat a typist like a skilled worker and a machinist as a semi- or low-skilled worker.
In reality, aside from macro-level production stats and private sector signals such as dealflow, we have no idea about the rate of production in the US.
From personal experience, I doubt any "make in America" policy would lead to more jobs - most low and medium level assembly roles have been automation friendly for decades now (even in India you can buy and install a programmable soldering robot for roughly the same amount as a year's salary for an employee).
Most discourse is divorced from reality, I blame this on the lack of engineers in the policy space - most of us with those backgrounds would rather remain in the private sector, because an LA or think tank staffer salary ain't making rent in DC.
If you do not know the difference between AC or DC or what solder flux is, let alone further intricacies, you have no position making industrial policy or grand strategy for American manufacturing or engineering (this is a shot fired at you so called "Software Engineers" as well - Leetcode doesn't mean you understand how Infiniband works). But this principal also works in reverse w/ regards to policy matters imo.
juujian
Note that "Aerospace" is largely arms, not passenger airplanes. It's the billion-dollar bomb the U.S. has dropped on Afghanistan, and air-to-air missiles that cost 10s of millions of dollars each to manufacture. There aren't even any benefits accruing to a large population, it is actually the opposite.
laughing_man
1987, literally the peak cold war military spending, is an interesting year for comparison. Much of that high tech manufacturing (and employment) was underwritten by the taxpayers through the Pentagon, and that military tech eventually made its way into the civilian market.
Very soon after the US took a decade-long "procurement holiday", and we lost an enormous amount of manufacturing expertise.
Can we bring those jobs back? Sure, with a lot of tax money. Do we want to? I do - the value of "service economy" jobs is in free fall as companies replace white collar employees with LLMs.
avalys
Is this really about military spending? The US used to make so many products and appliances domestically - everything from steel to uranium to doorknobs to refrigerators to chemicals to CRT displays to roofing shingles, and everything in between.
The military benefited from the massive industrial base that supported this production - but it didn’t create it.
And now the loss of that domestic manufacturing base is largely why military production - and indeed, any kind of large-scale endeavor in the US, including construction - is slow and expensive.
laughing_man
The article identifies three areas as "high tech manufacturing": Computer and electronic products, Pharmaceuticals & medicine, and Aerospace products and parts.
It's likely microchip development would have happened somewhere else without large US defense contracts. The industry was literally created by defense contracts for things like spy satellites, combat aircraft, and ICBMs.
Same with aerospace. The entire commercial aerospace industry exists because of bomber development in WW II, and all the engine tech since was initially developed and deployed in military aircraft. Carbon fiber, radar, fly-by-wire, plus the entire manufacturing process that produces aircraft that work the first time were all technologies developed or made practical to manufacture for the military. There's a reason passenger aircraft aren't manufactured in countries without a lot of military spending - companies like Boeing, Airbus, UAC, and Comac all depend on military contracts to pay development costs.
What constitutes high tech manufacturing is probably a bit different today. I would include sectors like exotic materials (superconductors, boutique alloys, and almost-here stuff like graphene and CNTs) and battery tech.
derefr
An interesting rabbit-hole I fell into the other day, was researching the French company Vantiva, the maker of my ISP's fiber ONT (and many previous cable modems I've had from other ISPs, under their previous names Technicolor / Thomson.)
If you trace out why Vantiva makes modems, it turns out that it's because all the patents for cable modems / coaxial carrier-network signal modulation and amplification were filed by RCA; GE bought RCA; and then GE divested its own + RCA's consumer-electronics businesses (including these patents!), selling that unit to Vantiva.
Presumably, cable modems were the kind of industry that only support a few big players, because there's not enough margin there after licensing costs are paid to patent-holders. The default winner of such a market would be a vertically-integrated player who holds those patents and can therefore make cable modems without licensing them.
That player was RCA (American); then GE (American); but is now Vantiva (French).
Vantiva released the cable-modem patents into a free IP sharing consortium kind of thing 15+ years ago now; but only once they already had an extremely dominant position in the space, with existing contracts with pretty much every ISP, such that they could be assured continued dominance even without the weight of licensing pressing down on all their competitors' backs.
Whenever I read about tech IP, I run into similar stories to this one. Some American company owned some tech innovation, but sold it to an overseas buyer some time in the late 90s / early 90s. And now it's not worth it to make that thing in America any more, because doing so would require licensing that IP from its current overseas owner.
(Perhaps, if America wants to be competitive, the government should encourage American firms with lots of free cash to [re-]acquire foreign companies that hold especially-valuable IP. Then, at least the IP incentives would lean in favor of vertical integration of manufacturing within the US.)
bad_haircut72
its not specifically military spending, just good government. If they pivoted after the cold war back into the space race or something, we would still have a high tech sector and it need not necessarily be military focussed
speed_spread
Could also have invested in public education and healthcare but noooo
evantbyrne
Where did you see that white collar jobs are in a free fall? The employment rate is still tightly correlated with level of education as it always has been.
laughing_man
People who graduated in June are having a real struggle finding a job. Companies haven't laid many people off (outside of the ones that over-hired recently, like Meta and IBM) but they're not hiring. That's just the breeze that's heralding the storm. LLMs are going to make "any degree" jobs an increasingly rare thing as time goes on.
neom
Out of curiosity, If that storm comes, what do you predict will happen? I've been very curious what folks think is going to happen if the above becomes very true.
theshackleford
> People who graduated in June are having a real struggle finding a job.
So were people who graduated in 2007-2009. I guess it heralded the end of white collar jobs. Oh wait...no it didnt.
> LLMs are going to make "any degree" jobs an increasingly rare thing as time goes on.
If you actually believe this, it makes you one of the rare few who likely could actually be replaced with an LLM.
chrsw
1. Do we really want these jobs to come back to the US?
2. If we do, what cost are we willing to pay for it?
noosphr
Does the US need a functioning war force that China can't turn off when they feel like it? This happens: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/22/books.france
8note
couldnt china make the same threat of nuking america if america doesnt give over its nuclear codes?
noosphr
If you read the article you'd realize the whole point is that they won't have to if they are the ones who built the conventional forces in the first place.
sieabahlpark
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wenc
If we want US manufacturing, it has to:
1) Meet or exceed spec (this shouldn't be a problem)
2) Lower TCO than competition -- labor, automation (this is where the US is current uncompetitive on the lower-end, very competitive on the high-end).
3) Non-cost strategic requirements compared to the competition -- supply chain resilience, national security, lower lead time, consumer preference for US made (but not all products fall into these categories)
4) Benefit from policy intervention like subsidies, tariffs, tax incentives and regulations vis-a-vis competition (the problem with these protections is they make US products uncompetitive in the long run in the international market -- US cars for instance are not competitive in most countries)
pokstad
People need purpose. It’s not enough to work in an Amazon warehouse selling stuff from China to make ends meet or driving Ubers. These manufacturing jobs aren’t low skill industrial age jobs, they are highly skilled professions that improve our national security.
nemothekid
>People need purpose.
I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.
The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.
svaha1728
It depends on the job. T-shirts yes. I enjoy building microgrids. There are many unsolved challenges. When the robots start doing it maybe it’ll be boring. That’s a long way off.
bilbo0s
I think the implication of question 2 is who, exactly, are we going to tax to get the money to pay for all the highly skilled professionals needed? Everyone can't be working for a military contractor. Someone has to pay the costs of moving the legions of workers needed into those jobs. And taxing the uber drivers, walmart stockboys, or the Amazon warehouse workers is just not going to get us there.
In my view, the way forward is, unfortunately, automation. We can't bring that manufacturing back using the same labor basis as is used in Asia. Just to put that labor basis in perspective, we'd be looking at millions of jobs that the military would be funding through sub-contracts. We have to get some of that work done through industrial automation without creating jobs. We need to do that not only to make this sustainable, but really even to make this feasible at all.
Analemma_
I've yet to be convinced that manufacturing jobs inherently give more "purpose" than white-collar work, and I think posts like yours are mostly ungrounded fantasy. Ironically, that kind of rose-tinted nostalgia is usually coming from people who have never actually worked a manufacturing job themselves and can only guess at what it's like from internet memes.
I recommend this quasi-review of Rivethead by Ben Hamper if you want a taste of what "manufacturing jobs" were actually like: a lot of people drinking themselves stupid to escape the monotony and utter lack of agency in their work. And this was at one of the Big Three automakers, supposedly the peak of what we're trying to return to! [0]
[0]: https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/96390732283/happy-la...
smitty1e
3. If we don't, who eats the blame when the strategic failure comes home to roost?
mc32
They would pay better than fast-food. So, I think so.
When we started shipping manufacturing jobs overseas people in power would say that the future was in service jobs. Ha! What a joke. Every population has a bell curve distribution --i.e. not everyone can work toward being a high value-add service jobber.
We manufactured high end handsets (Motorola) stateside till roughly 2014. Sun manufactured workstations in the East bay. If you go back further Cisco and 3Com used to manufacture in the South bay.
It was better than working at Mickey D's. So, yeah, we'd want these stateside. Better than having people out in the streets strung out on drugs not even aware their lives are going down a whirlpool.
Everyone since Obama paid lip service to bringing back manufacturing jobs --they were doing this to pretend they cared about the blue collar folks Clinton, G "H" W and G "W" sold out. I blame Clinton the most because he just let China ascend to the WTO despite knowing the Chinese had loopholes allowing them to ignore much of the conditions. "W" just didn't care.
varispeed
The economy is going downhill, precisely because we have no manufacturing and investment funds are in full asset stripping mode.
In few years there will be no one to buy said services and everything will implode.
lettergram
Yes. Strategically, it makes sense for the US, much like Russia and China to be independent.
Sanctions weren’t effective on Russia because they had most of what they needed domestically and partner markets to sell those goods to.
When the US tried to impose sanctions on China, China called the bluff and blocked strategic materials. The US “trade deal” wasn’t much different than how it started.
In terms of willing to pay for it; what’s having a country worth? Because if a competing country can withhold resources you need, you’re effectively a junior partner.
Ultimately, reduce over seas benefits, tariff and offer tax write offs to build on shore. Then you’ll have better higher paying jobs and onshore manufacturing. More real GDP from goods will not have a negative impact or cost, it’s part of why Germany and Japan grew rapidly (they had tight import controls, to build a domestic industry).
Also, the majority of the country voted for Trump and this was his #1 issue. Like him or hate him, the desire for domestic protection is what elected him.
delecti
I don't think it refutes your point that supply chain dependence is a tactical weakness, but sanctions weren't effective on Russia because half the world is still buying their oil.
lettergram
Also true, kind of ment the chip sanctions. They transitioned to China and domestic production.
varispeed
It's painfully obvious if you want to make something in very much any western country. There are very few firms you can subcontract CNC work or PCB assembly. Then the costs are so high, your product will be dead on arrival price wise, but also there is lack of skill and capabilities.
Unless you are dealing with companies that supply to the military, you'll get poor workmanship and months long lead times. Might as well just give up or...
Just subcontract work to China. Sure, there is many crap suppliers, but once you find good ones, it's another league in very much every aspect. Parts take days to deliver, not months and are top quality.
I think many people don't realise that we are very much in the middle of shit creek and without a paddle.
A_D_E_P_T
> Unless you are dealing with companies that supply to the military, you'll get poor workmanship and months long lead times. Might as well just give up or...
This is true even if you deal with companies that supply to the military.
> Just subcontract work to China.
The thing that kills me is that dealing with China is so much easier than dealing with anywhere else.
Part of it seems to be an attitude thing. Like, if I shoot somebody in China an email, it will inevitably be answered within 24 hours, and more likely within 4.
Send an email to an EU or US company, and you're often (I'd say typically) going to wait days for a response. I've never seen that, not once, in dealing with a Chinese firm. What's more, if you're buying from their B2B megamarkets (like 1688.com) they almost always have live 24/7 customer service and procurement support available on chat.
The other part is that, if you know what you're doing, it's less risky. I was chatting with a French vineyard owner a couple of years ago. He was pulling white vines to plant more red varieties, because his best clients, the Chinese, preferred reds. He told me that dealing with China was easy -- they'd always pay in advance, and a handshake deal was always honored. Dealing with the US, in contrast, was a nightmare of legal quicksand, double-dealing, and Net-30 that always seemed to turn into Net-90.
foobarian
The more I read about this kind of thing, the more I wonder what it would be like to up and move to a bustling tech center in China like Shenzhen or similar. Where there are stores in walking distance selling electronics parts. Where you can walk into a shop and get PCBs made. Where you can meet and talk shop with fellow makers who are not just LARPing arts and crafts but actually doing cutting edge manufacturing. Has anyone done something like this?
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genman
The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. It became quite obvious when the Arduino wave took the hold and people started to design their own PCBs and realized that they can get their designs done in China much cheaper and faster. It was by now over 10 years ago - this was the moment when the opportunity was really lost.
bix6
Meanwhile farmers are also struggling but we can just eat AI right?
So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S:
When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].
The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):
1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.
2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.
If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP