"Wholly unprepared for wartime production needs": Is America still the world’s leading technological and industrial power?

Is America still the world’s leading technological and industrial power?

asks ROF's Sébastien Laye in the Washington Examiner as he lays out A Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook for the US. 

This is the daring and haunting question some of the most brilliant minds in technology and industrial policy recently addressed in a thick volume called The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook. 

Compiling contributions from American Compass, the Institute for Progress, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the New American Industrial Association Foundation, this extensive text lists policy proposals anchored in the belief that if we prolong the mantra “invent here, make there”, a lurking decline will decidedly knock the U.S. off its pedestal. 

These researchers focused on three areas: industrial, national security, and frontier innovation. With AI, these three considerations are tightly intertwined inasmuch as technology has become the cornerstone of industrial and innovation might. The playbook proposed by these researchers has the merit to remind policymakers that without a manufacturing base, this three-pronged approach would be heedless.

At the inception of the text, the authors dramatize the stakes by asserting that America is wholly unprepared for wartime production needs, as it would take at the current pace nearly eight years to replenish our weapons inventory. These manufacturing problems are further exacerbated by failing electrical and energy infrastructure nationwide. From the citizenry’s perspective, technology, like other pursuits, should support economic growth, national security, and community flourishing.

Other entries in Sébastien Laye's Washington Examiner series:
• Promethean Rivalry: The AI race between America and China is even more impactful than the Space Race or the Atomic rivalry at their apex
• Silicon Valley against China: the Trump administration needs to step up America's artificial general intelligence (AGI) game
• Is General Mayhem the Dystopian Future for International Technologiy Rivalries? Read About MAIM (Mutually Assured AI Malfunction) in the U.S.-China AI Race
• A national security imperative: By doubling down on partnerships with Ukraine and Greenland, the U.S. aims to break free from Chinese dependency while reinforcing its technological supremacy