America’s industrial strength was never just a story of machines — it was a story of people. It’s Ryan Duffy, Editor-in-Chief of Per Aspera.

A story of welders who could read vibration by touch. Of machinists who solved tolerance issues that no manual anticipated. Of engineers who carried blueprints in their heads, not just in files.

That kind of knowledge — earned, unwritten, and passed hand-to-hand — powered everything from the Saturn V to the Stinger missile. Today, much of it is gone. And where it still exists, it’s aging, undocumented, and dangerously close to vanishing.

In this antimemo, we explore the strategic erosion of America’s “tribal knowledge” — the real-world expertise that turns plans into performance. We map where it’s vanished, why it’s so hard to recover, and what it will take to preserve and leverage this disappearing advantage in the age of automation.

This isn’t a eulogy, but a call to arms. The knowledge is still out there. The question is whether we’ll capture it in time.

P.S. Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here.

Welcome to Per Aspera's third antimemo. In these, we dive deep into crucial technological frontiers that will shape our future.

“Tribal Knowledge’s Comeback.” Too often, you’ll hear the line: “We can’t build it, we forgot how.” It’s become a familiar refrain, echoed whenever Americans pause to admire feats like Saturn V rockets, stealth fighters, or advanced semiconductors.

We look at this hardware and quietly wonder: Could we do this again today? This question cuts to the heart of a critical and overlooked challenge to American capability: the quiet erosion of tribal knowledge.

WHAT IS TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Tribal knowledge is the deep, experiential mastery cultivated through mentorship, observation, and hands-on practice—not through manuals or documentation. This mastery ain’t something that you can Google.

Manufacturing expertise = tribal knowledge. And manufacturing, despite what some MBAs may insist, isn’t a mere commodity nor a matter of “simply executing.” On the contrary, it’s often where the real innovation actually occurs: at the messy intersection of design, physics, materials, and production.

Yet with each strategic capability offshored or outsourced, America quietly surrenders irreplaceable tribal knowledge. Apple CEO Tim Cook captured the consequences of this clearly: America’s talent gap in manufacturing is now so severe that "in the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room.” In China? “You could fill multiple football fields."

PRESERVING AND TRANSFORMING TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE

This week’s antimemo speedruns through America’s stages of grief about this crisis (denial was quick; bargaining unproductive) and moves directly toward action. In the five-part antimemo, we detail:

• The nuanced categories of tribal knowledge—critical retrospective, transitional, and legacy—and tailored strategies for each.

• The false choice between private equity’s analog roll-up vision and VC’s fully “lights-out” dream, and why each in isolation misses the mark.

• How America can strategically blend analog know-how with digital capabilities, using sensors, automation, and robotics.

• A clear-eyed, action-oriented approach to translating traditional mastery into skills for an automated, AI-driven, and robotically articulated future.

• Automation isn’t the enemy of tribal knowledge, but our way forward. Technology will be a key enabler for preserving, scaling, and transforming tribal knowledge.

Beyond strategy, success hinges on human capital. Elevating manufacturing as high-tech, high-status, and high-paying is essential to attract the talent we need, and to rebuild a culture that honors building, making, and doing.

THE CALL OF THE MACHINE AGE

America still bends steel and forms silicon into marvels, and we stand today at a pivotal moment filled with technological possibility. But the cracks in our industrial foundation are real, having been chipped away by the outsourcing and offshoring of essential capacity.

Securing tribal knowledge is a choice, and it requires clarity, speed, and agency. Here’s exactly how we start.

OFF-CUFF

A personal note from Dan Goldin:

America is in the midst of a profound industrial transformation, deeper and more nuanced than any I’ve encountered in my career. Capturing tribal knowledge—and translating it into something both machine-readable and deeply human—is a daunting task. We worked hard in this antimemo to strike the right balance between honoring past mastery and leaning forward into the future, merging human skill and technological promise.

I’m optimistic, but clear-eyed: it won’t be easy. So let’s get to work!!!

If you work in this industry, you don’t just know the problem — you live it. Most American industrial programs still run on fragmented systems: static documents, manual trackers, siloed dashboards. Critical operations get stitched together across brittle, error-prone tools never built for scale or continuous improvement. Redwire Space’s work in space highlights what’s possible, but Epsilon3 wasn’t built for one sector — it’s a modular execution platform engineered for complexity across the entire U.S. industrial base: aerospace, defense, energy, aviation, robotics, and beyond. It replaces legacy stacks with a unified, version-controlled environment for planning, testing, assembly, and live operations. It embeds telemetry into procedures, maps cross-functional dependencies in real time, and links every task to its parts, approvals, and as-run history — all while using intuitive data analytics and government-grade AI to generate and optimize workflows. In sectors where seconds, traceability, and rapid iteration define success, Epsilon3 doesn’t just streamline operations — it lays the digital foundation to rebuild and scale American industry with precision, speed, and strategic depth.

This section provides our weekly pulse check on hard pursuits, industrial developments, and deep tech — a curated snapshot of what matters, from test stands to launch pads, from lab benches to factory floors. Real signals, no BS.

🥽 The cheap shot heard round the world. In a first-of-its-kind operation, Ukraine yesterday carried out “Spider’s Web,” a deep-strike operation that used modified cargo trucks, driven unknowingly by Russian civilians, to smuggle drone swarms thousands of miles into Russian territory. Once in position, the trucks deployed their payloads, launching drones that hit multiple airbases and allegedly destroyed/damaged 40+ aircraft, including strategic bombers.

• If confirmed, to our knowledge, this would be the first direct attack on any leg of a nuclear triad in history. And the asymmetry of it all is hard to ignore: a low cost (<$10M) attack inflicted billions in damage (up to $7B) and disabled up to ⅓ of Russia’s long-range cruise missile platforms.

• Offense just got cheap. Strategic $B+ platforms aren’t safe by default, and critical infrastructure deep inside the homeland may be newly exposed to low-cost, highly resourceful swarm attacks.

• The challenge now is to rethink assumptions about range and risk, and to treat adaptability, speed, and resilience as strategic advantages that must be built into the system.

⚡ Transformer and Breaker Backlogs. Despite reshoring tailwinds, U.S. transformer and breaker supply remains deeply constrained. Lead times sit at one year for distribution units and three years for high-voltage models (~80% of which are imported). New factories are on the way, but they’re late, slow to scale, and still dependent on inputs sourced abroad like grain-oriented electrical steel. These are the conditions that define a tribal knowledge vacuum: capital hesitancy, technical difficulty, workforce uncertainty, and long lead times despite strong demand. → To understand why this keeps happening across so many crucial sectors, and what we can do to fix it, don’t miss today’s antimemo.

🔦 Beaming Power, Blurring Lines. Aetherflux and Reflect Orbital are two of several U.S. startups attracting fresh VC interest around remote energy delivery from space. The premise is compelling: extend satellite uptime through wireless power beaming, or direct sunlight to Earth to amplify solar output at the edges of day. But beneath the clean energy narrative lies a class of infrastructure with unmistakable dual-use implications. Laser and reflector-based systems designed for power delivery could, with targeted modification, become tools of precision disruption. In an era shaped by Golden Dome analogs and the demand for resilient space infrastructure, these platforms aren’t classified as weapons, but they run on adjacent rails. And as the space power stack matures, the line between “power” and “projection” may prove more about intent than infrastructure.

🛡️ Star Wars Redux? Speaking of Golden Dome…POTUS’s newly announced defense initiative now has a commander (Gen. Michael Guetlein of the Space Force), a target timeline (EOY 2028), and a headline cost estimate ($175B). Golden Dome proposes a space-based shield, of sorts, that would be capable of intercepting threats at every stage of flight (boost, midcourse, terminal, and potentially even pre-launch). This is the spiritual successor to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, but with more advanced technology, a very different geopolitical backdrop, and the massing of orbital offensive capabilities (direct-ascent ASAT missiles, lasers, satellite-to-satellite dogfighters, robotic arms for in-orbit grappling, EW units, kill sats under the Kosmos banner, and more). How/if Golden Dome gets fielded, what it’d mean for deterrence, and whether 21st-century contractors can ship something this ambitious on schedule—we’ve got more questions than answers at this point. But we’re watching closely.

🦾 Factory Meets Foundry. Here’s a tie-up worth your time: Divergent Technologies’ advanced manufacturing stack × Palantir’s Warp Speed/Foundry platforms. Thanks to a recently announced partnership, Palantir’s defense and commercial users can now trigger part production directly through Divergent’s DAPS platform—a clean handshake from supply chain alert to physical output. And yes, Divergent was Per Aspera’s week-one Founding Sponsor. We love to see our friends turning command lines into production lines.