INTRODUCTION

THE FORGOTTEN ART OF BUILDING HARD THING

In 1967, the Saturn V stood on its launchpad — a 363-foot colossus of American engineering genius, capable of lobbing 48 tons into lunar orbit. Saturn V was the backbone of the Apollo program and America’s trump card in the Space Race. Yet, this rocket wasn’t merely a triumph of aerospace design and engineering diagrams. It represented thousands of unwritten techniques, improvisations, and innovations, existing only in the minds and hands of its creators.

The engineers, technicians, and craftsmen behind the Saturn V perfected their craft through decades of practical experience — from Cold War missile projects to precision manufacturing.

They solved problems no manual anticipated, devised workarounds no textbook taught, and mastered techniques passed down through experience alone.

By 1973, as Apollo concluded, this team scattered — retiring, reassigned, or rotating into the private sector. Their invaluable knowledge — uncodified and irreplaceable — scattered with them.

Decades later, when NASA tried dusting off Saturn V designs for new heavy - lift rockets, the detailed blueprints remained, but the vital, practical experience – the “how” behind the “what” had vanished.

A straightforward revival became a billion-dollar puzzle missing critical pieces, leaving a significant gap in American capabilities precisely as adversaries advanced their own heavy-lift launchers.

SECTION 001

THIS ISN’T JUST HISTORY, ITS A RECURRING CRISIS ACROSS AMERICAN INDUSTRY TODAY

A few cautionary tales…

• “Fogbank” nuclear material: In the early 2000s, the U.S. couldn’t reproduce a secret interstage material for nuclear warheads because veteran staff retired without recording critical manufacturing processes. Re-learning this "lost knowledge" cost five years, $69M, and delayed a warhead upgrade.

• Plutonium pits (nuclear cores): After halting large-scale production in 1989, the U.S. has struggled to restart manufacturing of plutonium warhead cores. Los Alamos faces ongoing challenges from technical complexity, safety issues, and rebuilding a skilled workforce, causing delays in meeting targets for new ICBM warheads.

• New nuclear reactor construction: After a 30-year hiatus, America's first new reactors (Plant Vogtle) were delivered seven years late at a cost of $35B (more than double the initial $14B estimate). Why? Industry leaders cite the loss of a generation of practical construction knowledge when the U.S. stopped building reactors in the 1980s.

• Ultra-heavy forgings for nuclear/power hardware: America lost the specialized capability to forge massive, high-performance steel components critical for nuclear plants and naval vessels. Today, we rely almost entirely on imports from overseas suppliers, creating a strategic bottleneck for domestic infrastructure projects.

• Shipbuilding & submarine workforce: U.S. Navy shipyards face a shortfall of tens of thousands of skilled tradespeople due to decades of workforce attrition. Retiring veterans leave with critical, undocumented expertise, forcing shipyards to rely heavily on rehiring retirees and slowing submarine and carrier production.

• Tool-and-die makers (industrial molds): America’s once-abundant base of skilled tool-and-die makers has been dramatically hollowed out. If critical industrial molds break today, manufacturers often have no choice but to go overseas for repairs, causing significant production delays and costly shutdowns.

• Large electric transformers (grid infrastructure): Only a handful of domestic factories still produce high-voltage transformers, meeting just 20% of U.S. demand. The loss of domestic expertise in specialized manufacturing processes for large transformers — such as coil winding and precision welding — has contributed to longer lead times and higher costs, further straining the resilience of the grid.

• F-22 Raptor stealth fighters: Restarting F-22 production and procuring just under 200 additional units of the stealth fighter jet would cost ~$50B, according to the Air Force, because the production line shuttered in 2011 and the jet’s specialized industrial network has disbanded. Of that $50B, roughly 20% ($10B) would go to non-recurring startup costs: rehiring workers, finding new vendors, securing new plants, etc.

• Semiconductor lithography equipment: America once led lithography technology, which powers the machines that etch circuits on chips, but surrendered that capability in the 1990s. Today, all cutting-edge lithography machines come from overseas (ASML), creating strategic vulnerabilities for the U.S. semiconductor supply chain.

• Advanced chip packaging: America offshored semiconductor packaging expertise decades ago, leaving a generational knowledge gap. Today, even U.S.-made chips must be packaged overseas, adding delays, raising security risks, and weakening America's end-to-end semiconductor capability.

• Legacy military electronics: The Pentagon relies on obsolete electronic components whose original manufacturers — and the tribal knowledge needed to reproduce them — have disappeared. Today, expensive reverse-engineering and rehired retirees fill critical knowledge gaps, complicating repairs and upgrades.

• Hypersonic weapons development: Decades of stop-and-go R&D caused the U.S. to bleed critical hypersonics expertise. Now playing catch-up, the Pentagon is scrambling to revive old NASA research and rehire retired specialists, while rivals advance on the foundation of continuous programs.

• U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers: In 2019, as vital Arctic sea lanes opened, the U.S. looked to rebuild its aging icebreaker “fleet.” The issue? It’d been 50 years since America last built a heavy polar icebreaker. By late 2024, the Coast Guard operated just two icebreakers (the aging Polar Star, and the Healy, which was temporarily sidelined last summer due to an electrical fire). A repurposed commercial vessel, the Aiviq (soon USCGC Storis), is set to enter service in 2026 after modifications. Meanwhile, Russia maintains ~40 operational icebreakers, highlighting a strategically troubling capability gap in the Arctic.

• Stinger missiles: When Ukraine’s defense needs depleted Stinger missile stocks in 2022, Raytheon had to recruit retirees to teach current engineers how to produce missiles using blueprints from the Carter administration. Scaling production to meet urgent demand proved nearly impossible without these retirees’ undocumented expertise.

These cautionary tales are not isolated anecdotes. They are alarm bells signaling how quickly and quietly America’s industrial mastery can vanish, leaving strategic vulnerabilities in their wake. Each example illustrates the same troubling pattern: the erosion of crucial, collective expertise built over generations, fading unnoticed until it’s suddenly gone.

This phenomenon has a name: the loss of tribal knowledge.

tribal knowledge (noun | /ˈtrī-bəl ˈnä-lij/): Unwritten, experiential mastery passed through mentorship, hands-on practice, and subtle observation, rarely documented formally. Especially prevalent in deep-tech manufacturing, where knowledge travels through whispers and worn hands rather than manuals or code repositories. Real-world know-how that cannot be Googled or learned on YouTube. See also: vanishing.

The stakes extend far beyond individual companies or sectors — they threaten the foundations of American industrial capability.

Each shuttered facility erodes manufacturing capacity. Each offshored production line shrinks the opportunities to cultivate the next generation of skilled, adaptable builders. As this expertise disappears, our ability to innovate, adapt, control our own destiny, and compete in strategically vital industries diminishes.

This evolution creates three distinct categories of manufacturing expertise, each requiring different preservation strategies:

1. Critical retrospective knowledge: High-value expertise that delivers strategic competitive advantage — precision manufacturing techniques, specialized materials processing, and complex systems integration skills that cannot yet be readily automated. This knowledge demands urgent preservation efforts.

2. Transitional knowledge: Skills essential during the shift toward automated manufacturing, such as diagnostic capabilities, quality control, and process optimization. These tasks will increasingly be assisted by sensors, software, and AI, but will still require significant human oversight and input over the next 10–15 years.

3. Legacy knowledge: Practices that will be fully automated, partially automated or rendered obsolete — repetitive tasks and standardized procedures where human expertise adds diminishing value.

“We can’t build this anymore, we forgot how to do it” is not what an advanced, powerful society looks like. This is our moment to act — to recover, scale, and codify the tribal knowledge essential for our nation’s future.

Behold the story of tribal knowledge — what it is, why it's vanishing, and how we can bring it back before it's too late.

SECTION 002

THE ELECTRON PROBLEM IN THE AGE OF BOUNDLESS AI

For decades, American industry miscast many manufacturing processes as low-skill, routine labor – easily outsourced and replaceable. Companies prioritized design and R&D, relegating actual production to a secondary concern. The result? Surprise surprise…American companies’ financial returns thrived, but American “industry” atrophied.

The issue with this MBA-ified managerial mentality is that manufacturing isn’t merely a commodity, nor a matter of “simply executing.”

Rather, manufacturing is innovation, where designs collide with the stubborn realities of physics and where plans are refined through practical iteration into finished products.

As Elon and other startup founders are fond of saying…“the factory is the product.”

Manufacturing is often the crucible from which breakthroughs are born. Case in point:

• The iPad, introduced in 2010, didn’t just require clever design; it demanded advancement in glass forming and heat treatment.

• Today’s solar panels required innovations in manufacturing large, high-efficiency glass coatings to become commercially viable.

• And the EV revolution demanded new metal forming techniques for Lithium-ion batteries.

In the above cases and many, many more, manufacturing wasn't detached from innovation — it was the innovation.

The past is prologue: In the 1980s, Detroit’s Big Three — GM, Ford, Chrysler — watched their empire crumble as ascendant Japanese carmakers, led by Toyota, rolled out leaner, meaner machines. The Americans scrambled: they had no other choice, it seemed, but to reverse-engineer whatever it was that the Japanese were doing. So the Big Three descended on Japan and meticulously dissected Toyota’s just-in-time (JIT) system with plant tours and consultant scribbles. Despite thorough documentation of Toyota’s techniques, the Americans couldn’t match their Asian counterparts’ level of efficiency. Their wheels spun in the mud.

The reason they failed wasn't in the notes, because the real innovations resided on Japanese shop floors. The Japanese had attained their hard-fought quality and efficiency gains through decades of kaizen, a culture of relentless daily improvement, standardized precision, and supplier trust. This was something that Detroit's suits couldn't bottle up and bring home.

And then again… In the 1990s, semiconductor firms designed chips here in the U.S. but outsourced fabrication overseas. Automakers moved manufacturing to Mexico, and medical device makers followed suit. This outsourcing wave mistook labor arbitrage and cost savings for strategic advantage. But this line of thinking had a gaping flaw: it ignored the critical intersection of innovation and manufacturing.

The Strategic Knowledge Gap

Capital can erect factories, but only mastery makes them hum.

This fundamental truth lies at the heart of America's manufacturing dilemma. We can build cutting-edge semi fabs and battery plants, but without the mastery to operate them effectively, these facilities become hollow monuments.

Automation alone, despite its promises, isn’t enough to bootstrap us back to “mastery” in many critical manufacturing domains (a topic we will return to soon). Infrastructure investment and industrial policy, meanwhile, are necessary measures but insufficient in isolation. The critical, oft-overlooked component is human capital: skilled practitioners with operational instincts and experiential knowledge that bring blueprints to life, even as automation reshapes (and takes a greater and greater share) of production processes.

With a shortage of these practitioners, it’s absolutely essential that veterans pass down their hard-won insights to younger workers. Yet there’s often nobody to pass it down to. This failure in knowledge transmission is unfortunately happening across our industrial base.

Addressing this gap requires more than ad hoc solutions — it demands a coordinated national strategy.

National Strategies for Knowledge Retention

The skillful preservation and cultivation of tribal knowledge among the world’s industrial superpowers is no accident. It’s a deliberate act of national will.

From America's DARPA to Japan's VLSI project, from South Korea's support for Samsung to Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park, successful industrial powers have systematically accumulated tribal knowledge through coordinated national strategies. Countries that maintained manufacturing leadership didn't simply offer better tax incentives or cheaper labor — they created ecosystems where human skill, digital precision, and automation feed off one another.

Let’s look specifically at Japan. As discussed above, while American carmakers chased balance sheet optimization in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Japan prioritized production excellence by channeling cultural forces like kaizen (continuous improvement), shokunin (artisanal mastery), and senpai-kohai relationships (mentor-apprentice dynamics).

These forces embedded a self-sustaining cycle of skill development that no policy memo can replicate. Coincidentally, they also allowed Japan to seamlessly integrate cutting-edge automation into its industrial base.

India, too, holds lessons worth studying. Ancient practices like yoga endure through millennia, a testament to cultural mechanisms that preserve knowledge. Respect for “Gurus” — custodians of expertise — and a “Karma”-driven work ethic fuel dedication to craft. Today, India churns out nearly 10 million STEM graduates yearly, a feat tied to its fiercely competitive education system. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) lead the charge, producing globally recognized talent rooted in this legacy of transmission.

America doesn’t need to mimic foreign models outright, as we have our own system that plays to our unique strengths. But we also have our own shortcomings. Next, let’s take a look at both the strengths and the shortcomings.

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AMERICA’S PATH TO A TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE RENAISSANCE

We’ve shown why tribal knowledge matters and how other nations have kept it alive. But for America, the question is no longer whether we can or should revive it — it’s how. How do we bridge the gap between the world we’ve lost and the world we must now build?

The goal shouldn’t be to reclaim the manufacturing of the 1950s, but to build a bridge to the manufacturing of the 2050s, which requires preserving critical expertise while simultaneously transforming it for a more automated future.

Rebuilding A Hollowed Talent Core

As Apple CEO Tim Cook bluntly stated in 2024, America's manufacturing expertise has eroded to the point where "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."

This isn’t hyperbole — it’s a measurable gap we’re racing to close:

• The Manufacturing Institute reports a need to fill 2.1M to 4M manufacturing jobs by 2030, with over half potentially going unfilled unless more young people enter these fields.

• Studies show that ~13% of high school students who express interest in engineering eventually go on to graduate with a related university degree in the field.

• Even more concerning, fewer than half of engineering grads stay in engineering careers, with just 27% of women and 41% of men who graduated between 2006-2010 still working in engineering one decade decade later.

But this data isn’t destiny — it’s a call to arms. Young Americans are starting to see the potential in manufacturing careers. Engineers who once drifted away are returning, drawn by the chance to tackle real-world challenges. The pipeline isn’t broken beyond repair.

The Hidden Infrastructure: America’s Silent Backbone

American life depends on a vast, often invisible network of small-to-medium machine shops — the unsung heroes of our aerospace, defense, and infrastructure sectors. These aren't the gleaming factories in corporate promotional videos. They're often modest facilities tucked into industrial parks and small towns, yet they form the backbone of our aerospace, defense, and infrastructure capabilities.

Take the typical New York City subway train. Machine shops provide components such as wheel sets, brake pads, suspension parts, door mechanisms and electrical connectors — essential components without which transportation systems would fail.

The majority of these shops are small businesses, run by veterans in their ‘50s and ‘60s whose sons and daughters often choose different paths. If and when these owners retire and close up shop, what happens to the intimate, hard-won knowledge they’ve built up over decades?

This isn’t an obituary. It’s a reminder that these shops, and the knowledge they hold, are still here, still vital, and still ready to be handed off to those who will carry it forward.

There’s Another Dimension to This Story

Given the value of these shops and their uncertain future, many have become targets for consolidation (or disruption).

If our friends in private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) will indulge us — allowing for a bit of broad-brush generalization — there’s a key dichotomy at play. Our investor friends have two dueling visions for America’s industrial future:

1. The PE view, focused on rolling up these shops and wringing out efficiencies from an analog past (while not investing in modernization).

2. The VC view, imagining that we can leapfrog straight to lights-out factories and total automation.

Both visions capture something real, but neither is enough.

We’re not going to preserve these legacy shops in amber as the PE rollup model might suggest. But we’re also not at the point where we can start from a clean sheet, sweep the floor clean, and replace the shops with fresh greenfield automation, as some investors might hope.

What’s needed instead is a grounded, clear-eyed approach: one that uses the deep knowledge of these shops as a launchpad to modernize and adapt, rather than trying to preserve everything as is or scrap it all for something untested. This is about taking the best of tradition and the best of technology — understanding how to combine them, not in theory but in practice.

And that’s where we turn next: how to take these building blocks — what we already have — and forge them into an industrial future that’s resilient, advanced, and unmistakably American.

Building on American Advantages

Despite the headwinds, the U.S. isn't starting from zero. We maintain significant advantages that can serve as the foundation for a true tribal knowledge renaissance:

1. World-leading research universities and national laboratories

2. Unmatched venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem

3. Leadership in cutting-edge technologies like AI and advanced computing

4. And, crucially, a renewed political will and public mandate to rebuild and reshore what matters

We're not trying to reclaim the manufacturing of the 1950s. We're building a bridge to the manufacturing of the 2050s, which requires preserving critical expertise while simultaneously transforming it for a more automated future.

These assets are the springboard, but they only matter if we approach this challenge with clarity and strategic urgency.

The decade ahead is our transition window. In this window, we have to preserve the deep, human knowledge that still underpins real-world execution — while simultaneously investing in the tools, the talent, and the infrastructure to expand what’s possible.

This dual focus — preserving what’s essential while transforming how it’s done — is the heart of America’s tribal knowledge challenge. It’s not about clinging to the past, and it’s not about chasing the next bright shiny thing. It’s about using the best of both: tradition and technology.

If we get this right, we don’t just patch a hole in the supply chain — we forge a foundation that can withstand the tests of the next century.

SECTION 004

FORGING A STRATEGIC SOLUTION

The Arsenal of Democracy wasn't built with slogans — it demanded the coordinated mobilization of welders, engineers, and technicians nationwide. And Apollo didn't just need funding; it needed master machinists capable of tolerances finer than a human hair. 

Today, there’s no simple return to those past models. Many labor-intensive, low-margin processes have moved permanently offshore to regions with structural cost advantages. 

Meanwhile, automation is redrawing the global industrial map — not leveling the playing field, but hardening its divisions and hierarchies.

In WWII and the Cold War, tribal knowledge was a national strategic asset, deliberately cultivated, protected, and deployed. Today’s world is different but our goal remains the same: to secure high-value, strategically essential manufacturing capabilities so that we may control our own destiny. To do this, we must act across five fronts: 

1. Codified Craftsmanship 

Let’s define “Codified Craftsmanship” as the work of translating deep, often unwritten, human insight into digital processes and intelligent systems that can learn, adapt, and scale — without erasing the people who hold that knowledge in the first place. We see promising technologies here, like: 

• CloudNC’s AI reduces CAM programming time by 80%, transforming weeks of skilled machinist work into hours

• Path Robotics' AF-1 enables autonomous welding with just a CAD file and stock material

• Seurat's laser printing cuts additive manufacturing time tenfold for critical components (proven with 50 tons of Siemens wind turbine parts) 

• Hadrian's "lights-out" machine shop produces aerospace parts continuously, blending software with human oversight

Yes, automation will displace some roles, but this isn’t about sidelining skilled workers. We still need many more skilled tradespeople, right now — to keep critical lines running, to learn from the veterans who know the feel of the work, and to translate that sensory, real-world intuition into data-driven models.

The machinist’s feel for vibration, the welder’s ear for arc tone, the technician’s pattern-recognition when a line’s about to slip — all of this is useful tribal knowledge, and all of it is perishable. 

We can and should develop sensors, software, and algorithms that can replicate these intuitions into code: embedding an operator’s judgment into a factory digital twin, turning the welder’s nuance into a repeatable weld path for a robot, and capturing the operator’s “feel” in a dataset that can train machine learning systems to replicate, refine, and expand on that experience.

These tools don’t replace human mastery. They extend it, and they demand human oversight to keep them sharp. We’ll still need plenty of folks in the loop, to train algorithms, correct for edge cases, interpret anomalies, and maintain the systems that machines can’t fully understand or fix.

2. Engineering-Driven Technicians & Operators

This refers to an emerging class of hybrid workers who don’t just turn wrenches or feed parts into machines, but who bridge the gap between analog know-how and digital precision.

Just as we need to codify tribal knowledge, we also need to modernize how we train and inspire the people who can wield it — especially during this 10-15 year transition to increasingly automated production. The imperative here is to create a workforce fluent in both the tactile world of materials and the digital logic of sensors and code.

As we’ve already noted, we have a pipeline problem here. For too long, we as a society have stigmatized the trades while exalting the “laptop class” (e.g., white-collar jobs). This stigma shows in the data:

According to Per Aspera's 2024 Manufacturing Survey of ~1,000 U.S. adults, 52% of Gen Z and 31% of Millennials say they are not confident in their understanding of manufacturing — compared to just 18% of Boomers. A career path cannot inspire if it remains invisible or misunderstood.

Yet there are reasons for optimism. Beneath the surface, a generational shift in attitudes is underway. In the same survey, we found that 70+% of Gen Z and Millennials agree that manufacturing careers today require more technical skills — in areas like data analysis, automation, and advanced materials — than they did in the past. Even more encouraging, over two-thirds of young adults believe that expanding domestic manufacturing is important for the U.S. economy — a level of agreement nearly matching that of older generations. 

The ambition is there. The opportunity is clear. What's needed now is a concerted effort to nuke the stigma, to bridge the perception gap, and to equip new generations with the tools, training, and inspiration they need to take up the torch. These efforts could include: 

• Early exposure programs to show K-12 students the modern face of manufacturing

• Updated technical programs that reflect today’s world, and integrate software, control systems, and sensor data with hands-on operations 

• Mid-career transition programs to move workers from sectors in secular decline into high-skill technician roles (though, historically speaking, this has always been easier said than done) 

• Modernized apprenticeships that blend direct mentorship, hands-on practice, and digital fluency — accelerating how quickly new talent can master both the physical intricacies and technological complexities of advanced manufacturing.

3. Make Manufacturing Sexy Again

A good bit of this pipeline problem explained above boils down to perceptions. 

And to that, we say: we must make manufacturing sexy again. We believe this trend is already well underway, both with new technical talent entering the workforce and more seasoned engineers departing Big Tech for the world of atoms.

And, as we found in our survey, younger generations may not yet feel confident about manufacturing, but they are starting to recognize its evolution from assembly-line labor to highly digitally literate (and well-paying) jobs.

To briefly return to the automation piece: Ironically, many white-collar roles seen as the pinnacle of knowledge work, those that were elevated above the trades (finance, legal research, data analysis, and even software engineering itself) are now at much greater risk of automation than blue-collar roles. 

In our mind, these hybrid technician and operator roles, grounded in the messy realities of building and fixing physical things, will remain stubbornly resilient to automation for decades to come. They’ll form the backbone of factories that need human oversight, judgment, and creative-problem solving to complement automated systems. 

4. Legacy Knowledge As Leverage 

As a refresher, “legacy” knowledge refers to techniques and processes that have already been automated (or seem destined for automation in the not-too-distant future).  

Legacy knowledge should be preserved as a strategic insurance policy.

History shows why this matters. NASA engineers turned to 1960s welding methods to solve Space Shuttle challenges. Traditional metallurgy continues to inform modern 3D printing alloys. What seems obsolete today may become tomorrow’s competitive edge. As the military adage goes: “Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics, and masters study history.”

We don’t need to start from scratch — models for preservation already exist. The Smithsonian Institution, NASA’s Oral History Project, the National Archives, and universities such as MIT, Caltech, and Stanford have been pioneering this effort for decades. 

But there’s no coordinated effort focused on manufacturing tribal knowledge itself — not as dusty archives, but as living digital resources ready to be called upon if needed. Here’s what that could look like: 

• Comprehensive documentation of manufacturing processes with searchable metadata

• High-fidelity video archives of master craftspeople demonstrating (and teaching) tricks of the trade

• Oral histories capturing not just steps but problem-solving approaches and adaptive thinking

• Digital repositories of case studies, failure analyses, and process innovations

In a world in which digital storage is effectively too cheap to meter and AI processing is headed in the same direction, why wouldn’t we do this? 

Even if 99% of this knowledge remains dormant, the 1% that proves essential to a future breakthrough will more than justify the effort of preserving it. 

By treating legacy knowledge as valuable insurance, we transform preservation from a backward-looking exercise into strategic foresight — ensuring that American manufacturing maintains maximum adaptability and optionality. 

5. National Elevation 

These four imperatives aren’t standalone fixes. They’re interdependent levers in a system designed to turn crisis into capability.

We already have the technologies and frameworks in place. What’s missing is national elevation: the collective recognition that manufacturing expertise deserves the same strategic status we give to scientific research or military readiness.

It’s about putting real weight behind the idea that our ability to build — physically, in the real world — remains the bedrock of economic security, technological leadership, and national resilience.

And, just to be utterly clear, this isn’t about resurrecting the past, but forging something new: an industrial backbone that blends the best of tradition and technology, reliant on both human expertise and automated precision. 

We can build a manufacturing renaissance that doesn’t just mirror the past, but pushes us forward. One that ensures American factories don’t merely endure, but set the pace for what’s next.

SECTION 005

CALL OF THE MACHINE AGE

The U.S. still bends steel and forms silicon into marvels. Our $2.9 trillion manufacturing sector, though a smaller slice of GDP than in decades past, remains a cornerstone of American strength. Bolstered by recent policy initiatives and a renewed focus on reshoring, momentum is building to revitalize domestic production. Finally, feats like Stargate or Starlink prove that, at our best, American industry can still build what the world deems impossible. 

But capacity to design at the bleeding edge ≠ capacity to build at scale, with speed, and on our own terms.

Flashes of engineering brilliance cannot be mistaken for a systemic foundation, and there are cracks in the foundation: 

1. As we explained in our first Antimemo: “We took the 'meat out of the sandwich' — keeping design and marketing but outsourcing the actual building, the fabrication process, and the supply chain that connects them.”

2. And, as we’ve belabored today: the systemic erosion of our tribal knowledge — the chain of unwritten, hard-won mastery that turns a CAD file into a finished part — threatens everything else. 

Even as sensors, AI, and robotics race ahead, human judgment still spells the difference between a highly competent factory and a hollow monument. 

Because even in a future dominated by automation, human insight remains the first step. Before a task can be encoded in software or emulated by a robotic actuator, it must be understood deeply enough to be translated. Translation — from intuition to algorithm, from handcraft or mechanical command to repeatable process — requires someone who knows the work firsthand. Machines don’t teach themselves to weld with precision, calibrate tolerances in dynamic unstructured environments, or recover a line gone out of spec. At least not yet.

Some skills will fade with automation, but the foundational expertise cannot vanish. If we fail to preserve it, we risk starting from zero, or worse, being forced to rely on adversaries, brittle supply chains, or prematurely automated systems — none of which can be trusted. 

The numbers are stark: Since 2000, we’ve lost 4M+ manufacturing jobs. By 2030, up to 2.1M more could go unfilled. America’s machine tool capacity has dropped substantially, and a significant share of our critical machine shops face closure as owners retire. Nearly a quarter of machinists and tool-and-die makers are over 55, and their exit takes with them a human touch that no digital blueprint can replicate.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re signs of a nation that’s let its industrial muscle memory atrophy. 

Yet we stand at a golden age of opportunity. The tools to capture, transfer, and automate tribal knowledge have never been more powerful, and the national will to rebuild is stirring.

The bridge between intention and execution demands action, and a new covenant: 

1. Veteran experts must see their knowledge as a national asset, to be shared before retirement.

2. Shop owners must prioritize succession and apprenticeships over short-term pressures.

3. Companies must balance profit with resilience, treating tribal knowledge as a strategic priority.

4. Young talent should look to hybrid bits/atom work, not just code or knowledge work, as a legitimate career path.

5. Our culture — especially our elites — must elevate technical skill alongside academic achievement.

Like Y Combinator issues requests for startups, we’re issuing requests for tribal knowledge to empower the next wave of American manufacturing, and turn this moment of vulnerability into a renaissance of capability. 

This isn't just about GDP or cycle times — it's about reclaiming America's identity as a nation that builds. A country that doesn't just dream up and design the future but physically constructs it with skill, precision, and unmatched know-how. Tribal knowledge is an indispensable ingredient in helping us return to a country that competently turns designs into deliverables. 

We reject the defeatism of "we can't build this anymore, we forgot how to do it." America hasn’t forgotten how to build — we've temporarily lost the master craftsmen's touch. 

But we will reclaim it, and jolt ourselves from this strategic amnesia. 

America’s machine age is waiting — it’s time to make it roar.