Where’s the Meat? Around these parts, we like to draw our audience in with comfort food. And Dan Goldin (Per Aspera cofounder, ex-NASA chief, Bronx-bred straight-shooter, and honorary Texas boot-stomper) has diagnosed America with a dietary problem: The Great American Sandwich is too starchy.
Here’s what we mean by that…
(With apologies to our vegetarians in the audience… sometimes a meaty metaphor just tastes right…) We’ve kept both slices of bread but tossed out the meat. And America still bakes two superb slices of bread:
- Top slice (invention). Here, we have R&D, IP design, and invention: chip layouts hatched in Santa Clara, fusion breakthroughs spawned in Princeton, wild propulsion schemes scrawled on a Huntsville whiteboard at 2 a.m.
- Bottom slice (commercialization): Down below, we have capital markets, world-class marketing machines, and distribution/sales.
- The missing middle (manufacturing, assembly, etc.): the hands-on manufacturing craft, materials mastery, and supplier networks.
Take a bite and you taste nothing but starch. The key (and obvious) insight here is that without that middle layer, which includes the meat, fixings, and so on, you don’t have a sandwich. Ideas remain prototypes, supply chains snap under stress, and national power erodes one outsourced widget at a time.
WHAT’S MISSING?
The protein and fixings should be thick: fabrication, machining, assembly, materials processing, tooling, test, and supplier know-how. But we off-shored this layer to whichever port offered the cheapest labor and fewest environmental rules. Not only did we lose a set of physical capabilities, but we severed the living feedback loop between mind and matter.
- When designers can stroll ten paces to the mill room, a tolerance issue dies before your coffee can cool. Push that mill room across an ocean and progress crawls through customs, jet lag, and IP paranoia.
- Let enough cycles slip and you don’t just slow down, you forget how to run. We’re re-learning shop-floor basics our grandparents took for granted, and trying to keep lines alive without a single gray beard on call.
Semi fabs in the American Southwest won’t matter unless there are enough tradespeople to tune EUV steppers and enough stateside chemical plants to supply photoresists. MP Materials can mine Mountain Pass until the hills are hollow, but unless the neodymium makes it into magnets in Texas — and those magnets make it into motors in Michigan — we’re still one embargo, pandemic, or shuttered Suez Canal away from a national stall-out. Even software depends on hardware that must, at some point, get bent, etched, plated, or forged.
The deli is restocking, and the protein aisle is finally making front-page news. In the last week alone, we’ve seen headlines that the Pentagon will become the largest shareholder in MP Materials (as its rare earth magnet facility scales in Fort Worth), and invest significantly to build out the nation’s own drone supply base. Calling for end-to-end industrial capability isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, but the shortest path from idea and execution. And the distance between these two is destiny in the 21st century. Every dollar that drags the build closer to the brainstorm compacts the loop; compounds the learning; and hardens our strategic spine.
The bottom line: Until manufacturing and fabrication stand shoulder-to-shoulder with invention and commercialization, every great American idea remains a sandwich you can’t sink your teeth into. And, if you’re still wondering why we’re so fired-up about the sandwich, circle back to our founding Manifesto…