The airwaves and newsfeeds are buzzing with tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.

We do need to make more stuff in America. We learned that lesson during COVID.

Remember the panic when doctors in NYC, the world’s richest city, were told to wear ponchos as protective equipment?

There’s also the innovation angle. When the factory floor is down the hall instead of 30 hours away, rapid iteration is far easier.

One thing I learned on a recent trip through California’s tech and manufacturing hubs was that America outsourced making things, and in the process, outsourced the knowing how to make things.

We chased high-margin design and let the “dirty work” drift overseas.

But wealth isn’t just fancy logos or lines of code. It’s the power to shape the physical world. That takes two things: know-how and the machines to do it.

You can separate them for a while, but not forever. Lose the machines, and eventually, the know-how fades too.

Then there’s the human element. We’ve pushed this idea that everyone needs a four-year degree for an office job. The laptop class manipulating words and numbers thrived. But what about folks who excel at building and designing stuff with their bare hands?

Without a vibrant manufacturing sector offering well-paid jobs, where does that talent go?

Yes, I am in favor of “Made in the USA.”

No, tariffs aren’t the magic wand to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.

• We must double down on America’s strength…

Innovation.

If we want American manufacturing to truly roar back, we must stop looking backward and start leaping forward.

The only long-term path is to win by out-innovating everyone else. It means doubling down on our greatest strength: relentless technological innovation.

Forget recreating the factories of the 1950s. Those jobs are gone and they ain’t coming back.

We need to build the factories of the future. We need to embrace technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and 3D printing. They’re the core engines of America’s new industrial revolution.

I saw this future whirring away in El Segundo recently. A sleek 3D printer—moving like a robotic pen in mid-air—was precisely building complex parts for drones, layer by tiny layer.

Nathan Mintz, the founder of CX2—which is creating electronic warfare systems—told me, “These things work night and day in the background.”

Machines turning digital ideas into physical stuff. That’s how America wins.

• Meet America’s industrial alchemists

Drown out the tariff noise, and you’ll find companies bringing this high-tech future to life.

LA-based space startup Relativity Space is 3D printing entire rockets, drastically cutting parts count and build time.

A few miles down the road, Hadrian is building automated factories to churn out high-precision aerospace and defense components 10X faster and 50% cheaper than before.

Why is Elon Musk the only person to have successfully scaled manufacturing in America over the past decade? To quote Elon, “The factory is the product.”

Tesla (TSLA) doesn’t just make electric cars. It’s reinventing how cars are made.

Tesla’s Gigafactories are 95% automated. Assembly starts with three different body parts getting robotically stamped into shape. Then, more than 600 robots weld those parts together with micron-level precision.

Finally, the frame is hoisted into the paint shop by “Godzilla,” one of the biggest robotic arms in the world:

Tesla’s Giga Press | Source: Danilo Onorino on LinkedIn

Would you live in a 3D-printed house? As you read this, a startup called ICON is putting the finishing touches on the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood outside Austin, Texas.

The homes are built by a giant robot weighing nearly 5 tons. It looks like a huge pastry bag. It carefully squeezes out layers of concrete to construct the walls of what will become a home. The foundations and roofs are still built the old-school way. But the walls—one of the most time-consuming parts—rise from the ground in days rather than weeks.

We’re even “printing” nuclear parts!

Virginia-based BWXT Advanced Technologies uses 3D printers to craft nuclear reactor components with complex twists that are impossible to make traditionally. Raw American steel.

Sources: Oak Ridge National Laboratory; 3Dnatives

• Innovation = salvation

A tech-enabled industrial base is the salvation of American manufacturing.

It’s not about bringing back old jobs. It’s about creating new, better ones for people who design for 3D printing, manage robotic systems, write the software, and develop new materials.

It’s about building powerful machines that let us invent almost anything and then bring it to life.

For the past 40 years, shipping manufacturing overseas was a substitute for the hard work of manufacturing innovation. Finding cheap labor was easier than innovating how we make things in America. Now, that era is ending.

The exciting part is we’re now being forced to get good at building physical things again, using incredible new tools.

Tariffs accelerate the shift toward tech-driven manufacturing. Why wait months for a part from overseas and rack your brain navigating tariffs when you can print it at home in hours?

You’ve seen the rusted mega-factories, relics of a past industrial age. Imagine replacing them with sleek, automated facilities. Maybe even “dark factories” operating with minimal human intervention.

Picture a factory with a handful of humans babysitting thousands of robots. Now, picture those factories popping up everywhere. We could produce 1,000X more stuff for a fraction of today’s cost. When THAT happens (it’s already started), it could create trillions of dollars in wealth.

AI-powered robots transform “Made in America” from teary-eyed nostalgia into a symbol of cutting-edge innovation. The future, not the past.

This is how America and the West win. Let’s build things that matter, build them better than anyone else, and build them right here.

If you liked this, you might enjoy my Jolt investing letter, published every Monday and Friday. In it, I share my unfiltered investing insights and analysis. Specifically, I write about disruptive technologies and how to invest in them. Go here to join.

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Stephen McBride is Chief Analyst, RiskHedge. To get more ideas like this sent straight to your inbox every Monday and Friday, make sure to sign up for The Jolt, a free investment letter focused on profiting from disruption.