I’m not sure why any of this is surprising. The US was perfectly fine letting China manufacture all the things. That manufacturing know-how leads to design know-how. The desire by US corporations to keep wages low or eliminate US labor entirely to use outsourced manufacturing leads to this.
It isn’t just military hardware: it is products across entire industries. China is producing good ones, and even when they aren’t, they’re producing them at volumes the US could not dream of touching.
America needed well placed, strategic policies to support domestic manufacturing decades ago. Now numbskulls started seeing that those jobs should be in the states. Republicans capitalized on that to get elected to attempt it in the worst possible and most destructive possible way.
And in the meantime Trump is destroying America at a record pace.
America is gonna blink and then China will be miles ahead.
It’s a skill issue.
All good. DoD just put out a DRP 2.0 with talk being that there will be no exemptions made since this is straight from the SecDef this time. Already know people that took the first one with non-defense jobs lined up now getting 2 paychecks until the end of September. DRP 2.0 is going to be way bigger than the first one
This was all Greek to me, and it took a while for me to figure out how to google WTF you’re talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_U.S._federal_deferred_resignation_program
The vast majority of people have no idea how much turmoil there’s been in federal backed research and development. Even stuff like wildland firefighter’s getting workforce hit right before fire season is about to begin. Friends that did bioengineering (lab grown food and lab grown organ research) for private companies that have been laid off because of federal grants cuts/uncertainty
I know it’s bad. My wife is a researcher at a non-profit that relies greatly on federal grants, which are getting killed left & right, and so her company is laying off left & right.
