In April 2017, the Manufacturing Leadership Council published its “Vision 2030: The Factory of the Future, which was a Frost & Sullivan White Paper sponsored by General Electric and Intel. In their vision, the factory of the future “will look like an integrated hardware and software system and “is highly automated and information-intensive… fueled by vast quantities of information from every corner of the enterprise and beyond, moderated by analytical systems that can identify and extract insights and opportunities from that information, and comprised of intelligent machines that learn, act, and work alongside highly skilled human beings in safe and collaborative environments.”

Manufacturing is Critical to Our National Defense

The final reason that manufacturing is important is that manufacturing ensures that the U.S. has a strong industrial base to support its national security objectives. We need to preserve our national and homeland security to be able to produce the goods that allow us to defend our national sovereignty.

Why Manufacturing is Important to America

This week’s article begins a series of short articles on why manufacturing is important to the American economy. Our country’s Founding Fathers recognized the importance of developing a domestic manufacturing base instead of continuing to rely on imports from England, France, and the Netherlands. They established the U.S. patent system and protected the developing manufacturing industry with tariffs to discourage imports. This allowed the United States to be the world’s number one manufacturer for more than 100 years, accounting for as much as 25 percent of global manufacturing output in 2007. In 2010, China overtook the U.S. to become the world’s top manufacturing country by output.