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Onshoring critical supply chains is national security

The speakers argued that the United States must aggressively reinvest in domestic manufacturing for critical dual-use technologies, including semiconductors, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and drone components.

The argument

The guest warned that outsourcing production has eroded domestic innovation capacity, pointing to TSMC's dominance in semiconductors and China's control over 80% of generic drug APIs as critical vulnerabilities.

The thesis, stress-tested
✓ What validates it
  • The Office of Strategic Capital executing major off-take agreements for critical minerals or APIs
  • Increased federal funding and subsidies directed toward domestic semiconductor and hardware component manufacturing
▸ Risks discussed
  • High capital expenditure requirements for domestic manufacturing facilities
  • Potential timeline mismatches where domestic capacity cannot be built before geopolitical crises occur
Hear it yourself
"There is a counterfactual world where General Atomics had a consumer subsidiary called DJI, and the consumer drone market was entirely owned by The US, and it provided for economic prosperity for America and wrote us down the price production curve that we could be using these things in innovation for national security as well."
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TSM: Onshoring critical supply chains is national security · Zortix