When I was yet a wee lad, my grandfather told me stories of his days as a production superintendent at a GM plant. I learned about process, flow, how you can never make up for lost production due to downtime. He told me how he reorganized the plant at the beginning of World War II to manufacture machine gun bolts for aircraft. Dad was an accountant, but he sometimes told me about sales engineers that came to his plant to help fix machines.
Years ago when I had a sales engineering position, one of my customers was a US Army armaments plant. They built the Abrams M1 tank. I once quoted a job to upgrade equipment that painted the camouflage pattern. Just as I turned in the quote, Bush I invaded Kuwait. All the tanks were painted a single color—Desert Sand.
Even though I’m an internationalist in many ways, I recognized the crucial interplay of manufacturing and national defense.
This prelude leads to a report released by Michael Bloomberg called Strategic Edge: A Blueprint for Breakthroughs in Defense Innovation. This privately commissioned report addressed the challenges facing America’s strategic defense posture. Chaired by General David Berger (USMC, Retired), the report offers a new avenue for restoring the nation’s military and industrial edge through innovation and strategic investments.
If you are American, then this is a report worth reading and contemplating. What can you as a manufacturing professional do? If you are not American, not to worry, the same thoughts apply to your country.
This blueprint provides actionable solutions to counter decades of erosion in America’s ability to deter adversaries. With contributions from leading defense experts and technologists, the report emphasizes the urgency of rebuilding the industrial base, leveraging non-traditional innovators, and unlocking private capital to accelerate the fielding of emerging technologies. It recommends the Department of Defense do this by divesting 15% of its budget from its current portfolio of aging, legacy systems, and investing it in a new, separate pipeline for critical technologies.
I am not sanguine about the ability of our national government to spur manufacturing growth. The first Trump administration had a few big PR photo ops. How many of those plants are actually operating? The Biden administration observed the critical need for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Big PR ops. Oops, they partnered with Intel (had to, what other US semiconductor manufacturer is there?). Even directing investment isn’t often successful.
Yet, we must remain optimistic, for what alternative have we?
Summarizing the highlights:
Field Emerging and Critical Technologies by Creating an Alternative Pipeline: The U.S. must establish an alternative procurement pipeline to rapidly acquire and deploy critical technologies at scale, ensuring direct operational impact and strategic advantage for warfighters.
Restore U.S. Manufacturing as a Global Powerhouse: The U.S. must invest in dual-use manufacturing technologies, leveraging advanced practices to enable scalable production of both commercial and military goods, ensuring adaptability and resilience during conflict.
Attract, Train, and Retain Talent for Our Nation: The U.S. must cultivate a skilled, innovative workforce that thrives in both the public and private sectors, supported by a DoD culture that values expertise, adaptability, and national security impact.
Shift DoD Resources to Innovative Programs and Unlock Private Capital: The DoD must redirect up to 15% of its budget from legacy systems to emerging technologies, reducing risks to attract private capital and accelerate innovation.
As the report warns, the U.S. faces an unprecedented challenge in adapting its defense systems to modern threats. Without immediate action, there is a tangible risk of losing the next major conflict.
“We’re at a critical turning point that has been building for decades and we must quickly change how things work at the Department of Defense,” said Michael R. Bloomberg. “We can’t afford to wait to take urgent action, and we can’t be afraid to upset the apple cart. Without taking the kinds of steps outlined in this report, the U.S. faces grave risks to our security, our freedoms, and our position in the world.”
General David Berger added, “Our adversaries are outpacing us in speed, scale, and capability. This report is a call to action for a whole-of-nation effort to reverse this trajectory and ensure America’s strategic superiority.”
The report also includes legislative recommendations aimed at enabling decisive changes in defense innovation policy. These proposals focus on creating alternative funding pipelines, addressing supply chain vulnerabilities, and fostering public-private partnerships to mobilize resources efficiently.
The release of Strategic Edge aligns with broader efforts to modernize the Department of Defense and foster collaboration with allies and private industry. It signals a pivotal moment for stakeholders across government, industry, and academia to come together and secure the future of national defense.
Rethink Robotics, founded by Rodney Brooks of iRobot fame in 2008, pioneered the concept of robots working collaboratively with humans. Here are a few previous posts.
New Products at IMTS–Side note: Reacher and Riser are not as cool as the original Sawyer and Baxter, but interesting that they came back.
Now the Hahn Group, who acquired the assets in 2018, has decided to revive the company. It has announced a female team to lead the company back into the market.
Following a successful launch of the company’s new product portfolio at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago, Rethink Robotics Inc., the United States pioneer of collaborative robots, recently named a new all-female leadership team. Effective immediately, Julia Astrid Riemenschneider has been appointed chief executive officer and Franziska Lorenz chief operations officer. With these appointments, Rethink Robotics becomes the first and only player in the field of collaborative robotics with two women at the helm.
Julia Astrid Riemenschneider, CEO, Rethink Robotics (left) and Franziska Lorenz, COO, Rethink Robotics
In these new roles, top priorities for Riemenschneider and Lorenz will be to deliver pioneering technologies in collaborative robots, oversee the installation of Rethink Robotics’ North American headquarters, and expansion of the team. By the end of 2025, the company plans to triple its team size, open a U.S. headquarters, and relocate robot production from Europe to the United States.
The newly introduced product line now includes collaborative robots in payloads ranging from 7 to 30 kg, two autonomous mobile robots (AMR), and a mobile manipulator (MMR) platform. The robots are designed for increased precision, speed, and reliability, making them highly capable for industrial applications.
As CEO, Riemenschneider is responsible for managing all customer-facing related departments, including marketing, sales, business development, product development, and application engineering. Riemenschneider brings more than 10 years of business development experience in industrial automation. Prior to Rethink Robotics, Riemenschneider worked for United Robotics Group in Europe and the United States, growing the business development organization. Previously, she worked in the United States for an international sensor manufacturer, following Europe-based business development roles with a machine vision manufacturer, and collaborative robot market leader Universal Robots.
Franziska Lorenz, previously responsible for corporate development and compliance at HAHN Automation Group, United Robotics Group, and Schenck Process Group, holds a master’s degree in international business administration. She brings extensive international experience from her studies and professional work in Italy, Spain, and Mexico. Recently, Lorenz spent 18 months at Robotnik, a manufacturer of in- and outdoor mobile robots in Valencia, Spain, successfully managing their integration in the group.
In her new role as chief operations officer, Lorenz will be managing HR, finance, production, and service and is looking forward to creating a diverse team as the foundation of success.
“As a newly U.S.-based company, Rethink Robotics is thrilled to contribute to the creation of high-tech American jobs. Our mission is to offer opportunities for skilled and driven professionals to innovate with collaborative robots, addressing the challenges faced by modern manufacturing. The new Rethink Robotics leadership team brings significant industry knowledge and strong business acumen,” said Thomas Hähn, founder of HAHN Automation Group and United Robotics Group, and Rethink Robotics’ president. “With Riemenschneider and Lorenz in these leadership roles, we are well-positioned to execute this fast growth phase as a leading robotics provider.”
I researched the company’s history with a little help from claude.ai.
Rethink Robotics was a pioneering robotics company founded in 2008 by Rodney Brooks, a renowned roboticist and former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The company was originally called Heartland Robotics and was based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Key milestones in its history include:
1. In 2012, Rethink Robotics introduced Baxter, a groundbreaking collaborative robot designed to work safely alongside human workers in manufacturing environments. Baxter was notable for its affordable price, user-friendly interface, and built-in safety features.
2. In 2015, they launched Sawyer, a more precise, smaller single-arm robot aimed at more intricate manufacturing tasks.
3. Despite innovative technology, the company struggled financially and was unable to achieve widespread commercial adoption of its robots.
4. In October 2018, Rethink Robotics ceased operations and was acquired by the German automation company HAHN Group.
The company was significant in advancing the concept of collaborative robotics, demonstrating that robots could be designed to work more intuitively and safely alongside human workers, particularly in small and medium-sized manufacturing settings.
John Gruber’s Daring Fireball consistently provides a perceptive view into the tech industry. This post dives into the situation at Intel and how Pat Gelsinger was forced out.
The Verge’s Sean Hollister penned an excellent high-level summary of how Pat Gelsinger wound up getting forced out of Intel, “What Happened to Intel?”. A wee bit of pussyfooting here, though, caught my eye:
Just how bad was it before Gelsinger took the top job?
Not great! There were bad bets, multiple generations of delayed chips, quality assurance issues, and then Apple decided to abandon Intel in favor of its homegrown Arm-based chips — which turned out to be good, seriously showing up Intel in the laptop performance and battery life realms. We wrote all about it in “The summer Intel fell behind.”
Intel had earlier misses, too: the company long regretted its decision not to put Intel inside the iPhone, and it failed to execute on phone chips for Android handsets as well. It arguably missed the boat on the entire mobile revolution.
Gruber’s article continues through a litany of Intel misses. Mobile market, ARM chips, GPUs, chips for AI.
He concludes:
Intel never should have been blithe to the threat. The company’s longtime CEO and chairman (and employee #3) Andy Grove titled his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive. The full passage from which he drew the title:
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Grove retired as CEO in 1998 and as chairman in 2005. It’s as though no one at Intel after him had listened to a word he said. Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem synopsis for Intel’s own precipitous decline over the last 20 years.
I’m wondering how much the disease at Intel is similar to the disease that struck Boeing. Engineering companies run by finance people. My management training included the maxim to never let companies be run by sales (a problem in the trade media, by the way). Maybe another maxim would be never let the finance department run the company?
One of my trusted news sources is News Items from John Ellis. Today’s email contained an item—revolution in global manufacturing—that grabbed my immediate attention.
This regards China’s long term investment in electric vehicles that is now paying off. I remain convinced that one of the many reasons Elon Musk decided to throw whole-hearted support to Donald Trump was Trump’s belief in using tariffs to protect American industry. A significant one could be Tesla—the EV company under threat from China’s BYD.
Beyond Tesla lie many other American car companies that have been the foundation of our manufacturing health for a century. The other American car companies, bowing to short-term financial pressure, are scaling back on EV manufacturing just at the time China is poised to dominate the market.
Ellis quotes (requires subscription):
As (a) New York Times story makes clear, China now has an incredible—and I would argue unprecedented—capacity to supply over half the global market for cars, which is typically around 90 million cars a year.
China’s internal market is around 25 million cars, and not really growing—so rising domestic EV sales progressively frees up internal combustion engine capacity for export. Domestic demand for traditional cars is likely to be well under 10 million cars next year given the enormous shift toward EVs now underway inside China.
Put differently, China currently has the capacity to produce over two times its own domestic demand and is adding to that capacity quickly thanks to the rapid expansion of its electric vehicle sector. It thus has almost unlimited potential capacity to export.*
That sets the scale for a potential revolution in global manufacturing.
China is a leader in the transition to electric vehicles and it exports more of them than any other country. Chinese brands like BYD are becoming known worldwide for offering advanced electric cars at the most competitive prices. And as Chinese drivers have shifted rapidly to electric vehicles, demand for gasoline-powered cars in China has plunged and many are being exported instead.
Interesting that while waiting for the critical mass for the EV market, China is using its manufacturing capacity for internal combustion cars to export these.
But China’s trading partners say that China’s exports of both electric and gasoline-powered cars imperil millions of jobs and threaten major companies. Earlier this year, the United States and the European Union put significant new tariffs on electric cars from China. Governments are concerned because the auto industry plays a big role in national security, producing tanks, armored personnel carriers, freight trucks and other vehicles.
Two years of my undergraduate work was dominated by the study of international politics—how nations relate and interact with each other. I’m consistently amazed by the lack of understanding by US politicians elected to high office who do not seem to grasp the basics. For example, Trump seemed to think that the US could employ tariffs to bend other countries to our will. But other countries can employ the same tools back to us.
What’s more, China has used steep tariffs and other taxes as a barrier to car imports, so that practically all of the cars sold in China are made in China.
Relationships are complicated—both country-to-country as well as person-to-person.
I devoured newspapers from about age 12 until early middle age. I quit watching any TV news by 1990. It wasn’t a liberal/conservative thing. It was a reporting/hype thing. Too much idle speculation and opinion. Too little reporting.
My news for the past many years has been carefully curated RSS feeds plus two relatively new email sources—Axios and Morning Brew.
Last night, my evening edition of Axios entered my inbox. In it, Axios co-founder and publisher Jim VandeHei expanded upon remarks he had earlier made to the National Press Club. I support his point of view. I’ve occasionally written to him about a rare click-bait headline.
Trust in journalism fell far and fast. Elon Musk and millions more argue it is — and should be — buried forever, Jim writes.
They say anyone with unrestrained speech — anyone on X — can easily replace a discredited media. “You are the media now,” Musk repeatedly tells his 206 million followers.
Why it matters: My response, in a speech at the National Press Club that went shockingly viral, was: “Bullshit!” I argued that an America without clinical, fair, deep and fearless reporting will perish.
Absent reporting, which I define as the pursuit of fact-based truth without fear or favoritism, you’d have: more opioid deaths … more kids sexually abused in churches … more welfare fraud in Mississippi … more lawlessness in rural Alaska … more Harvey Weinsteins preying on young women … more corruption … more misinformation.
Reality check: You’re right to dunk on biased, sloppy, lazy coverage. I hate it, too: It undercuts the hard work of every on-the-level reporter working their beats — whether at the White House or in my hometown of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
But we need to distinguish between “the media” and honest reporting. I try to avoid junk food — not all food. I’d starve.
📖 The backstory: Angry emails I received after the speech show how many lump all parts of “the media” together, sweeping in anyone who’s paid to talk or type or report. I read every one. To say a lot of people on X hate “the media” is a gross understatement. My inbox confirms this emphatically.
Axios is very much not the legacy media, which has done plenty to undermine its own credibility. I have helped build two media companies — Politico and Axios — based on my own frustrations with legacy media. Journalists too often write for each other or awards committees. They’re too slow to own up to mistakes, and too quick to pop off on social media in ways that betray bias or righteousness.
So 18 years ago, I left The Washington Post to help start Politico — aiming to build a more direct, authentic relationship between readers and reporters. Eight years ago, I left Politico to help start Axios, grounded in an “audience first” mentality. We’ll never have an opinion section. And our audience “Bill of Rights” promises: “We will go the extra mile to earn your trust. All employees are asked to refrain from taking/advocating for public positions on political topics.”
I wrote this article for an Italian automation magazine—Automazione Oggi (Automation Today). I’ve written a monthly column called News from America for 12 or 13 years. After a change in Presidents, they are curious about the new administration’s impact on manufacturing and international trade.
I studied electronics and engineering and worked in engineering for most of my career. But I also did a year of graduate school in political science. This allows me to explore both sides of my brain.
Americans use a descriptive phrase for people, especially men—the “alpha male.” This person needs to assert dominance. After asserting dominance, he values loyalty above all else. We know from his first presidency that Trump needs to feel that he is the alpha male.
We also know from his first presidency that he says many things, most of which he made up at the moment. What he’ll actually follow up on is anybody’s guess. We can see from his first Cabinet appointments that he is rewarding those who have been loyal to him.
Then we have the “dance of the billionaires.” Beginning with Elon Musk. To a lesser degree Jeff Bezos. Following the election, we’ve seen a trail of billionaires and corporate CEOs kissing the ring. All assume that Trump is easily manipulated through flattery. All have an agenda. All could possibly be fooled.
Trump favors tariffs. He does not seem to understand all the ramifications of tariffs. It appears that he thinks they are an alpha male tool to “make America great again” by stopping the flow of money to other countries, especially China. Tariffs have, however, a double edge. (See below.)
Musk hopes to sell Trump on tariffs for electric vehicles. Such tariffs would reduce competition for his Tesla manufacturing company allowing him to raise prices. This would generate more profits.
Musk also sells rockets to the government. He wants to increase that business. Enter Jeff Bezos who also wants to sell more rockets to the US government. Therefore, he quashed his newspaper’s endorsement of Harris. He also hurried to congratulate Trump and kiss his ring.
Tech CEOs such as Apple’s Tim Cook, Alphabet’s (Google) Sundar Pinchai, and Meta’s (Facebook) Mark Zuckerberg hope that Trump will fight for them against the European Union. That is a complicated dance worth watching.
Meanwhile, some of Trump’s early appointees have voiced opinions favorable to breaking up these large companies. Since that attitude does not reflect Trump’s outlook, this will be another dance worth watching. Trump does tire of people easily.
Since tariffs seem to be Trump’s favorite stick, I looked at the effects from his first term. The tariffs implemented during 2017-2021 had mixed and complex effects on U.S. manufacturing:
Positive Effects:
Some U.S. steel and aluminum producers benefited from reduced foreign competition
Created some jobs in specific protected industries
Led to some companies relocating production to the U.S. to avoid tariffs
Negative Effects:
1. Higher input costs for manufacturers using steel/aluminum, particularly affecting:
Auto manufacturing
Construction equipment
Appliance makers
2. Retaliatory tariffs from other countries hurt U.S. exports, especially:
Agricultural products
Industrial machinery
Consumer goods
3. Supply chain disruptions as companies scrambled to find new suppliers
Economic Impact:
Studies found the tariffs cost U.S. companies and consumers billions through higher prices
The Federal Reserve estimated the tariffs led to a net loss of manufacturing jobs due to higher input costs
Some manufacturers absorbed the higher costs, reducing their profit margins
Others passed costs to consumers through higher prices
The first Trump presidency was marked by daily chaos. Media had to love him, since there was always a daily hot news item to draw people’s attention. I expect more of the same. And I expect that in manufacturing some will win and some will lose—pretty much like always.
