You cannot compare with what is happening with china/India today as what happened with Japan 15-20 years ago. The primary differnce is we were not shutting down US factories by the thousands and moving them to Japan.Precisely wrong. Japan's re-industrialization was an attempt to capture American manufacturing. What they failed to realize--what you fail to realize, what the Chinese fail to realize--is that the cash value of manufactured goods continues, is continuing, to crash, not because of cheap labour, but because of prodcutivity and efficiency gains and the low cost of freight (at the moment). A strong economy is no longer an industrial economy: it simply isn't 1927 any more, dude, and crying won't bring it back.
Productivity requires that entire industrial base that you blithely dismiss. You are unaware that we have lost the basis of creating the productivity and efficiency gains we enjoyed in the past, as the entire production chain is in the process of being relocated out of the U.S. The collapse of US technical education is a telling symptom as U.S. students flee engineering, math and sciences like the plague.
Japan did try to dominate global manufacturing back in its day, and was on a track to succeed...until Reagan bitch-slapped them hard with trade quotas. And it wasn't just cars. Stopped their momentum dead in its tracks. And gave our manufacturers a breather to figure out how to get competitive again.
George W. Bush did the same kind of thing here with only one industry, Steel, despite the Importers League drumbeat, and an anti-american tilted WTO court. Fortunately Bush prevailed long enough to save our integrated steel mills... mills which are uniquely necessary for defense production. Mini-mills can't, and never will, cut it for defense.
And as for your preposterous conclusion, "A strong economy is no longer an industrial economy." Tell it to China, which you claim "fails to realize" that manufactured goods are a cash loser. They seem to be doing quite nicely don't they, despite your disparaging WORDS. And that is all they are. No truth to them as regards China whatsoever. How much of the U.S. "productivity gains" that you ascribe really are in fact labor substitutions outsourcing componentry for import and slapping U.S. labels on? And it is not just Roberts, but a broad spectrum of economic thinkers Milton Friedman (U. Chicago), Warren Buffet, and Paul Samuelson (MIT) have become deeply suspicious of U.S. productivity claims lately.
And you keep missing the core concern: Manufacturing for national defense requires a deep, broad base. Not just those currently actually hired to do defense work. Think of it in visual metaphor terms like a "pyramid". The top tip end of it is those who do the defense work. But they rest on the foundations below them...and without those foundations, they would collapse. And this is very real-world and very apt.