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Foundry operation is a skill acquired by doing. This is not the kind of thing the country should allow to disappear since the foundry industry is far from dead worldwide. If international commerce gets interrupted by war, this is one of the things that will make victory more difficult and expensive.

Good point, but you are out of touch.

Foundry operations, molding companies, & basic manufacturing all over the country have already closed right and left because they can not compete with overseas competition... that is unless they find a way to make their services more valuable in some way. In short, we have already lost much of what we had.

This era requires manufacturers to be very creative to compete while remaining in the US. What results is that domestic manufacturers are now often the best performers, yet they must be selective to use US resources on only items that they can add enough value to lower total costs to the customer. They have overseas partners that can take the other projects.

While we still have an enormous manufacturing capacity, I find it astonishingly improbable that we could ever be the arsenal of democracy as we were in the late 1930's and early 1940's. However, in the early 20th century, numbers were everything... conscript your own population to build your army's size. Now, quality matters far more than quantity.

Perhaps we do not need all the capacity to support our national security.

"Foundry operation is a skill acquired by doing. This is not the kind of thing the country should allow to disappear since the foundry industry is far from dead worldwide."

No, it's a "buggy whip" industry. These pathetic 19th century Americans will have to be re-trained to do... something. I can't believe all the smugness going on here about our countrymen losing their jobs. Even if they are EVIL union workers.