Sovereignty Has a Physical Form
A nation that cannot build what it needs is not fully sovereign.
JOHN A. BURTKA is Director of Advancement and Outreach at the Coalition for a Prosperous America. He spent his career in manufacturing, automotive supply chains, industrial operations, and business turnarounds. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
In this year’s military campaign against Iran, American forces proved they could strike almost anywhere with precision on short notice. Then the magazines ran low.
In the first month alone, U.S. forces expended more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles. By the time a ceasefire was reached, the total exceeded 1,000. America builds fewer than 200 Tomahawks a year. According to CSIS, Tomahawk stocks may not return to prewar levels until late 2030, while THAAD and Patriot inventories could take three or more years to rebuild.
Iran is not a peer. Against a true adversary like China, the gap between our ability to fire missiles and replace them will be the difference between deterrence and defeat. Adversaries count magazines and the ability to refill them, not just launchers. Industrial deterrence is the credible ability to keep producing after the first magazines are emptied. Rivals weigh that capacity before deciding whether a war is worth starting.
If war comes, winning turns not only on courage in the field but on factories, suppliers, machine tools, rocket motors, skilled workers, and our sovereign control of them before the shooting starts.
What Sovereignty Requires
We usually discuss sovereignty in the language of law and diplomacy: borders, treaties, and the freedom to set policy without another country’s permission.
Sovereignty also has a physical form. It is the capacity to act independently in the material world, to produce on one’s own soil the things that survival and freedom require: shipyards, smelters, refineries, pharmaceutical plants, munitions lines, power grids, and the skilled workforce that runs them. These are the material basis of independence.
A free people that cannot supply its own defense, energy, and medicine has handed part of its sovereignty to whoever can. A government can pass laws and project confidence, but without the ability to produce transformers, forgings, or artillery shells its authority is contingent. Political independence requires industrial capacity behind it, and that capacity has been eroding for half a century.
The Strategic Consequences of Efficiency
For two generations, America treated production as a private matter and consumption as the national interest. Make goods wherever they are cheapest. Hold minimal inventory. Offshore work when the numbers favor it. Treat production location as a cost question rather than a strategic question.
But these choices were themselves a strategy. They produced real abundance in ordinary times. Now they are being tested in extraordinary times. Efficiency optimizes for the average day. It strips out the slack and spare capacity a nation needs when conditions turn against it. A supply chain built for the lowest cost is, by design, a supply chain with no margin for crisis.
A nation can become richer on paper while becoming thinner in the things that make power real.
The original Arsenal of Democracy rested on a broad civilian manufacturing base already equipped with the skill, machinery, and workforce to convert to military production. Automakers built tanks because they already built engines and precision assemblies at scale. Machine shops, foundries, steel mills, and shipyards formed an ecosystem that could be redirected. And there was a dense network of suppliers, engineers, and production workers who made mobilization possible.
Over the last few decades, as America lost factories, we also lost conversion capacity. We grew comfortable as consumers and forgot that national power depends on makers.
The upstream base tells the same story. In 2025, the United States produced only 660,000 tons of primary aluminum against 5.7 million tons of apparent consumption, roughly 60 percent net import reliance, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Copper is little better. USGS figures show 1 million tons of recoverable mine production, 790,000 tons of primary refined production, 1.7 million tons of refined imports, 57 percent net import reliance, and only two primary smelters.
These are just two examples, but I choose them for a reason. Metals are not luxuries. Aluminum and copper are in aircraft, vehicles, the power grid, motors, ships, and ammunition. Without them you cannot rebuild an arsenal. There are thousands of similar examples across the industrial base, each a real vulnerability. Trusted allies can help fill gaps, but allied final assembly that depends on Chinese upstream inputs is not allied capacity. It is Chinese capacity with better branding.
Capacity Must Exist Before Crisis
Walk the floor of a precision munitions plant and you stop thinking of a weapon as a single object. A guided missile is the visible end of a long chain: solid rocket motors, cast and forged parts, seeker electronics, rare-earth magnets, energetics, specialized fasteners, and the technicians who qualified the suppliers years earlier.
Remove any link and the weapon does not get built, or gets built too slowly to matter. The real constraint isn’t money. That would make this problem far easier. It is industrial capacity, including the permitting, capital, machines with long lead times, qualified suppliers, and trained workers. All of that takes years.
While the system optimized for cost, the base shrank. Manufacturing value-added fell from more than 21 percent of GDP in the late 1970s to 9.4 percent in late 2025, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. A country does not shed that much industrial mass without losing the suppliers, trades, and institutional knowledge that came with it.
Our nation has woken up to the fact that we cannot wait for war, blockade, pandemic, or energy shock and then decide to build what we need. The foundation of any serious industrial strategy is a set of principles applied with discipline before the crisis.
It begins with stable demand signals. Manufacturers invest when they see durable orders ahead instead of one-year appropriations that vanish with the next budget fight. Procurement must reward surge capacity and keep multiple capable suppliers alive, not just chase the lowest bid.
Critical inputs with no easy substitute need real domestic depth. Abundant affordable energy, faster permitting, patient capital, and a workforce strategy that treats skilled trades as a national asset are non-negotiable. Trusted allies can help where necessary, but irreplaceable capabilities must exist at home. Every serious industrial power understands that some capabilities are too important to leave to chance.
That does not mean America has to make everything. It does mean we have to decide what we cannot afford to lose.
Some capabilities are clearly essential. If losing one supplier can shut down a weapons line, the power grid, a hospital, or a large part of the economy, that capability is strategic. If it takes years to rebuild, depends on skills that are disappearing, or comes mostly from a country that may not supply us in a crisis, we need enough of it here to keep operating and to expand when necessary. That includes energy and grid equipment, primary metals and critical minerals, machine tools, castings and forgings, semiconductors, medicines and their active ingredients, shipbuilding and repair, munitions, rocket motors, and energetics.
Not every product has to be treated as a strategic capability. Goods with many dependable suppliers, ready substitutes, short lead times, and no serious effect on defense, health, energy, or the productive base can remain part of ordinary trade. Some products can come from trusted allies, especially while we rebuild capacity here. But we have to know where the critical inputs, equipment, and technology actually come from. Moving the last step of production to an allied country does not solve the problem if the supply chain still runs through China.
The middle class belongs in this calculation too. Factories do not run themselves. Skilled trades are built over generations through families, apprenticeships, technical schools, and companies willing to train people. When those jobs disappear, we do not just lose output. We lose the machinists, welders, electricians, toolmakers, engineers, and supervisors who know how to make difficult things at scale—and with them, the ability to expand production when the magazines run dry.
We also weaken the middle class that supports the economy and gives the country political stability. People who can support a family, buy a home, start a business, and believe their children have a future have a stake in the system. A country with great wealth at the top and permanent insecurity underneath will not remain economically strong or politically stable for long.
Rebuilding industrial sovereignty will require hard choices. We will have to decide what must be made here, what can safely come from trusted allies, and what can remain part of ordinary trade. Avoiding those choices is also a choice, and it is how we arrived here.
250 Years of Lessons
Two and a half centuries after independence, America needs to rebuild its industrial base, for reasons of necessity, not nostalgia. The men who declared independence understood that political freedom cannot be separated from the material capacity to sustain it. Independence was never only a matter of law and declaration. It had a physical form.
The case today rests on the same truth: industrial capacity is the material foundation of national independence, deterrence, and self-government. Free nations must act when conditions are hard, not only when they are easy, and that ability is physical before it is anything else.
America’s strikes against Iran showed a force capable of action. The years needed to refill the magazines showed the weakness behind it. The Arsenal of Democracy worked because civilian industry doubled as latent military capacity. That capacity must be built and maintained beforehand. A country that cannot produce enough aluminum, copper, machine tools, medicines, transformers, ships, and weapons is not fully sovereign in the real world. Neither is a country that allows the skilled middle class capable of producing and sustaining those things to disappear.
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