At this point, even if die makers started making 300k a year, there isn’t enough master die makers left in the USA to bootstrap the capacity in less than 5 decades. The only practical solution at this point is to max out apprenticeship and somehow incentivise the industry so that we could flood other countries with apprentices as well. Then, we might be able to start getting things balanced in as little as 2 decades.

Otherwise, completely homegrown manufacturing is essentially dead in the water.

If we want to regrow US domestic manufacturing, we need to throw about 100B at scholarships and incentives, or figure out how to capture remaining diemaker empirical knowledge into ML / robotics.

Or maybe we could spend 10B on immigration incentives for qualified Diemakers? Idk about the global state of affairs and how that would work. At any rate we need at least 100-300k new diemakers if we really want to rebuild 100 percent domestic capabilities overnight. And then we need a career path for them 20 years farther down the road.

It was really, really foolish to allow strategic industrial capability to wither on the vine.