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Vice President JD Vance: U.S. industrial capacity, not ideology, is central to national security
Summary
At an American Compass event, Vice President JD Vance argued that decades of offshoring have weakened U.S. industrial capacity and left the country vulnerable on supply chains for critical goods, and said rebuilding domestic and diversified global manufacturing must be a long-term priority.
Vice President JD Vance told an American Compass audience that decades of offshoring have undermined U.S. industrial capacity and constrained the country's ability to act on foreign policy.
Vance said the loss of manufacturing and processing capacity creates strategic leverage for rival states and can limit U.S. options in a crisis. "You can never be secure as a nation unless you're able to feed your people, and unless you're able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function, and ultimately to defend yourself," he said.
Vance framed the issue as both economic and geopolitical. He warned that reliance on single-country suppliers for raw materials and processing — especially in areas such as rare earth minerals and pharmaceuticals — gives potential adversaries leverage. "It is access to raw material and industrial capacity that is at the core of both of the decisions that we're making and the areas that we're prioritizing," he said.
He described gaps in government knowledge about where U.S. supply-chain vulnerabilities actually lay. "I asked that explicit question, and the answer was, we don't know. Nobody in the prior government had actually asked these very fundamental questions," Vance said, arguing that some problems were not investigated before now.
Vance invoked history to illustrate his point: industrial capacity was decisive in World War II, he said, because the United States could replace equipment in volume. Today, he said, similar capacity is needed for modern technologies and national defense.
The vice president called for a mix of domestic reshoring where feasible and diversification of global supply chains where onshoring is not immediately possible. He warned the work would take decades: "This is not a a 5, a 10, or a this is a 20 year project to actually get America back to common sense economic policy," he said.
Vance credited organizations such as American Compass for drawing attention to these issues and urged continued engagement from private-sector leaders, philanthropies and policymakers to rebuild manufacturing, processing and related skilled-workforces.
He said parts of the policy response will be technical — tariffs, revenue guarantees, capital formation — but stressed the human-capacity element: the country needs skilled workers and the educational pipeline to support advanced manufacturing.
The event included introductory remarks from a program introducer and other moderators; no formal votes or policy actions were announced at the event.
Looking forward, Vance said the administration would prioritize supply-chain assessments and industrial rebuilding but cautioned the effort requires sustained political and private investment over many years.
