Inside the Push to Reshore and Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing | Alex Krutz

Podcast Spotlights​

 

​For decades, we’ve told ourselves that manufacturing is something advanced economies naturally outgrow. That once you move into services, data, and software, heavy industry becomes optional, nice to have, but not essential.

 

But from a national and economic security perspective, America can’t afford to treat industrial capacity as a legacy asset it can outsource and revisit later—especially now.

 

Hollowing out manufacturing doesn’t just weaken supply chains. It introduces risk into systems that depend on precision, reliability, and readiness.

 

The question isn’t whether the U.S. can still build complex things; it’s whether we’ve kept the muscle memory to do it at scale, in volume, and fast enough when demand shows up all at once.

 

And the problem doesn’t live in one place. It shows up across the workforce, the factory floor, and the balance sheet. A generation was steered away from the trades. Production systems were optimized for low-volume, high-complexity output instead of sustained throughput.

 

Capital flowed toward financial efficiency rather than reinvestment in plants, tooling, and people. On paper, the industrial base still exists. In practice, it’s been stretched thin by decades of offshoring, underinvestment, and policy drift.

 

So how do you refocus a country after decades of offshoring?

 

Chips, ships, pharma, manufacturing, defense programs, and aerospace production, and data centers are all pulling on the same constrained supply chains, the same limited pool of skilled labor, and the same aging infrastructure.

 

Meeting that moment will take coordinated industrial policy, sustained capital investment, and a clear demand signal strong enough to justify rebuilding capacity at scale.

 

So what does that actually look like, and how is the government trying to close the gap?

 

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Krutz, CEO of Patriot Industrial Partners, who recently returned to industry after serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Manufacturing. We talk about what he saw moving through global industrial hubs, why the industrial renaissance is real—but fragile—and what actually has to change if capacity, resilience, and readiness are going to be rebuilt rather than debated.

 

You’ll also learn:

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- Why moving “past” manufacturing creates economic and national security vulnerabilities

- The overlooked gap between high-tech capability and true industrial scale

- How workforce decline became a cultural problem, not just a skills shortage

- Why volume manufacturing—not innovation—is the hardest muscle to rebuild

- The role of government as a demand signal, not a market dictator

- When government equity stakes make sense—and when they don’t

- Why shipbuilding, nuclear energy, and industrial gas turbines are resurfacing together

- How data centers and AI are quietly reshaping energy and manufacturing demand

- The coming collision between aerospace, energy, and MRO capacity

- Why reinvestment in tools, training, and facilities matters more than incentives alone

- A provocative idea to pull millions into manufacturing: tax holidays, paid training, and real upside

- What CEOs are actually worried about beneath the workforce headlines

 

About the Guest

 

Alex Krutz is the Managing Director of Patriot Industrial Partners and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Manufacturing at the U.S. Department of Commerce. With more than two decades in aerospace and defense, Alex is known for leading complex manufacturing and supply-chain turnarounds across the industrial base—earning him the industry nickname “The Factory Doctor.” His work spans global performance-improvement engagements in the United States, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Italy, France, South Africa, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan. Before his role in government, Alex founded Patriot Industrial Partners, a boutique advisory firm focused on value creation, operational excellence, and supply-chain resilience in aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing. In public service, he helped shape manufacturing and industrial policy at a national level, working closely with industry leaders across sectors including aerospace, energy, shipbuilding, and semiconductors.