Manufacturing dominance was for WW2, but post WW2 it's really high tech and Silicon Valley that gave us dominance.
Silicon Valley was built on defense contracts for control systems, that's what funded all early semiconductor work, what built the technical empire that led to software's dominance in more recent decades.
And Ukraine is proving that heavy manufacturing competence is not the key discriminator. Now light manufacturing, high tech, and bottom-up organization and logistics are letting a small country defend itself against a far far far larger enemy with 4x the people and an absolutely massive dominance in heavy industry and manufacturing of heavy vehicles.
The biggest weakness of Ukraine is the same weakness of the US at the moment: inability to manufacture large amounts of interceptor missiles for air defense. That's not a heavy industry problem, that's a technology problem, a logistics problem, an operations problem. This requires the skill of Apple, not the skills of GM. And in the time it takes the US to scale up production, Ukraine is going to invent their own far cheaper option from scratch.
And that's because the US has not yet moved beyond the style of military industry built on massive high-capital manufacturing, that's slow moving and design iteration measured in years rather than months. The US is currently repeating the same mistake, but even worse, with its drone initiatives because the rewards are based purely on corrupt personal relationships rather than any sort of competitive process.
Heavy industry and manufacturing are not the model for building a military of the future, or an economy of the future.
If by heavy industry you mean shitloads of steel production, I mostly agree, but if you count things like domestic rare earth minerals processing, semiconductors, solar, batteries, I'm not so sure. I don't know the official ontology of what goes in heavy vs light. If magnets are going to be one of the key strategic resources in warfare, though, we should probably get that supply chain down. And being able to replace ship losses still seems relevant.
And yeah, controls, signal processing, decisionmaking, etc are all going to be big determinants, and we're no slouches in that stuff. It used to take a huge bomber fleet and an absurd number of bombs to score as many hits on target as a single B-52 load can now score, thanks to the ability to strap cheap guidance packages onto dumb bombs, margin of error has gone from on the order of half a mile to single digit yards.
>Manufacturing dominance was for WW2, but post WW2 it's really high tech and Silicon Valley that gave us dominance.
There was a good 40+yr there, more in some industries.
Selling the industrial economy piecemeal to china under the guise of environmentalism, worker protection, etc, etc for pennies on the long term dollar was an intentional policy choice and a resounding failure. The winners from that of course don't want to see it framed that way.