By Andrew Kornuta — 28 Dec 2025

Industrialist Paper No. 0

To the Builders of American Industry

To the builders, buyers, shop owners, foremen, estimators, machinists, engineers, quality managers, and program leads who still make real things, and to the programmers, data scientists, economists, politicians, investors, bankers, and operators who support them and depend upon them, whether they know it or not:

We are living through an era of industrial confusion that is being misdiagnosed, often conveniently.

Every week we are told the same story: the United States has a manufacturing capacity problem. Not enough shops. Not enough labor. Not enough machines. Not enough training. Not enough “industrial policy.” If we could just add more inputs, we would recover what we lost.

That story is incomplete. It produces the wrong remedies.

America does not have a capacity problem first. It has a coordination problem first. And beneath that, it has a trust problem.

You can feel it in the daily work:

Buyers broadcast RFQs like flares into the dark and still cannot find the right shop in time.
Shops spend unpaid hours decoding ambiguous packages, then lose the job to someone faster or cheaper.
Quality teams build walls of paperwork after one bad supplier event, then wonder why lead times keep stretching.
Engineers revise models, revise drawings, revise notes, and everyone down the line pays the latency tax.
Supplier qualification is repeated from scratch, over and over, as if the last decade taught nothing.

These are not moral failures. They are mechanical outcomes. They are what happens when a large system loses shared context and loses reliable signals.

A key structural fact: the atoms vs bits debate is over

Manufacturing is not “physical work” plus “optional software.” It is already a cyber-physical system.

The cutting happens at the spindle, but the work exists inside software long before the first chip is made: CAD, CAM, tool libraries, post processors, probing cycles, inspection plans, CMM programs, travelers, ERP, MES, machine control, and increasingly vision and sensors.

And yet, many shops still treat software as something you bolt on, negotiate with, or resist. Not because they are irrational, but because they have been burned.

Software people arrive with a new “standard,” a new platform, a new workflow, and a new promise that ignores how real parts get made. They do not understand workholding. They do not understand setup risk. They do not understand that a tolerance is not a number, it is a process. Even many mechanical engineers do not spend much time in the reality they are specifying.

So manufacturing adopts software where it is unavoidable, like CNC and CAD, and resists it where it feels threatening, like quoting, supplier discovery, documentation, and data sharing.

That half-adoption is not stable. It creates seams. Seams create translation work. Translation work creates latency. Latency creates mistrust. Mistrust creates manual controls. Manual controls create more seams.

This series starts from a blunt premise:

If we want coordination at national scale, we must embrace software fully, but build it with respect for the machines, the process knowledge, and the incentives of the shop floor.

Not software as ideology. Software as infrastructure.

The thesis in plain language

Distance and complexity broke shared context, so sourcing became a translation problem.
Distance is cheap, uncertainty is expensive. The enemy is not miles, it is latency and ambiguity.
We cannot and should not impose a single authoritative standard across the ecosystem.
Translation and structuring are solvable with modern software, especially AI.
Trust must be engineered: evidence-based identity, performance signals, and real consequences.
Globalization amplified the breakdown and exposed us to asymmetric regimes.
Some nations coordinate faster through centralized control. We will not copy that.
Inputs like energy and labor matter, but coordination determines throughput and resilience.
Incentives and measurement drive allocation. Visibility is governance.
National boundaries are the practical container for aligned incentives and enforcement.
Coordination is computation: what cannot be represented cannot be routed. Testability wins. Fallbacks are required.

This is not nostalgia. It is not grievance. What we put forth here is system design.

Why this matters now

There are two comforting illusions in the current conversation.

Illusion one: we can simply outspend the problem.

You can subsidize machines and training. You can expand incentives. Those are not wrong. But if the network remains noisy, untrusted, and slow, new capacity does not translate into throughput. It translates into more quoting waste, more mismatch, and more leakage overseas when deadlines arrive.

Illusion two: national industrial policy will solve day-to-day execution.

Government can set boundaries. It can enforce rules. It can use tariffs and procurement to reduce unfair advantage. It can fund foundational R&D and workforce pipelines. All of that can help.

But government cannot run the day-to-day coordination layer of American manufacturing. It cannot update at the pace of real programs. It cannot adjudicate every tolerance stack, every conflicting note block, every revision mismatch, every supplier dispute, every capacity shift, every late quote.

If we stake our industrial future on political timing, we lose. The system moves faster than policy.

The durable solution has to be built by industry, for industry, in a way that fits a free and decentralized nation.

A note on standards, and why we should be suspicious of “one true format”

Many will propose a single standard as the fix. One format for RFQs. One national data model. One enforced playbook.

That approach fails for a deeper reason: implementing a single universal standard requires a level of coercive authority that we do not have, and should not want.

America’s advantage is not that we can coordinate by decree. It is that we can coordinate by voluntary adoption when the protocol is obviously useful, when it reduces work, and when it improves outcomes.

So we are not chasing one perfect standard. We are designing protocols that translate between imperfect inputs. We are building systems that can accept messy reality and still produce trustworthy routing.

What this series will do

Over forty papers, I will make the case for an American industrial renewal that is:

Pro market, not centrally planned
Pro small business, but honest about scale economics
Pro national resilience, without culture war bait

The structure is deliberate.

Act I: Diagnosis (Papers 1–10)

We name the failure modes in operational language: ambiguity, latency, noise, fragmented standards, repeated qualification, and the trust spiral.

Act II: System (Papers 11–25)

We define the coordination layer: the universal request object, minimum viable work packages, AI-assisted structuring, verification, reputation, trust scoring as routing, visibility rules, domestic-first governance, and interoperability outside the ERP.

Act III: Objections and governance (Papers 26–40)

We answer the real objections: commoditization, platform capture, gaming, pay-to-play, IP leakage, quality risk, buyer inertia, and antitrust constraints. Then we state an industrial constitution: what must be protected for the system to remain legitimate.

Along the way, I will use evidence and numbers where they clarify reality, not where they distract from it: quoting cycle time studies, supplier response rate surveys, cost-of-quality research, lead time and expediting economics, and the documented failure patterns of marketplaces and broker models.

A note on motives and tone

I am not writing this to win an argument on the internet.

I am writing it because too many good people inside American manufacturing are burning time on avoidable confusion, and the nation pays for it in slow iteration, missed schedules, and fragile supply chains.

Reasonable people will disagree about tactics. Some will want heavier policy. Some will want pure market forces. Some will want to believe the past can be restored by willpower alone.

This series is not an attack on those people. It is a claim that the mechanics are what they are. If you want different outcomes, you must build different infrastructure.

Implications

If you treat manufacturing as a directory problem, you will create noise.
If you treat manufacturing as a marketplace problem, you will optimize for price and damage trust.
If you treat manufacturing as a coordination problem, you can change throughput without central control.
The nation that builds the best coordination protocols will out-iterate the rest, even at higher wage levels.

Next: Paper 1, the Tower of Babel problem, manufacturing history, and why translation is the root cause beneath the pain.