Authored by Seurat’s CEO, Co-Founder & Co-Inventor, James DeMuth
As 2026 begins, one fact is unimaginable to dismiss: manufacturing just isn’t an industrial legacy. It’s nationwide infrastructure, and the USA continues to woefully neglect it.
2025 was suffering from acquainted issues. Strained provide chains, lengthy lead instances, and intensified world competitors. Even within the face of tariffs, important manufacturing capability remained concentrated offshore.
Sure, there have been some optimistic indicators:
- Policymakers are speaking extra significantly about reshoring and functionality.
- Superior manufacturing instruments, particularly additive manufacturing, are more and more acknowledged as strategic.
- Private and non-private provide chain leaders are realizing they will’t make selections purely based mostly on short-term revenue. They should discover a stability between resilience and value.
However earnest dialog doesn’t rebuild factories or shorten lead instances. 2026 should be the yr the USA strikes from recognizing the issue to constructing the answer.
Public + Personal Partnerships Have At all times Fueled Crucial Developments
America’s biggest industrial advances had been by no means purely non-public sector achievements. From the interstate freeway system and aerospace to semiconductors, GPS, and nuclear power, the nation constructed its most transformative industries by deliberate public–non-public partnerships.
Rebuilding U.S. manufacturing is not any totally different. It must be a public mission with additive manufacturing at its epicenter. The Division of Struggle’s 2025 Acquisition Transformation Technique already pointed the best way: develop home manufacturing, stabilize demand, speed up non-public capital, and scale back supply-chain dependency.
The query is not course – it’s urgency.
Even Low-Price Elements Can Break Fragile Provide Chains
Vcg/Visible China Group/Getty Pictures
2025 delivered one other warning shot.
The Nexperia semiconductor disruption, triggered by export pauses on ultra-low-cost automotive chips, pressured manufacturing cuts throughout main automakers. These weren’t superior elements. They had been fundamental inputs.
That’s the level.
Provide-chain threat just isn’t hiding in unique supplies or superior elements. It’s embedded in bizarre components when manufacturing is distant, brittle, and concentrated.
When Manufacturing Is The Bottleneck, Velocity And Resilience Are Benefits
Legacy provide chains had been by no means designed for geopolitical volatility, fast iteration, or the rising complexity of contemporary merchandise. Future provide chains should be constructed otherwise:
- Digital manufacturing as an alternative of handbook backlogs.
- Automated, resilient manufacturing as an alternative of brittle, distant suppliers.
- Home throughput as an alternative of international choke factors.
What The USA Should Have in 2026: A Manufacturing Acceleration Technique
Rendering of Seurat’s Industrial Elements Manufacturing Manufacturing unit
If U.S. management in protection, aerospace, power, transportation, electronics, and medical know-how actually issues, home manufacturing capability can not stay optionally available. 2026 must be the yr we get up and deal with manufacturing as strategic nationwide infrastructure. Our efforts should be intentional, coordinated, and scaled:
- Not scattered pilot initiatives.
- Not one-off innovation grants.
- Not complicated tax credit.
What’s required
- Manufacturing unit-scale Additive Manufacturing deployments: Constructed by public–non-public partnerships and anchored by federal procurement. Not simply prototypes, however large-scale manufacturing capability throughout all important industries.
- Strengthen home provide of important inputs: The Nexperia episode confirmed how even low-tech elements can create threat when provide is concentrated. Diversifying and reshoring important manufacturing inputs is each economically and strategically pressing.
- A Twenty first-century manufacturing workforce: The following-generation industrial workforce will mix innovation and operational expertise. We’d like automation, engineering, supplies science, and system operators. We should allow pathways that help all of them.
- Regional manufacturing clusters: Industrial energy grows when OEMs, suppliers, know-how suppliers, and universities co-locate and collaborate to shorten provide chains and speed up adoption.
- Metrics that mirror actual industrial energy: Success must be measured by throughput, uptime, lead-time compression, resilience, and value competitiveness.
Manufacturing Is Extra Than Economics
Rendering of Seurat’s Industrial Elements Manufacturing Manufacturing unit
A sturdy home manufacturing base is greater than an financial engine; it’s the mechanism by which a nation maintains:
- Sovereignty: Proudly owning our important industrial processes and industries.
- Resilience: Lowered dependency on concentrated international provide chains.
- Innovation: Sooner growth of next-generation applied sciences and merchandise.
- Safety: Readiness and responsiveness in unsure environments.
- Management: The capability to set world industrial requirements and maintain our position as the worldwide engine of invention.
A Decision For The 12 months Forward
James DeMuth at Seurat’s Pilot Elements Manufacturing Manufacturing unit
In 2026, my hope is that leaders — public, non-public, and institutional — take concrete actions to deal with manufacturing not as a relic of the previous, however as the inspiration of tomorrow.
The USA has all the things required to guide the following industrial period:
- World-class analysis establishments
- Entrepreneurial power
- Deep heritage
- Rising applied sciences that lastly permit us to compete on pace, value, and scale
If we deal with superior manufacturing because the strategic infrastructure it actually is, then 2026 might be the yr the USA strikes from discussing industrial renewal to really delivering it.
To interact with us on this mission, please attain out at information@Seurat.com.
James DeMuth, Co-Founder and CEO of Seurat, will likely be talking at Additive Manufacturing Methods (AMS), a three-day business occasion going down February 24–26 in New York Metropolis. DeMuth will take part within the panel “Greatest Practices for an Aligned Investor-Founder Relationship” on February 25. Registration for the occasion is open through the AMS web site.
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