April 26, 2026

Eisenhower industrial policy lessons are among the most relevant and least cited precedents for America’s current strategic predicament — because Eisenhower understood something that most politicians today have never had to learn: logistics wins wars, and logistics requires manufacturing.

Dwight Eisenhower is remembered for two things in popular history: his warning about the military-industrial complex, and the interstate highway system. Both are misread. The warning about the military-industrial complex is typically invoked as an argument for constraining defense spending. What Eisenhower actually warned against was the corruption of the defense procurement process by financial interests — not the industrial capacity itself, which he regarded as essential. The interstate highway system was not a public works project. It was a national defense infrastructure investment designed to allow the rapid movement of military forces across the continental United States, modeled explicitly on the German Autobahn that Eisenhower had observed during the Allied advance in 1945.

Craig Tindale placed Eisenhower in a lineage of leaders — Hamilton, Napoleon, Menzies, Churchill — who understood that industrial capacity is not an economic amenity. It is the physical foundation of national power. Eisenhower won the European theater not through tactical brilliance but through logistical dominance. He understood that you win by being able to produce more of everything your opponent can destroy faster than they can destroy it. That understanding shaped every institutional and infrastructure decision he made as president.

The Eisenhower industrial policy lessons for 2026 are direct. Rebuild the production base before you need it, because by the time you need it, it’s too late to build. Treat infrastructure as defense. Understand that the capacity to manufacture is the capacity to project power. And never mistake financial efficiency for strategic strength — a lesson America learned in the 1940s, forgot in the 1990s, and is relearning now at considerable cost.

US manufacturing decline in the technology sector was on full display at CES 2025 — not in a press release or a government report, but in the composition of the exhibitor floor itself.

The Consumer Electronics Show is the annual showcase of global technology innovation. For decades it was an American-dominated event, a demonstration of Silicon Valley’s capacity to define the direction of the technology economy. In January 2025, that narrative cracked visibly. Over 50% of exhibitors came from Asia. China alone accounted for 30 to 35% of the total exhibitor count. American companies represented less than 28% of the show floor — in an event held in Las Vegas, in the country that invented the consumer electronics industry.

Craig Tindale referenced this data point in his Financial Sense interview not as a cultural observation but as a material one. The companies at CES were not just showing products. They were demonstrating manufacturing capability — the ability to design, prototype, and produce at scale. The Chinese exhibitors were making things. The American exhibitors were largely showing software interfaces to hardware made elsewhere.

This is the visible face of the deindustrialization thesis. We did not just offshore manufacturing. We offshore the knowledge of how to manufacture. The engineers who understand how to design for manufacturing, how to spec a production line, how to troubleshoot yield issues at scale — those skills follow the factories. They don’t stay in the country of the brand owner. They accumulate in the country of the manufacturer.

The CES floor composition is a leading indicator. When the companies that make the physical things stop showing up at the world’s premier technology showcase, it is because they no longer exist in sufficient density to fill the floor. That is not a trend that reverses with a tariff. It reverses with a generation of deliberate industrial policy — if we start now.