Why?

to strengthen local industry

post-covid this should be crystal clear.

You are at mercy of other countries if you do not produce anything.

Probably need to look into where all the components are manufactured too. Final assembly is only one step in the process.

Still incrementally more resilient.

Something tells me Broadcom doesn't agree.

If you have the know-how and factory to do final assembly, it's at least one more step in a long supply chain you have mastered. Broadcom or no Broadcom.

"At least" is certainly right. You'd be adopting the lowest-margin, most competitive and lowest-hiring work from China. And you'd still be paying a price-premium for a dubious improvement in quality, if any improvement at all.

Eventually people have to realize that America cannot re-take the jobs we sent to Mexico and China. The modernization we enjoy today is entirely predicated on the abject abuse of people that are protected by inferior governments and weak economies. To import their jobs means to import their standard-of-living.

I wasn’t thinking of jobs as much as strategic optionality in case of conflict.

Same problem, just worse. If America can't source butt-cheap STM-32s then our efforts at assembling boards might as well go up in smoke. But that's easy enough... just bootstrap domestic refineries for every precursor, purchase a few billion dollars worth of ASML products, hire and train a few thousand workers while you build a dozen-odd factories, convince Texas Instruments to license ARM hardware officially at-cost and design an American-made core, validate and sample the new chip to your assemblers and pass the research/development costs onto the consumer with every device!

That's the problematic bit. Now you have an officially-licensed and tested STM-32 core that can serve as a drop-in replacement at 10,000% of the cost of an identical Chinese bootleg model. Part of the problem is that the US has to pay for ARM licenses that China refuses to acknowledge, but another part of the problem is that our supply chain's just not built to compete. We're a digital import-state.

So it's about time to reverse some of that.