The Great Lie at the Heart of Offshoring

If a product is offshored, it's because the United States just can't make it competitively...right?

Americans have been told this lie about manufacturing: if something is made offshore, it is because the United States cannot do it competitively. Sometimes that is true. Very often it is not. In a great many situations today, offshoring has become less a sign of superior capability (or even price) than a sign of superior coordination, combined with a learned willingness to dump risk downstream and let someone else absorb the damage later.

That distinction matters because misdiagnosing the problem leads to the wrong cure. Washington (joined more recently by large investors) talks about labor arbitrage, subsidies, tariffs, and giant factory announcements, while ignoring the quieter fact that much of American industry is already here, already capable, and already underused because buyers cannot find it, trust it, or engage it without friction. We keep debating whether the United States can still make things, while leaving untouched the day-to-day failure that sits right in front of us: a buyer with a drawing and no reliable way to reach the right domestic shop with enough shared context to get a serious quote back fast.

I have spent the last several years building Noramark, a network and coordination layer for U.S. manufacturing. In the process, I have also been writing a forty paper series called the Industrialist Papers, which argues that America does not have a manufacturing capacity problem first. It has a coordination problem first. Beneath that, it has a trust problem.

Today, offshore often looks faster not because the manufacturing problem is easier, but because ambiguity is absorbed differently. Opaque intermediaries and offshore brokers can quote quickly by making assumptions, hiding supplier identity, spreading risk across anonymous counterparties, and pushing the real cost into rework, delay, quality escapes, and brittle supplier relationships. American shops do not do that; their name is on the building and one bad job can cost them a customer they spent ten years earning.

That is why many domestic shops quote more carefully, and that caution gets misread as weakness. In reality, it is often the behavior of firms that still live in the real economy, where scrap is real, downtime is real, and a bad tolerance callout on a drawing can ruin the week. Fast quoting from foreign shops often reflects a willingness to transact under uncertainty and let the consequences land later as churn, dispute, and disappointment. Americans should stop confusing speed without accountability for industrial superiority.

Once you see that clearly, a lot of the mythology around offshoring starts to crack. Many of the supposed capability gaps are actually discovery gaps, packaging gaps, and trust gaps. Buyers say, “No one in the U.S. makes this,” and then we look at real capability data and find multiple domestic shops that machine that material, hold that tolerance, run that finish, or ship that assembly. The real issue is that those shops do not want to burn hours on vague RFQs from unknown buyers, and they are right not to.

This is also where the conversation usually gets too small. People start talking about selling another internal software tool to another small shop, as if the main problem were local inefficiency inside each firm. That misses the much larger prize. The real outcome in manufacturing is making fragmented industrial capacity legible and routable at network level, so that a buyer with a real need can reach a verified supplier with the right capability without spraying the RFQ into the void.

Big firms solve fragmentation by acquisition. They buy shops, centralize the customer relationship, standardize process, and make the network visible by owning it. That works, but it is expensive, slow, and naturally concentrates power. A trusted U.S. coordination layer can solve much of the same problem without owning the factories. When supplier identity is verified, capability is normalized, demand is routed with context, and execution history is carried forward from one RFQ and PO to the next, fragmented capacity starts to behave like a coherent industrial base instead of a pile of disconnected logos in a stale directory.

That points to some concrete changes the country should make now. American engineers and buyers should stop treating identity-hiding, opaque marketplaces and China-first prototype sourcing as harmless defaults. Prototype work is where the drawing gets cleaned up, the fixture strategy starts to emerge, the inspection plan gets clarified, and the supplier relationship often gets anchored. It is also where real IP theft happens, constantly, when this work is sent to China. When that phase is routed through an opaque intermediary or sent offshore by reflex, the learning compounds somewhere else, and so does the leverage.

American manufacturers also owe more to themselves than a permanent posture of complaint. Complaints about unfair trade are often justified, but they are not an operating model. Shops need response discipline: acknowledge the RFQ quickly, triage it quickly, ask clarifying questions early, no-bid cleanly when the fit is wrong, and quote as fast as the facts allow. Buyers owe the same seriousness in return: locked revision state, material callouts, cert requirements, ship-to location, inspection expectations, and real response windows in the work package. Domestic industry starts to win again when speed and trust show up together. This level of coordination is state-mandated in authoritarian China. They have engineered coordination in their industrial base for the express purpose of taking industry out of other countries (and the IP that goes along with that).

Ensuring U.S. industrial dominance through coordination of our remarkable and heterogeneous supplier base is what Noramark is trying to do. We are not asking people to choose domestic manufacturing out of sentiment, charity, or nostalgia. We are trying to make the market clearer, faster, and more trustworthy so that American capability can actually surface and win. If buyers send better formed requests, and verified U.S. shops can see enough context to respond quickly and confidently, then a large amount of work that currently leaks offshore comes back within reach through better coordination and better commercial discipline, not just better slogans.

This should also change how we think about industrial policy. Large plants, defense programs, and energy intensive reshoring all matter, but a nation’s manufacturing strength does not live in its biggest firms alone. It lives in the distributed fabric of small and midsize shops that already know how to cut, form, weld, machine, finish, inspect, repair, adapt, and - yes - innovate under constraint. Those firms are one of America’s greatest industrial assets, and they are still treated like background scenery by the people who claim to care most about rebuilding domestic production.

America can make more than people think. The harder problem is making that capability visible, trusted, and fully utilized. If we want a stronger industrial base, we should stop hiding behind opaque intermediaries, stop exporting early learning by reflex, and stop acting like fragmentation is somebody else’s problem to solve.

Andrew Kornuta is the Founder of Noramark, Inc. You can follow him on X @andrewkornuta.