Back in April, TIME Magazine picked up on a trend in the manufacturing sphere that’s been gaining ground in the industry with their cover story: Made in the USA.
Some are calling it another industrial revolution, but 21st Century style - an advanced manufacturing response to the digital age. There are even those that are expecting and advocating a shift back to the U.S. as being primarily a manufacturing nation, with technology and education joining forces with to create a much larger technically skilled advanced manufacturing labor force. Others argue that the “revolution” isn’t sustainable, and that the next labor revolution should see the service and management sectors dominate.
We are a leading customer-exclusive production-based job shop because we have never stopped growing and innovating.
Speaking at the 2012 Manufacturers’ Summit at the Minneapolis Airport Hilton in Bloomington, MN, Mr. McHale spoke of the “red flag” he saw in outsourcing low-skill manufacturing jobs overseas. While conceding that such a policy wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for America so long as our country took steps to bring advanced manufacturing jobs to its home territory, McHale also noted the perils of off-shoring too many industrial jobs. His reasoning seems reasonable to our own way of thinking here at Ardel: by outsourcing too many low-skill manufacturing jobs to China, Indonesia, and the like, America is giving these countries the incentive to develop advanced manufacturing bases on par with our own. As unskilled labor pools overseas become – by sheer effort and labor – more skilled, the possibility of developing advanced manufacturing jobs to accommodate these new skill-sets is that much more likely.
This was back in the 1980s, once upon a time and not so long ago, when the U.S.S.R. was a clear and present danger to the peace of the planet, and the Soviet Red Banner Fleet harbored the largest submarine force in the world. It was a time when slogans for “A six hundred ship Navy!” resounded through the Halls of Congress and the White House. It was a decade that saw the construction of some of the most awesomely powerful ships ever built: the giant Nimitz class aircraft carriers, the deadly and silent Los Angeles-class attack submarines, and the fiercely protective Ticonderoga-class AEGIS missile cruisers. By outspending the Soviet Union in naval forces year upon year, we contributed to Communism’s collapse, and the birth of the so-called Pax Americana. We played our part at 
Thirty years ago, one by one, manufacturers who dealt in bulk production of things like electronics and toys made the critical decision to reconfigure their operations in places like China’s Pearl River Delta, Singapore, the Philippines, or Mexico. As a result, the total percentage of our workforce that is employed directly or in a field related to manufacturing has declined steadily since the late 70s, to a point where it now constitutes roughly 9% of American workers. Compare this statistic to the boomtown heydays of the early 1950s when around 30% of our workforce was engaged in manufacturing, and you can see the great disparity. Cheaper workers, more permissive labor laws, and certain aspects of free trade agreements have all contributed to a culture and atmosphere where it is deemed “smart” – and justifiably so – for a large company to migrate its manufacturing capacities overseas. Few companies have used the productivity of foreign workforces more brilliantly than California’s Silicon Valley technology companies, where outsourcing of printed circuit boards and silicon chips has gone on since at least the 1980s.
We had refrigerators, microwaves, toasters, dishwashers, and washing machines that made the daily schlep of food storage, cooking, cleaning, and grooming into something less than a footnote in our collective day. And as our country came online throughout the 90s and the 00s, we found ourselves living in a world where everything – information, consumer products, skills, career opportunities, professional consultation, friendship, even soul mates – were suddenly ours for the Google-searching. In a few brief years, the work of 
Time and again in recent decades, American air supremacy has won the day in conflicts such as the First and Second Gulf Wars, as well as in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The names of America’s fighters, bombers, attack, recon, electronic detection, and transport aircraft are the stuff of late 20th and early 21st century legend: F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, C-5s, C-130s, A-10s, B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s have struck fear in the hearts of America’s enemies and have been “welcome news” indeed for many an American army or marine grunt pinned down by enemy gunfire in cities, villages, plains, and crevices across the Middle East and beyond.
In the early 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan called for a “600 ship navy” to counteract the menace of a steadily growing Soviet fleet of submarines and maritime bombers – we put our shoulders to the wheel to meet that challenge. The American Navy saw its largest incarnation since the end of the Second World War, and was indisputably the most powerful fleet that ever sailed an ocean. As the Cold War ended and the so-called Pax Americana began, we thought the time had come to begin shifting our efforts into other advanced fields of technology, areas like computers, advanced medicine, and space-borne telecommunications systems.
In their daily goings-about at General Mills, Del and Loren observed – and astutely so – that the machinery they operated at the company’s plants could be built from higher-quality components. After some negotiations with the parent company, they began fabricating machined parts for General Mills in 1967. Other commercial customers followed in swift succession. In the 1980s, with the massive build-up of the United States Navy to counter the perceived threat of the Soviet Red Banner Fleet, Ardel became a critical provider of high-grade components for U.S. naval warships. Our work on behalf of the U.S. Navy played its fair share in helping America out-engineer and outspend the Kremlin in terms of defense, and allowed for the Cold War to finally – and peacefully – end.