For many of my articles, I try to provide answers. Or at the very least, I try to explore several possible answers to a tough question and in the process, expand our wisdom together. For this article, though, I only have a question — a question I don’t hear anyone else asking. But I can’t get it out of my head.

The question is: We don’t make many of our most important goods in the U.S. anymore. Isn’t this a major national security threat?

Of course, there are other national security questions:

• How do we deal with the threat of nuclear North Korea?
• Is Turkey really our friend long term?
• How do we stabilize the Middle East?
• How do we respond to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan?
• How do we prevent Russia’s invasion from plunging into NATO?

But plenty of people are asking those questions. The question I never hear asked is mine: is the global supply chain a crucial weakness in the event of a conflict with a superpower, especially China, which has far more production capacity than us?

This question began brewing during the COVID-19 crisis when you couldn’t find hand sanitizer, Lysol spray, and for some reason toilet paper on grocery store shelves. Then we learned that the vast majority (over 90%) of our masks were made in the U.S. Now, I have grown to hate those masks, as you likely have too, but it certainly illustrated the point that regardless of how great our nation was, when a crisis came, the store shelves were empty of what we wanted most.

In World War II, the U.S. struggled mightily to get troops across the Atlantic without taking a one-way trip to the bottom of the ocean courtesy of German U-boats. Eventually, a major military commitment helped securely escort those vessels, at no small cost to American lives and ships. In that same war, America’s industrial base was quickly retrofitted to produce military equipment. But even then, we faced shortages of key goods like aluminum, butter, leather, and rubber.

Are we taking it for granted that in wartime we could get thousands of ships safely to U.S. ports, even when we can’t make our own? Currently, thousands of Ukrainian drones are harassing Russian supply lines. Wouldn’t China or another foe be even more formidable?

It’s not just about manufacturing equipment, by the way. You need skilled labor to create many of these goods. For instance, the U.S.’s ship-building capacity is a small fraction of what China is capable of, and it would take years to catch up. We lack the skilled labor to do so, even if we wanted to. Marine engineers, welders, dock yards, steel parts, etc. Maybe you fell asleep in history class, but you don’t have to be a historian or a national security expert to piece together that making ships, even commercial ships, is pretty important for war, especially when your rival is across an ocean.

To be fair, we have heard a bit about this from the Trump administration, particularly on microchips and critical minerals. But the strategy so far has mostly focused on tariffing imports and boosting investment in the U.S. This has certainly helped create good American jobs, to the chagrin of a few economists. But does it really put enough of the supply chain for indispensable goods inside the U.S. in the event of a global war?

Setting aside the obvious microchips question, which has received attention, what about medicines? Is there a small replacement part for our cars or MRI machines that is only made in Thailand or Taiwan? Will it safely traverse the Pacific in the event of war with China? What about your CPAP machine? Most of our shoes and clothing is made overseas, but I guess shabby chic can make a comeback. So many goods are manufactured not just in China, but Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and India — suddenly dubious supply routes across the Pacific in the event of war with China.

Retired Brigadier General John Teichert is an optimistic guy. You can’t help but like him when you meet him. But he shared my concern about outsourcing our most important goods during a recent conversation on the “Outstanding” podcast.

“The reality is there are things across the spectrum that should be a really big concern to us. And I’m talking about agriculture or weapons or manufacturing or automotive or things that we just take for granted that we should take some thought in. How are we de-risking the entirety of the supply chain so that we’re not relying on an adversary? A story I like to share is when I was a test pilot in F-15s, this is maybe a decade ago, we had a brand new digital radar, and you would have to take out a chip that was stored in a vault that would activate the radar whenever you went out to go fly, and you’d have to plug it into the radar in your pre-flight, and you would know that it was plugged in properly when you could read upright: ‘Made in China’ instead of it being upside down. And it made me scratch my head and say, ‘Casey, what are we doing?’ That this is a highly classified system and we’re relying on a chip from China in order to activate it. That’s just one example of many. But I think that we as Americans and our government for sure need to take some real thought about how are we de-risking those supply chains so that we can weather a storm, whatever that storm may be?”

A critic of my view might say we would quickly leverage our global relationships to re-establish new supply chains when the time came. And we could ramp up domestic production once the war began. But is it really that simple? Maybe the military will get their chips, but can you quickly train sophisticated ship builders or re-source pharmaceutical base chemicals? And even if you could, best case scenario, wouldn’t there be shortages? Most American medicines are manufactured in other nations. China corners the market on those, too. Do you know anyone who relies on a daily medicine every day to survive? Then you understand waiting three months for new supply chains to manifest is not an option.

“Overreliance on foreign drug manufacturing and testing creates risks both to national security and patient access, and undermines investments in U.S. research, manufacturing and production,” Dr. George Tidmarsh, M.D., Ph.D., director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a press release last fall.

I’m not suggesting a grand strategic plan here, just asking a question so that someone smarter than me can start putting forward answers. In these Last Days, the world will become increasingly unpredictable and violent. We need to be ready. By the time we realize the seriousness of the problem, it may be too late to fix it without serious consequences.

Unsurprisingly, the retired general had more insight on this topic during our conversation. He expressed hope for fixing the problem and framed it not just as a national security issue, but as an issue of stewardship of this great land the Lord has given us. Let’s have God’s wisdom and stewardship in mind, not just the bottom line, as we are in this season of redesigning the American economy. Here’s what Teichert had to say:

“We are massively blessed in having a lot of the capabilities we need indigenous to the United States. … I go back to the books I read about the agriculture and the energy and the protection of oceans that surround us. We are blessed in that way, and it would be horrible if we squandered that blessing by not being stewards of our supply chains, so that we gave an adversary an inroad that they should never have into a country that should be, for the most part, self-sufficient or sufficient alongside of our friends and our allies.”