It's Time to TOOL OR DIE
Reindustrialize, reshore or retire.
Without a strong manufacturing industry, there will be no country and no nation. – Made in China 2025, Beijing policy document, 2015
What is “TOOL OR DIE”?
America's manufacturing muscle didn't skip leg day - it skipped the country. Decades of offshore dependency left us innovative but hollow, advancing technology we could no longer build. Now our security and industrial autonomy hang in the balance.
TOOL OR DIE goes inside the race to reshore critical industries, one factory at a time. Join us for deeply technical conversations with the innovators, large-scale operators, defense investors and engineering grognards rebuilding American manufacturing from the shop floor up.
What are our core theses?
Reindustrialization strengthens America's economic, technological, and cultural foundations—and rebuilds the middle class that made this country great.
The divide between manufacturing capability and military power is unsustainable. China controls global production; America maintains military supremacy. This gap isn't just a vulnerability—it's an existential threat to American autonomy.
Domestic manufacturing capability isn't just about wartime resilience—it's about preventing conflicts through industrial strength and supply chain sovereignty.
The next industrial revolution will be built on American soil, combining our innovation edge with renewed production capability.
What you’ll hear on “TOOL OR DIE”
Detailed technical discussions on manufacturing processes, automation, and tooling strategies
Inside perspectives from facility operators managing 100,000+ sq ft operations
Engineering insights from leaders reimagining domestic production
Real talk about reshoring challenges, from workforce development to supply chain optimization
Deep analysis of successful domestic manufacturing case studies
Hard numbers on costs, timelines, and ROI for bringing production back to the US
Machine-level deep dives into CNC, robotics, and advanced manufacturing tech
Shop floor to top floor: Complete operational breakdowns of modern American factories
Expert insight on regulatory navigation and compliance frameworks
Data-backed understanding of environmental and energy constraints
Practical strategies for scaling from prototype to full production
Industry-specific analysis across aerospace, medical, automotive, and defense
Next-gen manufacturing approaches: Lights-out facilities, integrated metrology, robotics and AI, predictive maintenance
Raw truth about retooling challenges: Investment costs, downtime management, and risk mitigation
Success metrics that matter: OEE, MTBF, cycle time optimization, and quality control
Who are we?
We are Joel Johnson and Alex Roy, the principals of Johnson & Roy, a strategic management advisory firm to those who work to improve the safety, experience, and sustainability of technology, manufacturing and mobility in service of humanity.
Why Reindustrialization Matters
Blame whoever you want: politicians, private equity, regulators, the young, the old, our consumption-first culture. Blame unions, Silicon Valley, or globalization's promises. The truth remains: America spent three generations gutting a foundational strength that built a republic – the power of making things with our own labor, start to finish.
We shuttled our factories across borders and oceans. We padlocked great halls of American industry, quieting arsenals of brick and iron that once hummed from coast to coast. We sent our children to college with money back with labor and told them they were blessed to never have to get their own hands dirty.
For a while, the math worked. Cheap labor, lax oversight, record profits. We got our endless stream of disposable goods. But we lost something deeper – we lost our pride.
COVID shattered the illusion. Just-in-time manufacturing meant just-not-enough when sea-lanes stopped. Basic necessities – paper, food, lumber – vanished from shelves. For the first time in living memory, most Americans faced real scarcity. The intricate links of global shipping collapsed, and with it, our assumptions about security.
The markets and the trade routes recovered, but the worry remains. What breaks next time? Another pandemic? A war? A blockade?
This isn't just about supply chains. It's about the pride of craftsmanship, the dignity of creation, the security of self-reliance. It's about making real things in the real world. It's about bringing the work home.
Manufacturing isn't just another industry – it's a load-bearing pillar of national wealth, security, and identity.
America needs to build again. Even a phone’s spellcheck tries to correct "reindustrialization" to "deindustrialization." We’ve got a long road ahead.
TOOL OR DIE is our mission to accelerate American manufacturing's rebirth. We're here to find the workers, the builders, the innovators already working to restore what we lost. We're here to help them win.
Listen or watch Episode 1, with Russell Varone, on YouTube right now. (Add us to your feeds on Substack, your podcast client, YouTube, or X; we’re publishing at least once a week.)
Spellcheck trying to auto-correct “reindustrialization” to “deindustrialization” says it all. We're so far removed from making things that even our software assumes we’re giving up.
What hit hardest, though, is the framing of manufacturing as not just economic, but cultural. I've been writing about this factor in my own publication. It’s not just what we produce—it’s what we believe we’re still capable of. A country that can’t build its own tools won’t stay sovereign for long.
What do you think the fastest path to rebuild capability at scale—when we’ve spent 40 years letting tooling shops die, trade schools vanish, and capital chase software? Is there a way to compress that rebuild into years instead of decades?
And how do you think we force a cultural shift that values production again?