Under Secretary of War Emil Michael said Tuesday that the Trump administration is onshoring critical supply chains the United States spent decades sending overseas.
Michael, who serves as chief technology officer at the Department of War, spoke at a Breitbart News policy event in Washington titled “AI Is Here: What to Fear, What to Embrace.” He said the country has grown reliant on a foreign adversary for batteries, magnets, critical minerals, and pharmaceuticals.
He put the question to the room directly.
“How do we get to a place where this country, the greatest economic engine in world history, is overly dependent on an adversary, not an ally, for its critical needs?” Michael said.
The under secretary said the arrangement was built on an assumption that the era of great-power conflict had ended. He said the cost fell on American towns.
“We outsourced these capabilities. We devastated a lot of communities in this country,” Michael said. “So now, what do you do about that? Well, we have to reshore those things and not everything, but our critical capabilities.”
Michael said the department is targeting chips, minerals, and batteries.
“We are busily working on onshoring the critical areas of the supply chain so we could be self-reliant,” he said.
Chip fabrication plants are going up in Arizona and Ohio. New missile plants need machinists and metal workers. Data centers need electricity, gas turbine power, and a structure to house them. The critical minerals push requires mines, refining capacity, transport, and shops that form raw material into parts.
Michael said the country is short hundreds of thousands of electricians and metal workers. Those jobs pay well over $100,000, he said, and in some cases more than $200,000.
Then he offered a prediction that cuts against most forecasts about the technology.
“If anything, it’ll increase blue collar job needs,” Michael said of artificial intelligence. “So that is a twist that we haven’t seen in the last 25 years.”
He said opposition to data centers overlooks that math.
“It’s interesting to me you have this anti-data center movement yet it’s going to provide incredible blue-collar job opportunities,” Michael said.
The administration says it has signed or approved 160 minerals deals worth nearly $40 billion since January 2025. The most recent came August 7, when Trump announced more than $2 billion at a White House mining roundtable. The Department of War’s share included $1.4 billion for battery anode maker Sila Nanotechnologies and $150 million for Niron Magnetics, which builds magnets without rare earths.
Michael said he toured the Oshkosh Corporation plant in Wisconsin the day before the event. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the same facility Monday as part of the Pentagon’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour. Oshkosh Defense has built more than 25,000 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles since receiving the original contract in 2015.
