Finding a couple of hundred engineers is easy if the pay is right AND the location is right. You can't plunk a factory down in the middle of a corn field and expect the surrounding community to include a bunch of engineers. Nor can you expect a bunch of engineers to move to a one-horse town where your company is the only game for hundreds of miles. You basically have to place your factory where the other factories are located.
I didn't say finding 200 engineers was impossible to do in USA. I said (that they said) that it's impossible to find them
quickly. (Your other points about location are, of course, absolutely true!)
In the '70s, we were putting semiconductor plants in Albuquerque, Fort Collins and Austin. At least these were population centers even if specifically trained engineers might have been scarce. The thing that was missing was infrastructure. Where to buy specialty gases, chemicals, disposables? Basically, an entire industry had to move. The thing is, the engineers didn't want to move, regardless of the lifestyle and lower cost of living. They would get to a place where there was only one company in town and if they didn't work there, they wouldn't work at all.
Totally.
Small shops: When I was a kid (18+) I worked in a small machine shop. There were dozens of these shops around my small town and all were building stuff for the government (military or NASA). If the .gov needed a widget built in a short period of time, there were a dozen shops in my town alone that could meet the schedule. I don't see that infrastructure around where I live today. There are a few shops but nowhere near the density that occurred in San Diego in the mid '60s. That infrastructure has been dying out since the '70s. Aerospace shutting down had a lot to do with it.
Machinists and Tool and Die Makers don't make very much money and job growth is almost non-existent.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/machinists-and-tool-and-die-makers.htm
Now we have to negotiate with the Mexican machine shops to get parts built because that's where we sent our factories. NAFTA...
If we had the will, we could bring all that work back. The question is whether people would pay the increases in the cost of manufactured goods. Absent tariffs, we really can't compete with foreign labor.
I always point to July 20, 1969, as the technological achievement of all time. We walked on the Moon and nobody else has done it since! Here we are almost 50 years later and nobody has come close. In fact, we had 6 landings and 12 astronauts on the surface so it wasn't a one-off event.
The point is, we had the scientists/engineers (several stolen from Germany) plus enough homegrown talent to pull off such an achievement. All we need is the will! Don't ever thing that the US lacks the skills!
You hit on a point I (an American living abroad) have made many times (in other contexts, not this thread): the US has completely lost its will. Back in the early and mid-20th century, the US had tremendous will as a nation, and accomplished incredible feats in very little time. (Manhattan project, the moon landing, etc.) But since then, the US has become incredibly fatalistic. Any time something is hard, we back down.
I see this very often when I attempt to discuss things like healthcare reform with Americans. For example — and this is true, not a contrived example — I will say that the healthcare system here in Switzerland (of an individual mandate, with insurance on a well-regulated but competitive market) would probably be the simplest system to transition the US to, in that (until the 1991 reform), Switzerland's healthcare system used to be structured very much like the pre-Obamacare US system. But Americans almost invariably reply something like "no, USA is much bigger, it could NEVER work here", just shutting down the conversation. Like… I don't say it would be
easy, nor that it's definitely the right solution. Just that it's something we should
explore. But the reply is usually something to the effect of it being too hard to even bother investigating. It's very, very frustrating.
And I guess that it's just that living abroad, you encounter countries/peoples that absolutely do say "This thing we wanna do, it's gonna be hard. But it'll be worth it in the end, so let's do it!"
And of course look at how seemingly every major project the US
has attempted in recent times has been a disaster, like the Joint Strike Fighter.
As for the issue of skills: I think it's the question of quantity and type. The top-quality skill available in USA is very, very, very high. But the
volume of top-quality skill is comparatively small. But more importantly, the volume of top
production skill is almost zero. To compare Switzerland once again, one of the things Switzerland has done very well is to not only produce top-quality skill (like the advanced research and engineering that happens here), but also to produce highly skilled tradespeople to actually build things. Switzerland (and also Germany) both have extensive apprenticeship systems, whereby most people do not ever go to college/university, but rather do a combination of trade school and on the job training. (And a culture of not looking down on the trades helps.) As I remind people: People buy cars made in Germany for their engineering and quality. But the German automakers buy their tooling in Switzerland.
I have been hearing a lot about the US needing a lot more highly-skilled machinists/CNC operators than it has. Journeyman machinists in USA like to gloat that they're making more money than the engineers who designed the work they make!