It already does a lot of inflexible manufacturing, often by outsourcing overseas, but I'd love to see part of the US military converted to a
rapid-response, highly flexible, fully-domestic manufacturing system. LOTS of very flexible automation, so they could take a wide range of designs and raw materials and rapidly switch from making one thing to making another and the ability to hugely ramp up production on demand without having to retrain people or recertify facilities. The people involved would be trained to set up for a different product every couple of weeks or so.
The system could be kept almost constantly humming, making one thing, switching and certifying, making another, switching and certifying, keeping them pre-trained, tested, and certified. The military itself has an ongoing need to rapidly adapt to new situations, but things are needed domestically for planned infrastructure, sudden large-scale destruction from earthquake/fire/flood/tornado disasters, sudden economic changes (ex: some sort of trade cutoff), strategic domestication (ex: immediately end reliance on some import), round-robin top-off of local emergency prep supplies, individual citizen preparedness supplies, etc.
The system could be kept almost constantly humming, making one thing, switching and certifying, making another, switching and certifying, keeping them pre-trained, tested, and certified. The military itself has an ongoing need to rapidly adapt to new situations, but things are needed domestically for planned infrastructure, sudden large-scale destruction from earthquake/fire/flood/tornado disasters, sudden economic changes (ex: some sort of trade cutoff), strategic domestication (ex: immediately end reliance on some import), round-robin top-off of local emergency prep supplies, individual citizen preparedness supplies, etc.