Working to Win: Rebuilding America’s Workforce for an Age of Geopolitical Competition

America’s Workforce Squeeze Has Become a National Security Threat

America’s security challenges are often framed in terms of equipment and investment—strained defense production lines, efforts to re-shore critical supply chains, intensifying competition over cutting-edge technologies, and the need to rebuild core energy, manufacturing, and logistics infrastructure. Yet underpinning all of these issues is a more basic limitation: the United States does not have enough skilled workers to meet the demand. The United States today faces a workforce problem that is bigger than any single sector and more strategically consequential than many realize. This is not a routine labor-market imbalance or a gap in education alone. It is a pervasive talent deficit that constrains the nation’s capacity to build, compete, and protect its interests—and it is addressable. Across many fields tied to U.S. strength and resilience, the same pattern emerges:

Defense and aerospace: Production lines are slowing because employers cannot find enough precision machinists, systems engineers, welders, and cyber specialists. This includes persistent gaps in depot maintenance and engineering teams that lengthen delivery schedules and extend repair timelines. Stockpile shortfalls in munitions, propulsion systems, microelectronics, and shipbuilding increasingly trace back to workforce shortages—not money or machines. The U.S. has prioritized rearmament, but rearmament without workforce is strategy without means. Nearly every major program cites labor shortages as a top constraint.

• Energy transmission and grid modernization: Projects are stalling due to insufficient numbers of electricians, lineworkers, and technicians. Active apprenticeships must rise by 44% just to meet near-term demand of roughly 200,000 workers.
• Advanced manufacturing and semiconductors: Multi-billion-dollar semiconductor fabrication plants are being completed faster than companies can hire the operators and technicians required to run them. By 2033, the sector is projected to need 3.8 million additional workers—and almost half of those roles may go unfilled.
• AI, cybersecurity, and digital infrastructure: Skills shortages are deepening just as technological rivalry accelerates. Three-quarters of companies struggle to find qualified talent, and 40 percent of adults lack basic digital skills. Meanwhile, U.S. technology workforce requirements are estimated to grow at twice the rate of the overall U.S. workforce requirements in the next decade.
• Local communities: Many places lack the workforce capacity to take full advantage of new investment or grow small firms, or transition workers into the industries that underpin resilience. For example, Arizona’s major semiconductor project has faced delays in part because there are not enough skilled construction workers and technicians to meet demand.

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