Interesting to see the US somewhat following China's lead here. Industry/government/defense cooperation has a rich (and somewhat ugly) history in the US, but seems to have fallen out of favor in recent decades, whereas China has leaned in even harder toward five-year plans that attempt to get every part of society -- academia, government, business, media, etc. marching in the same direction.

I've really started to wonder about how, and how much, government should try to influence a lot of this. In the 60s Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon (US) and we did it. There's clearly some role for direction-setting at the national level.

But it's not without costs: corruption, cronyism, wasted money. China's been trying to bootstrap a domestic semiconductor industry for decades and the most they have to show for it is SMIC, which is nowhere near TSMC or even Intel's level of capability. Ditto for internal-combustion cars--they (rightfully) trumpet EVs as a pretty large success story but leave out the part about wasting billions trying to make a domestic Detroit. And then there's the fact that government has a hard time writing sub-$1bln checks so there's the potential for a huge amount of waste if things don't pan out.