Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1460418
MARCH 2022 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 73 onating at the ecosystem level whereby the printed circuit board industry is now capable of participating. ose are big bills, and that's why they're not signed into law yet. Johnson: So far, we've talked about multi- ple examples for DoD participation and that is important. We're talking national security. However, the defense electronics market- place is a small chunk of the overall appetite for electronics in the United States. How does this work with DoD help to create demand or production or capabilities that aren't just for national security? Marsh: You have to point Washington at past successes in order to be more successful. You must be able to say DoD was an early adopter for this policy, or this program. en, the rest of the federal agencies take note and step up their adoption. You must start somewhere. Our "somewhere" was convincing the Pen- tagon that the dependency on foreign supply chains for DoD systems might not be known to you, but it's known to us. at's why we started at DoD. We plan to advance this mes- sage through Commerce, Homeland Security, and the Intelligence community, whereby our goal is to reduce the dependency on foreign supply chains. Now, we're not going to come back 100%. We won't grow back to 26% global market share overnight, but it's certainly going to be better than 4%. All our successes that we can point to legislatively create an opportunity to grow our industry as opposed to staying silent. Johnson: Is your overall objective to grow our global presence back, or is it enough to make sure that our critical national security needs are entirely self-contained? Marsh: It is absolutely to make sure our criti- cal national security needs are entirely self- contained. If we can't defend, or if we can have resilient domestic supply chains that feed the national security of the country, then all things commercial become irrelevant. You must be able to stand on your own for this to work. Again, we're not advocating for 100% onshore, rather that there's an issue that we need to start addressing in our ecosystem. Now we can point to specific sections of laws, D.C. bills, congressional bills, but it all comes down to supply chain issues. We've been recognizing that we have sup- ply chain issues; we've been raising our hand. I gave you four examples of D.C. decision-mak- ing entities with whom we've met: White House National Security staff, Department of Com- merce, Department of Defense and, of course, Congress. ose four entities are very con- cerned about U.S. supply chain. You got a good taste from the Trump executive orders which looked at certain industries, followed by the Biden 100 Day Review, which recognized elec- tronics as an issue. Supply chain issues are where we're focused. ere are many ways for us to solve that problem as a standalone industry, but government demand signals are a big help. Of course, we're also saying that if you bring some of that work back to domestic shores, then you'll bring back some of that know-how and that wherewithal and/or you train it up here. e whole point is that we might be pro- ducing 4% domestically, but we're also provid- ing all that capability overseas for those people to become experts in it. We want to be able to