Lessons learned from the Apollo 11 moon landing — particularly the need for nationalized industrial policy involving investments in research and development and protective policies for vital industries — are being lost, said Retired Gen. Robert Spalding, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Rick Manning.

Spalding began by noting China’s usurpation of America’s prior dominance in the realm of telecommunication technology manufacturing and development since the Space Race era.

"Let’s just look at the state of our telecommunications,” Spalding said. "There was such a large industrial effort for the Space Race. Back then, we were spending two percent of GDP on research and development. We had the industrial base that was the envy of the world. AT&T, at the time, was a monopoly, and with Bell Labs, was the standard for telecommunications.”

Spalding continued, "When you look at America today, we have no telecommunication equipment manufacturers left that are American companies. When China entered the WTO in 2001, from that time period to 2017, we lost 78,000 factories. We unemployed 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. In the same time, we spent trillions in the Middle East.”

Opportunities for nation-building at home are being squandered by misappropriation of funds abroad, assessed Spalding. He said American investment in education, particularly in STEM fields, is falling behind Chinese competitors.

"We have, today, 152,000 Chinese kids in STEM education,” said Spalding, "where in one year [of spending] in Afghanistan, we could afford to put 200,000 kids through four years of STEM education here in the United States. Back then, for that Space Race, we educated the scientists that built the technologies that grew this economy to be the number one economy in the world.”

 

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