Mike Rowe says the real trades gold rush isn't data centers — it's 400,000 open Pentagon jobs building ships and defense systems

“It’s not like it’s a data-center economy,” he said. “That’s, I think, part of what’s gotten conflated in this whole conversation is the only thing that we need are data centers. Those 400,000 jobs I mentioned in the defense industrial base are not data centers.”

In September, Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, told the House Appropriations Committee that 400,000 vacant skilled-trade jobs in the defense industrial base could grow to 2.5 million over the next decade.

The U.S. Department of War has partnered with Rowe’s foundation, mikeroweWORKS, under a new federal initiative called BuildFreedom.US, designed to fill skilled labor shortages in the U.S. defense industrial base.

“It’s affecting our country’s ability to build ships, aircraft, vehicles, defense systems and energy infrastructure,” Rowe said.

Labor shortage in defense called a ‘national security threat’

Earlier this year, former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan described the shortage of skilled labor in shipbuilding as a national security threat, with one in four shipyard workers set to retire in the next five years.

“Systems don’t build ships, people do,” he said, projecting a need for 250,000 skilled shipyard workers in the next 10 years.

Rowe’s foundation is providing scholarships to veterans, students and young adults eager to start careers as electricians, machinists, pipefitters, steamfitters, welders and more — all required for shipbuilding.

“Companies right now understand the workforce they need is in the eighth grade, right? You can’t hire out of the eighth grade,” Rowe said. “It’s a knife fight in a phone booth to get the talent that you need right now on a construction site.”

Rowe is promoting skilled trades opportunities with Mach Industries, a California-based aerospace and defense systems manufacturer “making highly lethal, very cheap weapons at scale,” and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oakridge National Laboratory.