Unfortunately, he's presented a toothless defense of his own views.
I do agree that once an industry has moved away it can be hard to rebuild that industry, that no one has an unbreakable lock on software development, and a few other minor points. None of the points he's correct about, though, support his primary argument that "you need a manufacturing complex in your backyard in order to innovate and have good management."
The proper way to make that case isn't to cite anecdotes, it's to do a real analysis that correlates poor performance and bad management decisions with outsourcing, and compare it to companies that keep management at home.
Even speaking anecdotally, the Kindle is the perfect counterpoint to
his own argument. A major early competitor in ebooks was Sony, a Japanese company with decades of hardware experience and factories in Japan. In the US market, Sony has been clubbed into irrelevance by three companies that all outsource and/or offshore manufacturing (Amazon, Apple, B&N) and two of which had no manufacturing experience whatsoever prior to producing ebook reading devices.
In short, I don't think I'd hire Denning as a management consultant.
