The moves at the top of the Pentagon power structure will create openings elsewhere, as officials continue move in and out of the Trump administration

As the Pentagon starts pumping cash into shipyards and small weapons manufacturers, is it enough to save some ailing production lines?

WASHINGTON: President Trump’s top advisor on trade and manufacturing policy railed against “globalist billionaires” and Wall Street executives during a forceful, hour-long speech in Washington on Friday. Peter Navarro accused US business leaders of being “unregistered foreign agents” working for Beijing trying to pressure President Donald Trump into a trade deal with China. “When these… Keep reading →

Congress and China have emerged as the primary culprits for the weakening the US defense industrial base. Those are the most striking findings of a new White House report that takes a deep-dive into the state of defense manufacturing in the United States, sounding alarm bells over the decline in capability and the rise of China’s industrial might.

President Trump approved a major study of America’s national security economy last week after meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan. But Hurricane Florence might have something to say about when it’s released!

These single points of failure already limit military modernization and potentially could disrupt operations in a crisis. That’s especially true if production needed to ramp up urgently for a major war, a subject the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, has publicly angsted about.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, told a small group of reporters here Friday morning that her office is trying to put rules in place to protect against buying “software that has Russian or Chinese provenance, for instance, and quite often that’s difficult to tell at first glance because of holding companies,” that move the software through the open market.

Under constant cyber attack, the Pentagon is struggling to find ways to incorporate cyber security as part of the contracting process.

WASHINGTON: No Russians. Few Chinese. The F-35. And the man who has led the charge in America’s trade wars, Peter Navarro, at the head the American delegation, with lots of other senior American officials along eager to boost bilateral sales of US weapons and civilian aircraft. Those are the early outlines of what we’ll see at this… Keep reading →

With an Executive Order and a new study due soon that promises to take a hard line against Chinese imports, the Trump administration is opening a new front, while protecting the US defense industry.