Even as one official warned that budget pressures would squeeze the budget, another said the nation must expand the defense industrial base to build a 355-ship Navy.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON: President Trump’s sweeping review of the national security industrial base — from shipbuilding to microchips, strategic minerals to vaccines — is almost halfway done. A score of working groups across the government, not just the Pentagon, will submit their draft recommendations this month and next, an administration official briefed on the review tells me. Then… Keep reading →

President Donald Trump has identified a fact few of his recent predecessors have understood: the Defense Industrial Base of the United States (DIB) is a critical component of our national security. The DIB is more important than any individual weapons program – be it an aircraft carrier, long range bomber, or high-tech tank.  But for too… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Is the Defense Industrial Base study required by the Trump Administration’s new Executive Order the groundwork for a new Buy America push or a bold strategic act reminiscent of President Eisenhower’s Solarium project, begun just four months after he took office? Many of the defense analysts, industry people and acquisition experts I’ve spoken with… Keep reading →