WASHINGTON — The Pentagon needs to continue key investments to strengthen the nation’s defense industrial base, including in areas like the submarine industry, munitions production and prototyping projects, according to a new National Defense Industrial Strategy Implementation Plan.
The implementation plan released today follows the publication of the Pentagon’s first National Defense Industrial Strategy in January. The strategy called for improvements in resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition, and economic deterrence as four strategic priorities meant to enable the defense industry to ramp up weapons production at speed and scale.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine exposed vulnerabilities in the global defense industry’s supply chain and highlighted the need for the US industrial base to become more agile and resilient, capable of quickly churning out weapons to respond to a crisis if called upon by the Defense Department.
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With nearly three months to go before a new president moves into the White House, the implementation plan can be read as the current Pentagon’s entreaty to the next administration to keep the ball rolling on key industrial initiatives — a list that includes the Defense Production Act, the Office of Strategic Capital, the Replicator initiative and multi-year procurement of missiles and munitions. It also warns what could be at risk if new leaders abandon them.
“Our aim is not merely to maintain America’s edge, but to sharpen it and lay the foundation for continued U.S. leadership in critical technologies and capabilities that will define the battlespace of the future,” Pentagon acquisition executive Bill LaPlante wrote in a foreword to the report. “Most importantly, this implementation plan will serve as a guiding framework for resourcing decisions and investments in the coming years. It will inform our budget priorities, shape our research and development focus areas, and drive our engagement with industry.”
During a roundtable this morning, Laura Taylor-Kale, assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, stressed that defense industrial policy had been an area of bipartisan support, with the department working with both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to shape the strategy and implementation plan.
“We are confident in the feedback that we’re getting, that this will be a priority regardless of who wins next week in the elections,” she said.
The implementation plan lays out six key initiatives the Pentagon sees as critical for advancing the stability of the defense industrial base, as well as current funding lines and the risks associated with vulnerabilities in those areas:
- Indo-Pacific deterrence, which includes investments to the submarine industrial base and the ramp up of key munitions and missiles
- Production and supply chains, a series of investments meant to shore up a more resilient supply chain, increase US stockpiles and onshoring the production of critical components and materials
- Allied and partner industrial collaboration, which involves international industrial collaboration and coproduction initiatives, to include AUKUS
- Capabilities and infrastructure modernization, which includes nuclear modernization and improvements to the US military’s organic maintenance depots
- New capabilities using flexible pathways, which includes rapid prototyping and fielding effort like the Replicator initiative to field thousands of unmanned systems by summer 2025, as well as the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) program
- Intellectual property and data analysis, a group of investments related to protecting the intellectual property of US companies and safeguard against adversary investment in American startups
All told, the Pentagon’s FY25 funding request of $849.8 billion includes $37.73 billion connected to implementation initiatives, slightly down from $39.42 billion in FY24, according to the plan. In both years, more than three quarters of that funding is earmarked for missiles and munitions, with the submarine industrial base in second place with $4 billion requested in FY25.
The plan notes that it does not contain initiatives under consideration during FY26 budget deliberations, noting that those efforts are “predecisional.” Both Taylor-Kale and Carla Zeppieri, deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial base resilience, declined to comment on whether current plans call for defense industrial base funding efforts to rise in FY26. However, Taylor-Kale noted that the FY26 budget was the first to be built with the National Defense Industrial Strategy in mind.
“I think there was a definite understanding across the board of the importance of building capacity in the defense industrial base and also bringing in nontraditional companies into working with the Department of Defense,” she said. “There’s a real concern around supply chain vulnerabilities and … adversarial sources in our supply chains, as well as sole source and single source [components].”
Zeppieri added that “some of the topics that continue to get emphasized [in the FY26 budget] build on some of the things that we’ve seen in FY24 and 25 with respect to munitions and the organic industrial base.”
Much of the implementation plan functions as a comprehensive list of tools and projects the Pentagon has started to help strengthen the industrial base. For instance, it outlines how $393.4 million in Defense Production Act funding would be spent to address shortfalls in critical chemicals, casting and forgings, the hypersonics industrial base and micro electronics.
The plan highlights the U.S. Army’s multibillion-dollar plan to boost domestic 155mm artillery munition production as well as the service’s ongoing efforts to modernize its ammunition plants and depots. It also lays out current efforts to improve the cybersecurity of defense contractors.
While there was no big news about high-profile Pentagon projects like Replicator or RDER, the plan did include some interesting tidbits about how the department hopes to enable those programs to come to fruition. For example, the plans states that the department “intends to commission various projects, studies, and white paper reviews to identify vendors who can accelerate solid rocket motor production,” an effort that Zeppieri described as separate but complimentary to Replicator.
The Pentagon is working on a classified annex to the implementation plan, which will include more detail on vulnerabilities and lay out its mitigation strategy in more detail. The department hopes to finalize that document by the end of the year, Taylor-Kale said.