How to further strengthen the Defense Production Act
The House Financial Services Committee’s hearing this week on the reauthorization of the Defense Production Act is timely and important. The DPA is an essential tool for national security that was little known prior to COVID-19. Its use during the pandemic helped the U.S. government mobilize its industrial base to allocate and distribute goods as […]
How to end China’s chokehold on the Pentagon’s supply chains
Around the world, threats to U.S. national security are converging. Our most potent antidote for dealing with these crises — hard power — is at risk not only because of our ailing defense-industrial base but because of China’s grip on our supply chains. It maintains a chokehold on U.S. military munitions and platforms that we […]
Here’s how to help solve Ukraine’s drone shortage problem
Drones and other unmanned systems are a “central driver” of the Russia-Ukraine war, Kyiv’s top general observed in an op-ed published this month. In terms of battlefield innovation, Ukraine’s “number one priority” is the “mastery of an entire arsenal of (relatively) cheap, modern and highly effective, unmanned vehicles and other technological means,” he wrote. By […]
How to boost NATO’s air defenses in Europe
In December 1983, amid the heightened tensions of the “second Cold War,” U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and his West German counterpart, Manfred Wörner, agreed on a $3 billion program (worth more than $9 billion today) to boost NATO’s air defenses along the central front: the inner-German border with the Soviet-controlled eastern bloc. Four decades […]