The so-called health of the defense industrial base is receiving a lot of worried attention these days. Dour diagnoses are regularly torn from headlines reporting supply chain disruptions, the sector’s middling performance on Wall Street, or the missed milestone of… Read more »
Next month at a small theatre in Los Angeles Westside, the Atlantic Council is presenting the workshop production of a new stage play it has been incubating, War Words, by the award-winning playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks. Based on Brooks’s interviews with those who… Read more »
How could we achieve a seamless integration of the industrial bases of the United States and its closest allies? That is the question addressed earlier this week in London at the Quadrilateral Conference of trade associations representing the national defense… Read more »
“I’d rather have decent answers to the right question than great answers to irrelevant questions.” This pithy precept appears at the top of page 1 of The Last Warrior, an intellectual history of Andrew Marshall, the furtive, 42-year director of… Read more »
In a commentary published in Aviation Week on Inauguration Day, I described “signposts and metrics” of force posture, defense spending, and acquisition management that I would be using to gauge the true magnitude and direction of change that would emerge… Read more »
It is hard not to read a pretext for protectionism into the Executive Order President Trump signed last month under the ponderous title, “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States”…. Read more »
What does the Trump Administration portend for defense policy? Will it increase the defense budget? Will it change the size, structure, and disposition of military forces? Will it cancel important acquisition programs? For now, the best answer to these questions… Read more »
In what may be his last act to shape defense authorizations, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) is pulling out all the stops to remake the Pentagon. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) is advancing a National Defense Authorization… Read more »
What are the industrial base issues that need to be considered in any defense strategy? In this age of austerity in military spending, we are hearing calls for bolder policies that would break with past practice, rewarding companies for taking risks, and punishing those that… Read more »
Three years into an “age of austerity” in Western military spending, investors’ imperatives and corporate strategies show one indication of how the defense-industrial base will evolve over the next decade. Investors in public equities are seeking companies that exhibit an… Read more »