Trump Should Scrap the 2023 National Defense Industrial Strategy

The Pentagon released its first National Defense Industrial Plan in January of 2024 .

Peter Bergen says the plan needs to be swept away by President Trump and the fresh blood he is bringing into the administration.

Bergen: The plan calls for diversifying the supplier base, not only with companies not traditionally involved in defense production, but with a special emphasis on spending more.

In the Second World War , Pittsburgh produced 95 million tons of steel in addition to a fifth of all tank landing ships, over 100,000 plane propellers a year , over half of all 155mm gun tubes, ammunition and numerous other vital wartime components.

Yet, eight decades later , the U.S. share of global steel production has cratered relative to the rest of the world.

Getting to Mises' point: Having tons of tons of.

sitting around will not be of use if the vast capital infrastructure needed to actually fight a war.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar ’s short essay “ The Defense Reformation ” is an excellent place to start.

He acknowledges on page one that the U.S. would run out of weapons and ammo in a matter of days in an honest to goodness war, and that it would likely take years to try and pick up the slack.

Fortunately, a global industrialized war of attrition does not seem likely in the near future.