Concern over depleted munitions stockpiles is now driving action at the White House, after an April analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded the U.S. may have burned through more than half its inventory of four critical munitions, Tomahawk missiles among them, during the campaign against Iran.
A presidential memo dated June 11 invokes the Defense Production Act, directing the Defense Secretary to pursue voluntary agreements with private industry to address weapons supply chain bottlenecks.
Trump cited “limited production capacity, fragile supply chains, long-lead dependencies, and related production bottlenecks” as conditions that may pose a direct threat to national defense.
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Dating to 1950, the law permits the government to bring private firms into coordinated planning efforts to bolster industrial output, but participation remains voluntary. Components including solid rocket motors, igniters, and guidance systems rank among the most capacity-constrained parts of the supply chain, creating chokepoints for both existing weapons platforms and future modernization programs.
Michael Cadenazzi holds the Pentagon’s top role overseeing industrial base policy, and he told a Center for New American Security event Tuesday that roughly nine months of groundwork had gone into reaching this kind of agreement. “Sometimes we need the collective wisdom of all the assembled companies to collaborate and solve our problems for us,” Cadenazzi said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, pushed back sharply on the framing of a stockpile crisis. “That is a manufactured story that the media wants to peddle and ultimately our stockpiles are great, and they’re only getting stronger,” he told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
That stance sits in some tension with Hegseth’s own April congressional testimony, in which he acknowledged restoring expended munitions could take “months to years.”
The funding dimension came into sharper relief on Tuesday when Hegseth headed to Capitol Hill for meetings with senators. Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, told reporters the Pentagon is running short of money needed to acquire weapons and other equipment.
The administration is pressing for a record $1.5 trillion Defense Department budget through the reconciliation process, which would allow new spending to pass without Democratic votes, though Republican appropriations leaders have already questioned whether passage of a third reconciliation bill is realistic.
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