Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s top national security adviser, didn’t enter office in 2021 thinking about America’s defense industry.
His first priorities were elsewhere: withdrawing from Afghanistan and writing a new national security strategy.
“The [defense industrial base] was not top of the list for me walking in the door,” Sullivan said Wednesday, using the government’s name for its supply of weapons.
He’s telling his successors not to do the same thing.
“Don’t wait a year or two years on it,” Sullivan said he’s advising the incoming team. “Let’s push now.”
His comments, made to a small group of reporters in the ornate office building beside the White House, reflect a growing acceptance from Sullivan and his staff. Under the Biden administration, the United States has spent tens of billions of dollars on its defense industry, alarmed at the scarcity of many key weapons and how hard it is to replace them. And yet, albeit with some exceptions, that supply has grown slowly.
Now, as President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House on Monday, the outgoing team is leaving an uncertain inheritance. In an all-out war with China, the U.S. would still “rapidly” expend its stocks of key missiles, Sullivan said in December, repeating a problem that’s been clear for years. And America’s enemies — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — have started pooling their own stores of weapons, making it harder for the U.S. to keep up even as it tries to do the same with its own allies.
Sullivan said he’s urging his successors, led by U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., to take early briefings on the state of America’s defense industry, even as other officials in the Biden administration argue it’s completely broken.
Waltz, a firm China hawk, has spent much of the last year frustrated that the military has been firing expensive weapons to intercept cheap drones fired at American forces by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Middle East. Speaking at a think tank in November, he also described his alarm at the state of U.S. shipbuilding, an industry that, like many others, has withered in the last 30 years, while China’s, in comparison, is more than 200 times as large.
“It has been a marked and serious decline,” Waltz said.
Despite agreement on the problem, the two parties are less certain of an answer. Biden’s administration has focused on rebuilding U.S. industries at home — largely by replacing weapons sent to Ukraine during its war against Russia — while also planning to build weapons together with other countries. The incoming Trump administration is far more focused on domestic production, threatening tariffs against even its closest allies.
But it’s not clear America can do that alone even if it tried. To build the number of submarines it wants over the next 10 years, the country needs 140,000 more skilled workers, Sullivan said in December. A surge in defense spending, which many Republicans in Congress now want, won’t immediately reverse such decline. And the Pentagon is notorious for inefficiently spending its money — something the new team has pledged to fix, like many administrations before it.
“We are going to have to keep an upward trend in our defense budget, but damn, we really should be able to do more with the dollars we have,” said Sullivan.
One exception to this rule, he argued, was the recent surge in artillery shells the U.S. has led to support Ukraine. Sullivan remembers learning how few of these shells America made per month when Russia invaded in February 2022, and both sides began firing them in mass.
“I began to recognize that in many respects, the cupboard was bare,” he said.
The U.S. has since increased that supply from 14,000 per month to 55,000 per month, said Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer. The target is 100,000 per month by 2026.
“There’s no magic in that” ramp up, said LaPlante, speaking with reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week.
Instead, LaPlante argued, the process has shown how the system should work: attention from America’s government applied to a difficult problem, like someone smoothing out kinks from a hose. To a lesser extent, the country is trying to repeat this process for other shortfalls, such as missiles and air defense interceptors.
“It’s not the system,” he said. “It’s the system in the sense of the political will.”
Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.
