The U.S. military is only as strong as its ability to procure needed weapons systems and other defense materials, and right now, America’s defense industrial base is sorely lacking, experts say.
“Unfortunately, like the armed services themselves, they have been neglected,” Robert Greenway, director of the Center for National Defense at The Heritage Foundation, says of the U.S. defense industrial base.
Instead of producing all of our defense materials at home, the U.S. has outsourced some military production, but “there are some things we don’t want in the hands of our adversaries, and there’s some things, many things, we don’t want under their control or influence,” Greenway says.
Foreign production of defense materials is not only a risk from a national security perspective, it also takes economic opportunities away from the U.S., says Richard…
