The Pentagon’s new plan to implement its defense industrial base strategy—coming in the 11th hour of the Biden administration—could survive the upcoming election because extra time was taken to get buy-in from all involved agencies and from both sides of the congressional aisle, according to the official who led its development.
The National Defense Industrial Strategy was unveiled at the beginning of the year, but its implementation plan, expected in March, wasn’t released until Oct. 29.
Laura Taylor-Kale, the assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, said during an Oct. 30 event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the lengthy delay was due to her team ensuring that the plan “really reflects” the needs of the entire Department of Defense, Congress, industry, and foreign partners.
“We spent the last six to nine months really engaging closely with industry, getting feedback on this strategy, as well as iteratively on the six implementation priorities; what they should be and also what should go in them,” she said.
Concerns about the long-term health of the defense industrial base grew after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the U.S. and its allies delved into their stockpiles to donate weapons and demand for all kinds of munitions and equipment outstripped the base’s ability to surge production.
At a Pentagon press conference to release the plan, Taylor-Kale noted that “today’s geopolitical undercurrents have impacted every part of the defense industrial base. We have seen how quickly we need to ramp up capacity in response to conflict. World events have forced us to prepare for the long-term and plan differently and we have experienced technological advancements that require a fundamental shift in our thinking.”
In order to succeed, the strategy “must be enduring,” Taylor-Kale added at CSIS.
To accomplish that, “we’ve really worked across political spectrums. We’ve gotten feedback and engaged with Republicans and Democrats both,” Taylor-Kale said. She said the plan made its way through both chambers of congress, including more than a dozen committees. The plan similarly made its way through affected departments in the Commerce and State Department, the Pentagon’s cost analysis shop, and the services.
Because national defense is a “bipartisan issue” and has traditionally been less controversial than other areas of political disagreement, Taylor-Kale said she is hopeful the implementation plan will continue even after a new administration—under either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris—starts in January 2025.
The next administration “will have an analytical framework” for how to invest in the defense industrial base as a result of the work, she said, and need not start from scratch.
She also said the plan has been coordinated with—and will be managed taking account of—export controls, the Foreign Military Sales System, and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
The implementation plan should be “a living document,” she said. It’s slated for an annual update, with both a classified and public version to be released.
At the heart of the plan are six implementation priorities requiring the most urgent action to secure the U.S.’s ability to prevent war or prevail if drawn into war. The military services must “align the plan to the budget review process” and have already had to integrate the priorities with their fiscal 2026 budget plans, Tylor-Kale told CSIS. Every program will now have to explain how it buys down risk in the industrial base.
The priorities are:
- Indo-Pacific Deterrence: Invest in the increased production of interchangeable munitions, missiles and, most recently with Australia, the submarine industrial base, strengthening partnerships with traditional and new allies.
- Production and Supply Chains: Invest to make the supply chain more resilient—especially for key items like microprocessor chips and rare earth elements. The plan also calls for bigger weapon stockpiles and re-establishing or invigorating domestic production of critical materials and items.
- Allied and Partner Collaboration: Co-produce commonly-used weapons, such as 155 mm mortar shells, with partners and allies worldwide. Taylor-Kale also said the U.S. must learn to rely on the technical sophistication of allies if they have a superior approach to certain capabilities.
- Capabilities and Infrastructure Modernization: Upgrade and overhaul military depots and nuclear weapons production and maintenance facilities to ensure “scalability” to larger-scale production.
- New Capabilities Using Flexible Pathways: Use rapid prototyping to develop and field new weapons at scale, like the Pentagon’s “Replicator” initiative, Mid-Tier Acquisitions and “Other Transactional Authorities” authorized by Congress to speed the fielding of new systems.
- Intellectual Property and Data Analysis: Recognize that protecting intellectual property rights and investments fosters competition.
“At the end of the day, we need to really think about what’s the risk of not doing something, as opposed to what’s the risk of doing something,” Taylor-Kale said.
The third priority recognizes that “working with our allies and partners must be a priority for global defense production and capabilities,” she added. “We now talk about ‘co-“ everything. So, co-development, co-production, co-sustainment. We also recognize that certain allies have capabilities that are particularly useful in the region, or it can supplement or really complement the work that that our forces are doing.”
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante, under whose signature the plan was released, “meets regularly with his counterparts” in other countries, Taylor-Kale said, and the plan provides better tools to determine when to share classified information with allies by analyzing the pros and cons of doing so.
“The time is now” to “build the defense industrial ecosystem that we need,” she said.
According to the 80-page plan, more than $37 billion of the fiscal 2025 defense budget request would go toward fulfilling the priorities, most of it earmarked for munitions.
Taylor-Kale told reporters at the Pentagon that the implementation plan will “foster transparency by providing industry and other partners insights into our plans and investments,” so they can align those plans with their own.
“Our approach has generated strong interest from industry and common goals have built closer ties between allied partners. We have greater support from internal and interagency stakeholders and Congress,” she said.