Exclusive: Jake Sullivan encourages Trump team to buy munitions in bulk
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Then-national security adviser Jake Sullivan at a Camp David summit in 2023. Photo: Nathan Howard/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Years of industrial complacency, including not putting "enough energy or emphasis on munitions," has painted the U.S. into a corner, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Axios.
- Solving the problem, he said, requires a "generational project" spanning business interests and political affiliations.
Why it matters: Today's defense news cycle is dominated by questions of American manufacturing might. The conversation is set against a backdrop of competition with Russia and China (and their growing symbiosis).
- The sudden shipbuilding obsession, including President Trump's own preoccupation, is a symptom of this.
Driving the news: Sullivan spoke to Axios on the sidelines of the Reindustrialize conference in downtown Detroit, a city experiencing its own metropolitan rebirth.
- There's a pressing need, he said, "for the national security community — not just the economic policy community — in the United States to be focused on reconstituting our industrial base in critical sectors that are going to define the future."
- The status quo "was decades in the making," he added. "When I came in, I found just how weakened a state our defense-industrial base was in."
State of play: Reams of studies, white papers, op-eds and surveys detail the fragility of the defense-industrial base (DIB).
- Govini's National Security Scorecard, published this summer, warned that China's "relentless three-decade military modernization — with an estimated $236 billion expenditure in 2024 — and Russia's industrial surge capacity — quintupling artillery shell production since 2022 — starkly contrast with the U.S. DIB."
- The Ronald Reagan Institute's National Security Innovation Base Report Card, shared in March, cautioned that the U.S. "struggles to manufacture and field new national security tech" at speeds and scales that matter.
- And the Commission on the National Defense Strategy concluded last July that the Pentagon's "business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance" reflect a bygone era.
Yes, but: There's hope the ship can be righted. It will take time — meaning multiple administrations and, potentially, conflicts.
- Sullivan in conversation with Axios encouraged the Trump administration to pursue multiyear contracting for munitions.
- Such deals give defense contractors "the certainty to make the capital expenditures to build the factories, to supply the munitions, rather than make this a year-by-year thing."
- Multiyear munitions buys were also favored by the House China Committee.
What they're saying: "The more you challenge the industrial base, you build the muscle, and it's like a flywheel," Darin DiTommaso, a GE Aerospace vice president, told Axios at the conference.
- "You actually enhance the capability of the supply base by putting more challenge on them, as opposed to starting and stopping programs, because that's when you lose people, and you lose skill sets," he said.
- "It's really hard to restart a production line once you've stopped it."
By the numbers: The U.S. Air Force in 2024 inked a $3.2 billion multiyear contract with Lockheed Martin for Long Range Anti-Ship and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff missiles. That same year, the Navy secured a bulk deal with HII for four amphibious warships, expected to save the service $1 billion.
The bottom line: "A country without robust manufacturing is hardly a country at all," Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said in a Reindustrialize speech.
- "America, like any country, is not just a country of consumers that want cheap stuff. It's a country of producers."
Go deeper: "You could never have enough": Militaries scramble for air defense interceptors
