The forge is the first line of defense

The National Review's recent argument is blunt and correct: America's defense platforms and weapons are of high quality, but the production lines behind them are dangerously slow. I will take that premise and carry it where it must go.

I wrote in my Report on the Subject of Manufactures that a nation dependent on foreign supply for the sinews of war is a nation at the mercy of its enemies. That was 1791. The geometry of the problem has not changed. What has changed is the scale — and the speed at which modern conflict consumes materiel. Artillery rounds, missiles, munitions of every description: a peer conflict burns through them at a rate that peacetime production schedules cannot begin to match. The National Review's lead makes exactly this point, and I find no reason to dispute it.

The question is not whether to surge production — the answer to that is obvious — but how, and under what public arrangement. History instructs us plainly. When private manufacture alone is left to the market's ordinary pace, it will not tool up for a contingency it cannot price. The risk is too diffuse; the capital outlay too large; the timeline too uncertain. This is precisely the circumstance that calls for an energetic public hand: loan guarantees, long-term government purchase commitments, and where necessary, direct federal investment in production capacity. These are not gifts to industry; they are the price of a credible deterrent.

I would go further. The concentration of defense production among a small number of primes — a handful of contractors who effectively hold the national arsenal in their private keeping — is a form of private power that warrants the same vigilance I would apply to any monopoly touching the public interest. Competition must be encouraged; new entrants must be given a path; and the terms of public subsidy must include accountability, not merely profit. Public credit deployed in the national interest demands a public return. (I mark this as inference from the structure of the problem, not from specifics the source provides.)

The midterm election cycle now opening — noted elsewhere in today's news — will tempt both parties to treat defense spending as a budget line to be bargained against domestic priorities. That framing is a false economy. A dollar of productive capacity built today is worth ten dollars of emergency appropriation when the crisis arrives and the shelves are bare. The Treasury knows this. Any serious legislator must know it too.

My recommendation is direct: Congress should authorize multi-year production contracts — not single-year appropriations that leave manufacturers unable to invest — paired with a dedicated industrial-base loan facility, modeled on the logic of the original Bank of the United States, to capitalize the retooling of American defense manufacturing. Set the terms firmly; attach performance requirements; invite competition broadly. Then build. The nation's credit and its security are, in the end, the same question answered twice.