The deputy defense secretary is working hard to fix the department’s “broken, antiquated, and immensely complex acquisitions system,” a Pentagon spokesman said.
The Pentagon is pushing ahead with rebuilding the defense industrial base by asking weapons manufacturers to share plans for how they will increase weapons production and speed up their delivery schedules.
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg wrote to industry leaders on Aug. 5, giving them no more than 21 days to submit plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities,” according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
“Years-long development cycles are not acceptable,” Feinberg wrote. “We must dramatically accelerate our program schedules and expand our production capacity now.”
In an Aug. 9 email to The Epoch Times, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed Feinberg’s memo seeking a rapid escalation of weapons production is real, adding that it “will inform the fiscal year 2028 budget submitted to Congress for funding, and it is entirely consistent with our ongoing push to rebuild the defense industrial base.”
Parnell said the Pentagon continues to be focused on boosting the speed, capacity, and lethality of the defense industrial base to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands.”
Feinberg is “driving the hard work of fixing our broken, antiquated, and immensely complex acquisitions system,” he added.
Parnell also said the production effort predates the five-month-old conflict in Iran, amid media reports last week claiming that the United States is running low on certain types of weapons as a result. At the time, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called the reports fake news.
A New Era
Trump ordered reform of the defense acquisition pipeline in April 2025 after entering office, and Hegseth subsequently released the Pentagon’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy in November 2025. The strategy outlined five pillars for reinvigorating America’s defense industrial base.
In a January speech ahead of a tour of these facilities, Hegseth said the decades-old policy that the United States no longer needs to focus on defense industrial might was over.
“We recognize that we are in a new era of great power competition; a generational struggle to maintain peace through strength, and we will rise to meet that challenge,” he said, framing the reforms as necessary for the U.S. defense industry to keep pace with the threats from communist China.
By Melanie Sun
