After meeting with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell, among others, the president said the Pentagon has ‘virtually unlimited supply’ of weapons.
President Donald Trump met with executives of the nation’s largest defense contractors on Friday in the White House and said they agreed to quadruple production of “exquisite weaponry … as rapidly as possible.”
The president said in a Truth Social post that he and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sat down with the CEOs of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corp., Boeing, Honeywell, and L3Harris Technologies to appraise how swiftly munitions stockpiles can be expanded under an accelerated program implemented last fall.
“Expansion began three months prior to the meeting, and plants and production of many of these weapons are already under way,” Trump said.
The president did not elaborate on what he meant by “exquisite weaponry” but there have been concerns raised this week in congressional hearings and elsewhere about stressed inventories of air-defense systems and interceptor missiles, most notably for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Patriot, and Aegis systems that have knocked down more than 500 Iranian missiles and 2,000 drones since the conflict kicked off on Feb. 28.
During a March 4 Senate Armed Services Committee Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee hearing, readiness and logistics chiefs from five branches of the military would not discuss munitions stockpiles in public.
“The Joint Forces is burning through costly inventories of precision-guided munitions when they are already in short supply,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said. “Moreover, these munitions take a long time to replenish and risk being unavailable for the unforeseen contingencies elsewhere, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, where we face a peer adversary.”
The five officers agreed to send Hirono “via classified email, a snapshot of … current munitions inventory, projected ‘burn rates,’ and any magazine-shifting you’re doing to meet the demands” of the massive U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran.
Trump and administration officials say they have more than enough munitions to handle any and all threats.
“We have a virtually unlimited supply of medium- and upper-medium grade munitions, which we are using, as an example, in Iran, and recently used in Venezuela,” the president said. “Regardless, however, we have also increased orders at these levels.”
Trump said he will meet with defense contractors again in two months to assess progress.
By John Haughey
