A defense contractor can know where a component was assembled and still have no visibility into the companies behind it. A domestic supplier may depend on an overseas manufacturer owned through entities spanning several jurisdictions. A country-of-origin designation alone can’t reveal those relationships.

Executive Order 14415 directs the Department of War to develop deeper supply-chain mapping and supplier-vetting requirements for national-security acquisitions, including greater visibility into critical materials and the financial, ownership and manufacturing risks associated with suppliers throughout the chain. 

Washington's semiconductor debate increasingly centers on the question: Can China build an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine? EUV systems are essential for producing the world's most advanced chips efficiently, and China still cannot manufacture them at scale. That constraint matters. But a strategy built around one machine risks missing the larger change underway across China's semiconductor industry.  Meanwhile, making smaller chips is increasingly less important to the future of advanced semiconductors as physics constraints slow progress and advanced packaging creates a new avenue for improvement. 

Beijing is steadily reducing its dependence on foreign suppliers across the broader chip supply chain. That progress is uneven, and some critical gaps will remain for years. Still, the direction is clear. China is building domestic capabilities in the equipment, materials, components and manufacturing processes needed to support a far more self-sufficient semiconductor ecosystem.  Missing that key point could become a major strategic setback for the Western tech ecosystem

An old adage holds: bullets don’t fly without supply. Today, bullets don’t fly without bytes. 

The Department of War’s fortification and digitization of its supply chains is a long overdue investment. Yet one critical element continues to lag: logistics command and control (C2). 

As the world is re-learning, national security and economics are as inextricable as a mortise and tenon in a working wooden joint. Rising fuel prices have cost the U.S. defense department over one billion dollars in the past six months. Part of the added cost is in global shipping prices. Shipping costs raise the price of what is paid for gas and oil-based products.  In fact, arbitrarily determined shipping costs and their related insurance premiums are already increasing energy bills in a significant way that affects the global price of oil and has received scant attention.

Mercuria Energy Group, a commodity trading giant with more than $6 billion in equity, filed suit against the Baltic Exchange, the nearly 300-year-old institution that sets the world’s shipping benchmarks. Mercuria experienced losses running into the hundreds of millions of dollars on freight contracts tied to a benchmark called TD3C. TotalEnergies, a century-old French, global energy company is reportedly weighing a similar claim.