The Pentagon's Cheapest Weapon Is Its Own Name

Designating defense manufacturing regions would cost almost nothing and organize what appropriations cannot buy.

The Government Accountability Office reported in July that destroyers are running as much as 55 months late (the contractors say they cannot hire at the wages they pay) and that attack-submarine production limps along at half the Navy's goal because the experienced workers are not there.  Congress, meanwhile, enacted $839 billion for defense in fiscal 2026, and the House has marked up a 2027 bill north of a trillion.  The money is moving.  The people are not.  Every system the Pentagon wants waits on workforce before it waits on steel.  The Labor Department funds training; the Pentagon buys weapons but connecting the two is nobody's full-time job.

Take castings and forgings.  The supplier base has been thinning for years and Congress knows it.  Castings and forgings sit first, literally first, in the list of supply chains its Industrial Base Fund exists to repair.  So, a technical college that stands up foundry training is not guessing about federal priorities.  It is answering a priority already written into law with funding behind it.  The Pentagon has even done its part, building national training courses in machining and metalworking that have reached some 25,000 learners.  What those courses cannot do is land themselves in a particular county, match themselves to the employers there, and then stay pointed at the demand.  National programs have no local roots.  The colleges in foundry country could run this training within a year.  Almost none do because of a lack of a definitive signal from Washington.  The Pentagon is now creating longer term contracts to preserve its supply-chain, it needs to do the same for workforce.   

We have run this experiment before.  Beginning in 2006, the Labor Department's WIRED initiative put $325 million into 39 regions to get colleges, employers, and economic developers pulling in one direction.  The evaluators never found a way to measure the economic return.  The durable asset they documented, however, was the alignment itself.  One regional leader stood up at a working session and said the worst thing the Labor Department ever did was give his region money.  Before the check arrived, his partners brought their own budgets to the table.  Afterward, they fought about the size of the check.  Commerce ran the corollary in 2013 when it designated 24 manufacturing communities with no new appropriation attached.  More than 70 regions organized to compete anyway.  The logo outweighed the check.  It did both times.

The obvious objection is that the federal government already maintains tools for defense communities.  It does, and the people who run them are good at the job those tools were built for, which is adjustment relief.  Relief switches on when harm arrives, and it rations help by the depth of the damage.  That is the right design for its purpose.  It is the wrong trigger for a wartime footing, which has to move on capability and demand before the shortfall shows up.  And the fix is not a tweak.  Repointing relief at alignment means rewriting authorities, which means Congress, which means legislative cycles, and production schedules do not wait on legislative cycles.  Flexible authority already exists on the production side of the building.  That is where the mission belongs.

So, what would designation actually require?  Surprisingly little.  A public standard, built on data anyone can check, reproducible enough that a region can compute where it stands.  A reset every two years, since the map moves whenever a production line does.  Designation for every region that clears the bar, which is another way of saying the Department picks no winners, caps no cohort, and promises nobody a dime.  No new layer of bureaucracy either.  A calculation performed in the open does the work discretion would do, and arithmetic keeps the politics out.  What does a region get for meeting the standard?  It names its own coordinating body, and it gains the one thing it could never buy: a declared national priority to organize against, plus somebody inside the Pentagon whose job it is to take their call.  The program builds nothing, buys nothing, and aligns spending that regions, states, employers, and philanthropies were doing anyway.  Congress already supplied the authority in the Industrial Base Fund statute (10 U.S.C. 4817), which lists the defense industrial workforce next to castings, forgings, and machine tools.  The cost is a small program office and some convenings, a mere rounding error beside the $8.4 billion Congress added above the president's request in 2026.

One more thing, and it may matter the most.  Private money is moving toward these industries at a scale not seen in a generation.  JPMorganChase alone has committed up to $1.5 trillion to industries it deems critical to national security, and the $24 million it put into Philadelphia shipbuilding in July had exactly the shape a designated region would ask for: equity in a mid-sized supplier, low-cost loans, grants to the local training outfits.  The GE Aerospace Foundation is pushing $30 million through regional colleges to produce 10,000 skilled workers.  All that capital is hunting for an address, and only the customer can supply one.  Commerce can tell investors that a region matters to the economy.  Only the War Department can tell them a region matters to the fight, and regions will organize around that sentence.

The assets are out there in the regions.  The authority has been sitting in statute for years.  The money is moving on its own.  What is missing is the name, and naming is the one thing the Pentagon could do this quarter without asking Congress for anything.  It does not need to buy a regional layer of the industrial base.  It needs to name one.

Mr. Gilroy is Vice President for Workforce Development at the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness in Arlington, Virginia.

Sources

Government Accountability Office, Weapon Systems Annual Assessment: Requiring Mature Technologies Could Enable Shift to Rapid Delivery, GAO-26-108457, July 2, 2026.  https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108457

Government Accountability Office, Navy and Coast Guard Shipbuilding: A Disciplined, Strategy-Driven Approach Is Needed to Achieve Ambitious Goals, GAO-26-109068, April 22, 2026.  https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109068

Congressional Research Service, FY2026 Department of Defense Appropriations: In Brief, R48891, April 2, 2026.  https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48891

House Committee on Appropriations, Committee Releases FY27 Defense Appropriations Bill, June 2026.  https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/committee-releases-fy27-defense-appropriations-bill

10 U.S.C. 4817, Industrial Base Fund.  https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title10-section4817

America's Cutting Edge, national machining training program.  https://www.americascuttingedge.org/about/

METAL, Metallurgical Engineering Trades Apprenticeship and Learning.  https://www.metalforamerica.org/the-vision/

U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, WIRED cross-generation evaluation, Occasional Paper 2014-08.  https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/publications/ETAOP_2014-08-WIRED-Cross-Gen-Report.pdf

Economic Development Administration, Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership, archived program pages.  https://www.eda.gov/archives/2016/imcp/overview/

Mark Muro, Building Manufacturing Communities for the Long Haul, Brookings, February 18, 2016.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/02/18/building-manufacturing-communities-for-the-long-haul/

JPMorganChase, Security and Resiliency Initiative, October 13, 2025.  https://www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/jpmc-security-resiliency-initiative

JPMorganChase, $24 million to strengthen shipbuilding in Philadelphia, July 15, 2026.  https://www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/press-releases/2026/24-million-strengthening-shipbuilding-philadelphia

GE Aerospace Foundation, multi-year $30 million workforce program, October 14, 2025.  https://www.geaerospace.com/news/press-releases/ge-aerospace-foundation-launches-multi-year-30m-workforce-program