Pentagon Reportedly Asks Detroit to Use More Car Factories as Arms Factories

The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the discussions”, said the Trump Pentagon has urged U.S. automotive industry leaders to do more for the war effort. It looks like America’s national weapons stockpile is starting to dwindle a bit given all the weapons we shipped overseas and all the weapons we recently seized – especially in Ukraine and Iran.

CEOs including General Motors’ Mary Barra and Ford’s Jim Farley are among the executives sitting down for talks with high-ranking defense officials about ramping up weapons production at car factories with the labor of people currently employed as automotive workers.

GM, it should be noted, already makes a military vehicle called the Infantry Squad Vehicle, or ISV.

In a speech in November last year, Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth described the industrial effort he wanted to see, but it sounded a little more chattyGPT than he intended:

“We’re not just buying something. We’re solving life-and-death problems for our war fighters. We’re not building for peacetime. We’re taking the Pentagon and our industrial base to wartime levels.”

A Pentagon statement provided to the Journal said the Defense/War Department “is committed to rapidly expanding the defense industrial base by leveraging all available commercial solutions and technologies to ensure that our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage.”

Earlier this month, President Trump requested a $1.5 trillion military budget with a clear emphasis on an expanded industrial base.

For no particular reason, here’s a flashback to high school history class: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1940 “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, one of the all-time masterpieces of American war propaganda.

In it, FDR claims that the Nazis are a threat to the American way of life, and our allies need our help fighting them. He explains that we are not being asked to give up our lives, just to come together as government, industry and workers.

“We must have more ships, more guns, more aircraft – more of everything. And this can only be accomplished if we abandon the notion of ‘business as usual.’ This cannot be done simply by imposing additional defense requirements of the Nation on existing productive facilities.”

It’s utterly reassuring, and listening to it today will awaken feelings of determination and patriotism you may have forgotten. If you want to hear it in current context, and play a little game of compare and contrast, that’s your job.