Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON — Despite a bipartisan push to disentangle the US economy from China, the military-industrial base still relies heavily on Chinese suppliers, a new study from analysis software firm Govini warns. And, the company’s leader says, that’s not the only weak link.
“Defense supply chains today are incredibly brittle. They’re not resilient. They’re very, very intricately tied to foreign suppliers,” Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told reporters Thursday. “We try to quantify that.”
Bottom line up front, Western defense firms have struggled just to meet the intense surge of demand from years of large-scale combat in Ukraine. A war with China would be much worse — and Murphy Dougherty doesn’t think that US defense production, stockpiles and supply chains are up to the task.
“The data is unequivocal: The United States is not prepared for the war that we may have to enter if China said, ‘today is the day,’” she said. “It’s not that I think we would automatically lose — by no means do I think that’s the case — but I do not believe that the industrial base is prepared to support the material demands of the Department of Defense.”
Drawing on its proprietary database of Defense Department spending and using its flagship analytics toolkit, Ark, Govini recently published its annual “National Security Scorecard.” The study looks at the previous year’s data on not only DoD’s prime contractors — which, Murphy Dougherty notes, remain a small and exclusive group despite ambitious startups like Anduril and Palantir knocking on the door — but also on their principal subcontractors, known as “Tier 1 suppliers.”
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