ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Blake Narendra was a director for Legislative Affairs on the National Security Council in the Biden administration. Previously, he was a special adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance in the Obama administration. He also was a nuclear policy adviser to Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

As “abundance” solutions to housing and energy fill op-eds and airtime on cable news, we should also embrace “abundance” for our aerospace industrial base.

The Pentagon’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy is one such opportunity; it should acknowledge that meeting our many global security challenges depends upon reviving a version of “Rosie the Riveter” to meet our growing aerospace and defense manufacturing needs today – before a war lays our vulnerabilities bare tomorrow.

The NDS is likely to highlight the need for the Defense Department to strengthen our interoperability with allies and partners to confront top geopolitical rivals in China and Russia. And in the months to follow, the Defense Force Posture Review will add a level of granularity by matching force deployments to priorities laid out in the NDS.

However, the NDS’ ambitious plans may face the cold, hard reality that our capacity to project overseas is tempered by our manufacturing weaknesses at home. As the saying goes, even the “best laid plans can go awry,” and that may be the case if the Pentagon is unable to domestically source parts for hardware like advanced aircraft.

American consumers learned firsthand the impacts of relying on brittle supply chains when COVID-19 struck in 2020. Grocery store shelves were bare, Amazon orders went on backorder, and car dealerships’ lots were empty due to a nationwide chips shortage. The vulnerability of American consumers to such shocks was a wake-up call for the Pentagon: if a pandemic could disrupt supply chains for items like toilet paper, and even freeze development of the next-generation jet engine, imagine the additional harm a manmade disaster like a war could do to our force projection.

As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks warned, relying on a small number of contractors for critical capabilities directly undermines America’s ability to surge production in wartime. That is especially true for the U.S. aerospace sector.

In the not-too-distant past, steel-fitters, welders and metal fabricators formed the domestic manufacturing base in the American “Rust Belt.” Today, two-thirds of foundries that produced castings for aircraft, armored vehicles and naval vessels have vanished from the map. The result is that we are left to a Cold-War era infrastructure and aging workforce to guarantee we can “fly, fight, and win” well into this century.

That has impacts for the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program — the Air Force’s effort to develop evolutionary engines for sixth-generation jet fighters; the additional range and thrust supplied to fighters by NGAP will extend U.S. superiority in contested environments — like the Taiwan Strait — for decades. But getting NGAP’s off the ground depends on the health of the industrial base beneath it: specialized parts suppliers and engineers who are in desperately short supply.

We saw that even modest supply interruptions on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program can snowball into program delays. Shortages in skilled labor and deliveries pushed deliveries of the F-35 back by four months.

We have also seen how U.S. adversaries can weaponize on our economic dependence for key inputs for aircraft. President Donald Trump’s visit with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping last month in Southeast Asia temporarily unlocked U.S. tariff-free access to rare-earth minerals. However, there is no telling if a future bilateral spat will wreck that trade truce.

What is clear is that Beijing knows it can choke off U.S. access to critical minerals and, with it, grind the assembly of finished jet-engines to a halt. And we may not have the luxury of time. According to a top U.S. general, China has calendared 2027 as the year it would be ready to invade Taiwan. For Beijing, establishing air dominance in the Taiwan Strait is a necessary step before it would likely press ahead on an amphibious invasion of the island.

U.S.-supplied F-16Vs to Taiwan can complicate Beijing’s decision-making. but they will not fully arrive until 2027 due to bottlenecks in the aerospace supply chain. Those impacts are compounded by the fact that China’s sixth-generation jet fighter will likely take off before the F-47 sixth-generation fighter enters the U.S Air Force fleet by the end of this decade.

We owe it to U.S. Air Force pilots, many of whom are not yet born, to pair the F-47 stealthy airframe with the highest performing engine we can field. Doing so will help ensure the fighter does not become obsolete during its 30- to 40-year service life. That is why NGAP serves as a down payment on preserving U.S. dominance in the skies. The cost of deterrence to keep a fragile peace pales in comparison to the costs to the U.S. and global economy if China reunites the mainland with Taiwan by force; Taiwan owns a staggering 70% share of the global semiconductor manufacturing market.

We cannot fully anticipate what geopolitical challenges at the middle of this century will manifest — we do know, however, that our airworthiness to meet those challenges hinges upon actions we take today to unlock “abundance” for our aerospace sector.