War Department investments in the fiscal year 2026 budget and promised in the FY27 budget have heartened companies within the defense industrial base to invest in their own capabilities and to grow their capacity to produce.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appeared on Capitol Hill today in back-to-back testimonies before defense subcommittees of both the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The secretary, along with Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Jules W. Hurst III, performing the duties of the War Department comptroller, testified before each committee in relation to the FY27 presidential budget proposal.
The secretary explained to lawmakers how the War Department's new way of doing business benefits the department, the American people and the defense industrial base — thousands of private businesses responsible for providing the hardware and weapons America's military needs to defend the nation.
"The $1.5 trillion budget request put forward by [President Donald J.] Trump will build upon the historic $1 trillion FY26 top line," Hegseth told lawmakers. "The $1.5 trillion budget will ensure the United States continues to maintain the world's most powerful and capable military, as we grapple with a complex threat environment across multiple theaters."
Private industry partners worldwide invest in their own capacity when they are confident in the sales they will make and the available income. Many private sector companies that provide weapons and systems for the War Department have, in the past, lacked that kind of confidence because the U.S. government is often an unreliable customer — unwilling or unable to provide an unambiguous demand signal and the funding for the war materials it will eventually buy.
The result is that the defense industry is often unable to invest in modernization, which might allow those companies to produce better tools for warfighters, more quickly and at lower cost.
Hegseth said now, thanks to the dealmaking ability of Trump and of War Department leaders such as Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg and Hurst, the department has changed how it does business.
"By supercharging our industrial capacity and transforming how the department does business, we are restoring American commercial dominance at a pace unseen in generations, transforming the defense industrial base from the broken, slow-moving systems of the past," Hegseth said. "We have flipped the Pentagon acquisition process from a bureaucratic model to a business model, decisively moving from an acquisition environment paralyzed by bureaucratic red tape into an outcomes-driven organization focused on delivering the most for taxpayer dollars."
The secretary offered examples of investments the private defense industrial base has made, using its own dollars.
"The department has helped stimulate more than 250 private investment deals in 39 states, in 180 cities, in 150 different companies, worth more than $50 billion," he said. "This has resulted in 280 new and expanded facilities, more than 18 million new square feet of American manufacturing and more than 70,000 new American jobs."
That $50 billion is not money the War Department had to pay. It's money those companies have invested from their own coffers because they are now confident that they can expect to earn profits in the long term if they invest in their own ability to be better providers to the department.
"By completely transforming our department's business model, American companies are investing in America with their own capital — a historic demonstration of American manufacturing and defense revitalization; all with their money, not Uncle Sam's," Hegseth said.
Now, thanks to deals being made by the War Department, Hegseth said, manufacturing in the United States is returning.
"President Trump's War Department has begun to turn the lights back on in manufacturing towns across this country to forge a lethal Arsenal of Freedom," the secretary said. "Where our critical supply chains are threatened, the Department of War has acted decisively to inject capital, stimulate production and prevent adversarial exploitation. We are firing up the American economic engine at every level of the defense industrial base."