Senior defense officials met with executives from General Motors, led by Mary Barra, and Ford, led by Jim Farley, to discuss shifting factory capacity toward producing munitions and military equipment. GE Aerospace and Oshkosh are also in talks. The Pentagon framed it as a national security matter.

The reason is brutal. The war against Iran consumed Tomahawks at roughly nine times the Pentagon’s annual procurement rate: over 850 missiles fired in a few weeks when the 2026 budget only funded 57. In the first 16 days, around 320 PrSM and ATACMS missiles were fired, nearly half the combined inventory. Patriot and THAAD interceptors were burned through at massive scale.

The defense industrial base, built for peacetime deterrence, couldn’t keep up with just a few weeks of real war. During World War II, Detroit stopped making cars and started making bombers. During Covid, GM and Ford built ventilators. Now the Pentagon wants to know if they can build missiles.