Pentagon pushes to double missile production for potential China conflict

The push to speed production of the critical weapons in the highest demand has played out through a series of high-level meetings between Pentagon leaders and senior representatives from several U.S. missile makers, according to people familiar with the matter. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg is taking an unusually hands-on role in the effort, called the Munitions Acceleration Council, and calls some company executives weekly to discuss it, some of the people said.

The department summoned top missile suppliers to a June roundtable at the Pentagon to kick off the industry effort. The meeting, attended by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew executives from several weapons makers, new market entrants like Anduril Industries, and a handful of suppliers of important parts like rocket propellant and batteries.

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are exploring extraordinary avenues to expand our military might and accelerate the production of munitions," said Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, when asked about the efforts. “This effort has been a collaboration between defense industry leaders and senior Pentagon officials."

Some people involved in the effort both inside and outside of the government worry that the government’s targets aren’t realistic. Individual missiles can take two years to fully assemble. It can take several months and hundreds of millions of dollars to test and qualify weapons from new suppliers as safe and reliable enough for U.S. service members to use.

There are also questions about the money needed to accelerate production. The Trump administration’s Big, Beautiful Bill, signed in July, provided an additional $25 billion in five-year munitions funding, but analysts say that hitting the Pentagon’s aggressive targets would cost tens of billions more.

“Companies don’t build these things on spec," said Tom Karako, a munitions expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You wait for the government to put them on contract. There needs to be an expression of support with money. It can’t just be words."

Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon say they have responded by adding workers, widening factory floors and growing spare-parts inventories to prepare for a potential demand surge. But some suppliers have struggled to hit the new targets and are wary of splurging on orders that the government has yet to fund.

Christopher Calio, the chairman and chief executive officer of Raytheon parent RTX, one of the military’s largest munitions producers, said in a July 3 letter to the Pentagon that it was ready to work with the Defense Department to increase production, but cautioned that the company would need additional money and commitments from the Pentagon to buy more munitions.

“Signaling the demand strength of these critical munitions to the supply base with Program of Record extensions…and funding to support is required," he wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Military officials have fretted about the U.S. ability to ramp up weapons production since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration launched an effort to raise munitions production rates and smooth out supply-chain kinks in 2023.

“The current conflict in Ukraine has been a wake-up call," then-Undersecretary of Defense Bill LaPlante said at the time. “We’ve allowed production lines to go cold, watched as parts became obsolete and seen sub-tier suppliers consolidate or go out of business entirely."

New missile orders have since failed to keep up with the soaring use of expensive interceptors, including the Patriot, to defend Ukraine against intensifying Russian bombardment. U.S. officials want more of those interceptor missiles on hand to protect bases and allies around the Pacific region.

By June, the Trump administration had set even more aggressive production goals. Then the U.S. fired hundreds of high-end missiles during the 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran, further depleting its missile arsenal.

The new acceleration council is focused on 12 weapons that the Pentagon wants on hand for a potential conflict with China, some of the people said. The list includes Patriot interceptors, Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, the Standard Missile-6, Precision Strike Missiles and Joint Air-Surface Standoff Missiles. Patriot is a particular priority because Lockheed has struggled to keep pace with surging global demand.

An early request for information asked weapons makers at the June roundtable to detail how they could increase production to 2.5 times current volumes through steps taken over the following six, 18 and 24 months, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. The military also asked suppliers to describe how they might attract new private capital and potentially license their technology to third-party manufacturers.

The Army in September awarded Lockheed almost $10 billion to make nearly 2,000 PAC-3 missiles from fiscal year 2024 to 2026. The Pentagon wants suppliers to eventually pump out that same number of Patriots each year—nearly four times the current production rate, according to some of the people familiar with the matter.

A Lockheed spokeswoman said the company is exploring more investments in Patriot missile production and expects to deliver above its stated capacity for the next several years. An RTX spokesman declined to comment.

The effort is also mapping supply chains down multiple tiers to find areas for potential improvement and looking for second sources where single suppliers create bottlenecks. For example, the Pentagon is calling for more production of a Boeing-made seeker nested in the missile’s nose, which has become a chokepoint for Patriot production.

Boeing rushed this summer to calculate how big an order of the seekers it could fulfill and recently finished a 35,000-square-foot expansion project at its factory, which is still being outfitted with new assembly equipment.

A Boeing spokeswoman said that monthly seeker deliveries have hit new records and that the company plans to further boost production.

Some suppliers say they are willing to put capital at risk before contracts are in hand. A Northrop Grumman spokeswoman said the missile supplier “invested ahead of the need with more than $1 billion across solid rocket motor production facilities," with plans to nearly double output over the next four years.

The Pentagon will soon be taking more steps to increase production, said Daniel Driscoll, the Army secretary, earlier this month. The department, he said, is planning “massively substantive changes to how we buy our stuff."

Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com