Trump meeting major defense contractors amid munitions stockpiles concerns

Defense Trump meeting major defense contractors amid munitions stockpiles concerns Comments: by Ellen Mitchell - 06/23/26 12:49 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Ellen Mitchell - 06/23/26 12:49 PM ET Comments: Link copied

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President Trump is set to meet with the heads of the biggest U.S. defense firms on Wednesday amid concerns of America’s dwindling stockpile of sophisticated munitions.

Trump has summoned the top military contractors along with senior Pentagon officials to the White House to discuss increasing munitions production, a meeting that is expected to be contentious, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The gathering was tentatively scheduled for earlier this month but had been moved due to negotiations to end the Iran war, according to the outlet.

Asked about the planned meeting, the White House referred The Hill to Trump’s comments from Monday, during which he seemed to confirm the gathering.

“We’re building plants all over the country,” Trump said from the Oval Office, noting that automakers General Motors and Ford would begin to help produce weapons.

“Some of the car companies, if they have any excess capacity, they’re making a deal to build missiles and the Patriot in particular,” Trump said.

The Wall Street Journal last week reported that Lockheed Martin was in talks with General Motors to supply the defense firm with some parts that could help it boost munitions production.

The president last met with major defense contractors on March 6, after which he declared they had agreed to quadruple the production of “exquisite class” weaponry.

That meeting included the executives of BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.

Trump has insisted that weapons stockpiles are fine, but defense analysts have warned that the U.S. military has a finite number of interceptors that cannot be replenished in short order. Those types of weapons, including Patriot interceptors and Tomahawk cruise missiles, have been used to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles in the war and were already in short supply before the conflict.

Trump earlier this month invoked the Defense Production Act to speed up weapons production due to “systemic constraints in the munitions industrial base, including limited production capacity, fragile supply chains, long-lead dependencies, and related production bottlenecks.”

The issues “may impair the ability of the United States to produce, sustain, and expand the availability of munitions, missiles, and equipment required for the national defense,” Trump wrote in a June 11 memo to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

But the nature of the sophisticated weaponry means it takes far longer to produce compared to conventional bombs.

Making matters more complicated, companies can’t receive full funding for any of the new munitions contracts Trump is touting until lawmakers agree to and pass a defense spending bill.

The president wants a historic $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal 2027 — with $1.15 trillion in the base budget and another $350 billion passed via reconciliation — but Congress appears to have no appetite for such high military spending.

In addition, the Pentagon has reportedly told senators it needs roughly $80 billion to cover the cost of the Iran war.

The Pentagon has requested nearly $53 billion to increase production of 12 “critical munitions” such as Patriot and THAAD interceptors, but a large chunk of money is in the reconciliation package, a no-go with many lawmakers.

Hegseth is set to sell House Republicans on military funding goals on Wednesday at the Republican Study Committee’s weekly members-only lunch.

And in an op-ed in the New York Post that ran on Tuesday, Hegseth pressed Congress to pass Trump’s defense budget, arguing that “the single greatest threat to America’s national security today is under-investment in military spending.”

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