“It’s a way for us to communicate and leverage industry,” Michael Cadenazzi said at a Center for a New American Security event, describing how the Pentagon plans to use the Defense Production Act to convene munitions suppliers and address persistent bottlenecks.
What the Pentagon is proposing with the Defense Production Act
According to Cadenazzi, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy, invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) will permit the department to foster “voluntary agreements” among munitions suppliers in ways that would otherwise risk antitrust scrutiny. He described those agreements as a vehicle “to bring industry in in an antitrust environment to go ahead and have conversations with them,” enabling the Defense Department to “articulate problems to them around nasty issues in the supply chain and the industrial base that allow them to communicate and work together, essentially collude.”
The source material defines collusion in business as a secretive, anti-competitive agreement between rival companies to manipulate the market for mutual gain, and notes that parties found guilty can face steep fines or jail time. Cadenazzi framed the DPA-backed construct as a means of creating a lawful framework for companies to coordinate on production and investment planning.
How the White House memo frames voluntary agreements
The White House posted a memo to the Federal Register tied to the DPA that the source says was signed by President Donald Trump and dated June 11. The memo explicitly identifies “voluntary agreements” as a way to break “systemic constraints in the munitions industrial base,” and to address problems including production capacity, supply chains, long-lead items, and other production “bottlenecks.” The memo was posted on the Federal Register and listed for publication on Wednesday, according to the same posting.
Operational aims: SRMs, certification, and supplier coordination
Cadenazzi described concrete ambitions for the construct: to gather large groups of munitions suppliers together to strategize on investment and production plans and to shorten certification processes. He said he wants “to be able to bring all the solid rocket motor providers into one room and say, ‘We have talked about having solid rocket motor problems for a long time. We now have the opposite. We have 10-12 companies that want to make SRMs. How do I best approach the market for SRMs?’”
Topics of those conversations, he added, could span workforce and engineering questions, materials and electronics supply, and issues around certification and qualification. Cadenazzi argued that “these conversations can’t happen across companies unless we provide the framework for it. This provides that framework.”
How L3Harris and procurement moves fit the picture
The source notes the second Trump administration has been exploring multiple avenues to boost munitions production while it seeks to refill stockpiles following operations against Iran. Those avenues include inking framework deals with companies to invest in their own manufacturing facilities and a cited $1 billion investment into L3Harris’s solid rocket motors business. Cadenazzi said he has been pushing the DPA-backed construct for the past nine months and expressed surprise when the memo’s signing became public.
How munitions suppliers, L3Harris, and DoD officials are positioned
- Munition suppliers: will be invited into structured, DPA-enabled forums where they can discuss production capacity, supply chain issues, and certification with DoD officials — conversations that Cadenazzi says otherwise “can’t happen across companies.”
- L3Harris: already a named recipient of a $1 billion investment into its solid rocket motors business, it sits at the center of broader efforts to expand SRM capacity and may be among firms engaged under voluntary agreement frameworks.
- DoD officials and industrial base policymakers: will use the DPA as a legal mechanism to convene industry, shorten certification processes, and steer investment decisions aimed at alleviating long-lead and bottleneck issues across the munitions industrial base.
The Defense Production Act memo and Cadenazzi’s remarks combine to describe a deliberate, legally framed push by Pentagon industrial base officials to move suppliers from independent, sometimes duplicative efforts into coordinated planning. The stated goal is to accelerate production and clear certification and supply-chain chokepoints; the explicit tradeoff, as acknowledged in the event, is arranging conversations that outside the DPA’s protection would risk crossing antitrust lines.
