Previously confined to a narrow circle of Defense Department specialists, discussions of procurement reform now attract the attention of a wide range of policymakers, business leaders, and national security analysts. The erosion of the U.S. defense industrial base, combined with China’s massive and still growing manufacturing might, have made Defense procurement a matter of increasing urgency with major implications for both national security and economic policy. In the face of growing security threats around the world, the United States struggles to produce military materiel in sufficient quantities across both high-tech and legacy categories—from artillery shells to drones to nuclear submarines.

For as long as I can remember, the American Right has celebrated “statesmanship” while striving to drown the state in a bathtub. Under appeals to the wisdom of the ages, it has pursued utopian projects at home and abroad that have done immense harm to the American polity and its people. The Left, on the other hand, built the modern American state, but has little use for statesmen, preferring activists, journalists, “experts,” and bureaucrats, or maybe harmless radicals like Bernie Sanders. While eager to theorize about global governance, this class is uncomfortable with the argot of statesmanship, of advancing the concrete interests of a discrete polity…

Before student loan forgiveness, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and the Inflation Reduction Act, something called the CHIPS Act was a major news story for a few days in late July. CHIPS was essentially a bill to support semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, and the final version that passed into law, which added basic research…

America in its present state of decline increasingly resembles the late Soviet Union, but one of the most unsettling parallels is its unmistakable slide into gerontocracy. From Trump to Biden to Sanders to Pelosi to most of the Senate, one might think that the biblical three score and ten had become a mandatory minimum for…