President Trump has summoned the chief executives of America’s largest defense companies to the White House for a Wednesday meeting focused on rebuilding the nation’s depleted munitions stockpiles, according to The Wall Street Journal and The Hill.
The gathering includes senior Pentagon officials and is expected to be contentious. It was originally scheduled earlier this month but was postponed while administration officials managed negotiations to end the Iran war.
Trump addressed the meeting from the Oval Office on Monday, confirming the planned session and announcing that automakers would play a role in weapons manufacturing. “We’re building plants all over the country,” Trump said. “Some of the car companies, if they have any excess capacity, they’re making a deal to build missiles and the Patriot in particular.”
Lockheed Martin is already in talks with General Motors to supply parts that could boost munitions output, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ford is also part of the administration’s effort to convert civilian industrial capacity to defense production.
The push comes as U.S. stockpiles of advanced interceptors remain critically low. Defense analysts warn that Patriot interceptors and Tomahawk cruise missiles were in short supply before the Iran conflict began, and battlefield use has drawn them down further. Trump has insisted publicly that stockpiles are adequate, but the meeting signals administration concern about long-term readiness.
On June 11, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to accelerate weapons manufacturing. In a memo to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump wrote that systemic constraints in the munitions industrial base, “including limited production capacity, fragile supply chains, long-lead dependencies, and related production bottlenecks,” may impair the military’s ability to meet national defense requirements.
The Pentagon is expected to submit a supplemental funding request of roughly $80 billion to cover the cost of the Iran war, a figure more than double what Hegseth and Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst testified before Congress earlier this year.
The Pentagon has separately requested nearly $53 billion to increase production of 12 critical munitions systems, including Patriot and THAAD interceptors. A significant portion of that funding is tied to the reconciliation package currently moving through Congress.
Hegseth is scheduled to brief House Republicans on Wednesday at the Republican Study Committee’s weekly lunch. In a New York Post op-ed published Tuesday, Hegseth argued that “the single greatest threat to America’s national security today is under-investment in military spending.”
Trump’s last major meeting with defense contractors came on March 6, when he declared executives from BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon had agreed to quadruple production of advanced weaponry.
