When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Rewind & Reconnoiter. Each week, we’ll ask one of our authors to look back at an article they’ve written for War on the Rocks in light of a current news event. Did their argument hold up? Read more below to find out.***In 2022, Stephen Rodriguez wrote “The U.S. Military’s Investment Ecosystem is Missing in Action” for War on the Rocks, in which he argued that, “the U.S. government should do more to foster defense innovation and strengthen critical industrial manufacturing capabilities, avoiding actions that push companies to move offshore, to allow themselves to be acquired by foreign competitors, or to exit the defense markets completely.” In light of the National Defense Industrial Strategy released in January, we asked him to look back on his article and argument.Read more below.Image: U.S. Marine Corps (Photo by Sgt. Mackenzie Carter)In your article, you argue that despite “years of warnings that China and Russia were focusing on offsetting U.S. research and manufacturing advances in military technologies, the only thing we ‘offset’ was our own ability to respond effectively as a national security enterprise.” Has this remained the case in the years since you wrote your article? How has the environment changed, if at all?The U.S. national security enterprise has become much more attuned to the threat of legacy penetration of critical defense capabilities. Major reforms to and stricter enforcement of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States–reviewed transactions have dramatically curtailed adversarial capital. Similarly, major U.S. research universities and defense laboratories have cracked down on foreign access to intellectual property with numerous researchers and contractors being kicked off campus. However, and to use an analogy, while we have done a good job plugging the holes in the ship, we are still struggling to sail in the right direction at speed. Doug Beck’s recently announced Defense Innovation Unit 3.0 acknowledges