Overview
- The defense secretary visited Rocket Lab’s Long Beach factory, praising its rapid, scalable model as the kind the Pentagon intends to favor.
- Citing the Jan. 7 executive order on prioritizing the warfighter, he said the department will intensify performance reviews and discourage stock buybacks and dividends by underperforming contractors.
- He promised larger, longer and more predictable deals for companies that invest in capacity and workers and deliver at speed and scale.
- He emphasized fielding American-built and American-launched satellite constellations to secure advantages in space for future conflicts.
- He alluded to the Jan. 3 U.S. mission in Venezuela as an example of operations enabled by such capabilities and reiterated support for a proposed $1.5 trillion FY2027 defense topline.