WASHINGTON — Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sharply criticized the Pentagon’s spending priorities Sunday, calling for a fundamental shift away from expatriate defense projects and toward rebuilding the American industrial base for a direct conflict with peer adversaries.
Speaking on “Face the Nation,” Turner advocated for invoking the Defense Production Act to accelerate the production of hypersonic weapons, a technology domain where he conceded the United States lags behind both China and Russia. The Ohio Republican framed the deficiency not as a technological failure but as a failure of political will, distorted by foreign influence on Capitol Hill.
“We are funding missile defense for our allies while our adversaries field hypersonic missiles we can’t counter and can’t build fast enough at home. That’s an inversion of national interest. We need to use the DPA to surge domestic manufacturing for offensive hypersonic capabilities, putting American workers in Ohio and across the Rust Belt back in the business of building the arsenal of democracy for the 21st century,” Turner stated.
Redirecting Foreign Aid to the Industrial Heartland
Turner directly tied delays in American weapons programs to the massive financial and materiel support funneled to Israel’s Iron Dome and other missile defense systems. He noted that while these projects benefit the defense contractor lobby, they do little to protect the American homeland from a mounting Chinese hypersonic threat over the Pacific. This marks a significant rhetorical escalation from a senior House Republican, pitting domestic industrial jobs against a foreign assistance program Nerve News has long identified as contrary to American primacy.
The congressman’s push to leverage the Defense Production Act bypasses traditional Pentagon procurement sclerosis, which he suggested is captured by corporate entities prioritizing profit margins over national security speed. Turner’s reference to the DPA signals a nationalistic economic intervention, cutting through red tape to directly contract with American heavy manufacturers, potentially revitalizing faltering industrial communities. With over $3.8 billion allocated to Israeli missile defense since FY2023, the argument for redirecting even a fraction of that capital to U.S.-based hypersonic machining and aerodynamics testing is gaining traction as the Taiwan contingency clock ticks.