What Jake Sullivan wants the Trump administration to know about the defense industrial base

During his last days as President Joe Biden’s top national security advisor, Jake Sullivan is advising members of President-Elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration on the lessons his team learned in their pursuits to expand the contemporary defense industrial base and modernize the production and procurement of U.S. military weapons and other warfare assets.

Sullivan shared new details about those takeaways and other defense-related discussions he’s engaging in amid the presidential transition — including the Pentagon’s fast-tracked drone-fielding initiative Replicator — with a small group of reporters at the White House on Wednesday. 

“[One] area where we’ve begun the process, where I think they need to move very rapidly, is in the integration of artificial intelligence capabilities into not just weapons systems, but everything — the back office, logistics and supply systems — all of it, basically,” he told DefenseScoop at the invite-only roundtable.

Broadly, the DIB encompasses the entities that provide the military with the material, products and services needed to deter and prevail in conflict and global competition. 

But beyond that, the Biden administration has also called on the DIB to produce those items for international partners currently engaged in warfare, including Ukraine and Israel — as well as Taiwan, for deterrence purposes. 

Sullivan noted that in his early months at the White House, his team was sharply focused on the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan and “working through kind of setting up [the administration’s] strategy with respect to a lot of other significant issues in the world.”  

“So, DIB was not at the top of the list for me, walking in the door. And it was really the lead-up to the war in Ukraine in the fall of ‘21 that I began to recognize that, in many respects, the cupboard was bare,” Sullivan said.

Around that same time, the AUKUS trilateral security alliance between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. was announced. Sullivan subsequently started looking into the submarine industrial base’s capacity for tasks associated with the partnership’s Pillar I aims.

“People would produce charts for me — basically going back to 1990 — the workforce challenges, the supply chain challenges, the under-investment. And it became clear to me that this has been a story that I don’t think has gotten the attention it’s deserved,” Sullivan explained.

Those experiences made him fully recognize what he called “the importance of a demand signal from the top.” 

During Sullivan’s tenure, Biden’s administration published the U.S.’s first National Defense Industrial Strategy and implementation plan to guide engagement, policy development, and investment in the DIB in the near term.

“Turning the vision into execution is difficult, and it takes persistence and repeat demand signal. And even then, you’re only going to get a portion of the things you are asking for. And so one of my pieces of advice for the incoming team is, right out of the gate, take this momentum that we’ve begun to build up and really push. Don’t kind of wait a year or two years on it. Let’s push now,” Sullivan said.

DefenseScoop asked the national security advisor to expand on some of the other tips he’s leaving behind to his counterparts in the Trump administration.

“One of the things that I have asked the incoming team to do is to take a brief on the elements of the defense industrial base that I’ve taken so that in the early weeks, they’re sort of fully up to speed on exactly what we’re still facing as deficits — with respect to subs, with respect to long-range strike. Those are two areas in particular that I would be focused on and that I told the next team to take a hard look at,” Sullivan said. 

On his way out, Sullivan said he’s also encouraging the incoming team to continue to focus on accelerating AI adoption across the Pentagon and military, which was also a top priority in Trump’s first administration.

“I think DOD is working that, but we have to go a lot further, a lot faster. So that’s another area that I’ve told the upcoming team to put attention to. We’ve got this national security memorandum. It has put out a lot of tasks for the defense enterprise. Those tasks are beginning to be completed, but that work is going to have to continue in a big way under the new team,” Sullivan told DefenseScoop. 

Also among what he considers to be the Biden administration’s DIB-enabling accomplishments is the long list of moves to support Ukraine’s military in response to Russia’s large-scale invasion.

“I think the single biggest thing about this war that we have not seen as acutely in previous conflicts is the need to constantly adapt and iterate — that it is a learning function on both sides. There’s an innovation in a capability, it produces great lethality. The other side adjusts, comes up with an electronic warfare solution to degrade that lethality, the other side then has to adjust. And so it’s war through some combination of technological adjustment and software update, and that is an unusual thing for people used to fighting a more static type of conflict,” Sullivan said.

The U.S., under Biden, committed to injecting more than $1.5 billion in multiple types of investments to help Ukraine get to a point where it can manufacture and produce drones at scale — steadily, during a still-unfolding war, he said.

“And the point that I’m trying to register for the incoming team is [that] whatever happens in Ukraine, the need for this sustained scale-up is there for U.S. deterrence and U.S. defense needs for this foreseeable future — and we just have to be able to somehow convert that reality into an actionable demand signal that industry can respond on,” Sullivan told reporters. 

Applying lessons learned from Ukraine domestically, the administration held what Sullivan called a “first-of-its-kind conference” with officials from across the U.S. combatant commands and Pentagon acquisition components “to take stock of, essentially, where does this UAV component fit into the future of warfare.”

Biden appointees leading the Pentagon launched the high-profile Replicator initiative to accelerate the delivery of next-generation warfighting technologies in repeatable processes — beginning with thousands of drones to be fielded by August 2025 to counter China’s growing military build-up. 

“The idea is basically to learn a lot of the lessons that we’ve seen over the course of the past couple of years from Ukraine,” Sullivan noted.

He declined to give reporters a precise timeline for Replicator system deployment plans but expressed confidence that it would carry on as a priority initiative in the Trump administration.

“I have no reason to believe the new team is going to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to take that away.’ You’d have to ask them, but I think that that has a momentum of its own that can and should continue,” Sullivan said.

To date, Trump’s team has not disclosed whether they aim to cut, keep or modify Replicator. Spokespersons from his transition team did not respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment before publication.

“What’s interesting to me is that if the U.S. actually went to war tomorrow — itself — I think that the pace of change would iterate much more rapidly. So, the possibility that this timeline can be accelerated just through agency is there. Now, agency typically is driven more by external imperatives. Necessity being the mother of invention, rather than just by us coming together to say we’re going to do it,” Sullivan told reporters.

“But my pitch to the incoming team is, with all the lessons we’ve now learned and the picture we now see so clearly, let’s take some steps, and let’s do it on a bipartisan basis,” he said.