In this week’s episode of Building the Base, Hondo and Lauren join Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan’s 7th District to discuss the future of the defense industrial network. 

Elissa’s experience in a locally known family business in Michigan and her extended career in national security and defense makes her a strong advocate for public-private partnerships. She advocates for faster government acquisition and contracting cycles of emerging technologies to sustain an edge over our international competitors and, having now worked in both the Executive and Legislative branches, she hopes to continue to encourage inter-agency cooperation. Her constituency in the heavy industries has been directly impacted by supply chain issues and dependency on China’s industry, so she advocates for a stronger US future industrial network.

Hondo, Lauren, and Elissa go on to discuss a variety of topics, including:

• Public-private partnerships
• Inter-agency cooperation
• The state of the defense industrial base
• Competition with China
• Workforce development in manufacturing and other industries