Over the past 18 months, U.S. supply chains have firmly established themselves as an issue of both economic security and national security. “Late night calls in search of masks for our nurses, hand sanitizer for our citizens, and microchips for our automakers, laid bare these vulnerabilities in the commercial sector,” the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) says in its recent Report of the Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force.
These realities have placed a new focus on defense supply chains—those international networks that provide the goods and services needed to deliver finished products to the Department of Defense (DOD)—and how those networks were prepared to respond to supply shocks. And while COVID-19’s impacts continue to emerge and linger, the HASC says they also provided “valuable insights and underscored the imperative to act on them.”
