US President Donald Trump acknowledged the key defence meeting, which a White House official earlier said would take place on Wednesday.
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“We’re really in a big strong economic push to do the weapons, and some of the car companies, if they have any excess capacity, they’re making a deal to build missiles, and the Patriot in particular,” Trump told reporters Monday at the White House. “We have quite a few of them, but we want to make sure we have always a lot of them.”
RTX Corp is among the companies expected to attend the key discussions with the Trump administration, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin Corp. has also referred questions to the White House.
Spokespeople for RTX and L3Harris Corp. declined to comment to Bloomberg’s requests. A spokesperson for Boeing Co. also declined to comment on the development.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that General Motors Co. has held discussions with RTX and other defense contractors about helping the weapons makers increase production, with the potential partnerships involving work similar to the automaker’s agreement with Lockheed Martin.“I know General Motors is all excited about building weapons,” Trump confirmed on Monday. “Now they have some plants, which they’re going to switch over, we’re going to build weapons, including the Patriot, including the Tomahawk, and lots of other things.”
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The US President has urged defense contractors to “constantly produce more made-in-America weapons,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement.
She further added that the US military “has more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals and beyond.”
The US government has accelerated efforts to boost defence production, as Trump last week invoked the Defense Production Act in his order for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make “voluntary agreements and plans of action”. The move aims to address the depleted US defense industrial capacity.
He cited “systemic constraints in the munitions industrial base” in deploying the Cold War-era law.
The US administration in January issued an executive order barring defense contractors from issuing dividends or conducting stock buybacks — demanding that they focus on increasing weapons production.
Following a March gathering with the arms producers, Trump announced the companies had agreed to quadruple manufacturing of what he called “exquisite class weaponry.”
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“We just concluded a very good meeting with the largest US Defense Manufacturing Companies where we discussed Production and Production Schedules,” he said as key discussions concluded.
“We have a virtually unlimited supply of Medium and Upper Medium Grade Munitions, which we are using, as an example, in Iran, and recently used in Venezuela. Regardless, however, we have also increased Orders at these levels,” he added.
Trump said that defence firms representatives who participated in the meeting included the CEOs of BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell Aerospace, L3Harris Missile Solutions, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
