The Pentagon’s push to rebuild missile stockpiles faces two stubborn chokepoints: a shortage of solid rocket motors and a constrained supply of advanced guidance electronics. The Department of Defense has turned to the Defense Production Act to address both problems, awarding $14.3 million to Anduril to broaden domestic sources of solid rocket motors and securing a presidential determination that qualifies advanced avionics position navigation and guidance systems for federal investment under DPA Title III. Yet a Government Accountability Office review of DPA actions spanning fiscal years 2018 through 2024 found that purchase commitments and project monitoring have repeatedly lagged behind stated goals, raising hard questions about when these investments will translate into finished weapons rolling off production lines.
Pentagon Spending Targets Two Distinct Industrial Gaps
Solid rocket motors and guidance chips serve entirely different functions inside a missile, but both sit at the front of the same production queue. Without a motor, a missile cannot fly. Without a guidance unit, it cannot hit anything. The fact that the federal government has taken separate emergency actions on each component reflects how thin the domestic industrial base has become on both fronts.
The $14.3 million award to Anduril is designed to expand the number of companies capable of producing solid rocket motors, a market long dominated by a small number of legacy contractors. That concentrated supplier base has left the Pentagon vulnerable to single-point failures whenever demand spikes, as it has since the United States began drawing down inventories to support Ukraine.
On the electronics side, a separate presidential determination under DPA Title III established that advanced avionics position navigation and guidance systems qualify for the same kind of federal industrial-base interventions. That determination also covers airbreathing engines and constituent materials for hypersonic systems, signaling that the White House views guidance electronics as sitting alongside propulsion hardware on the list of defense-critical shortfalls.
GAO Audit Exposes Execution Lag in DPA-Funded Projects
Federal authority to invest is one thing. Turning that authority into factory output is another. The GAO’s report on DPA use and challenges from fiscal years 2018 through 2024, published as GAO-25-108497, found systemic problems in how the Department of Defense structures and monitors DPA-funded projects. Implementation challenges have slowed the translation of DPA authorities into measurable output increases, according to the report’s findings.
The accountability gap matters because solid rocket motor lines and guidance-chip fabrication facilities operate on very different scaling timelines. Motor propellant chemistry relies on energetic materials that, while hazardous, draw on established chemical supply chains and do not require the ultra-clean semiconductor fabrication environments that radiation-hardened guidance chips demand. Export controls on advanced chipmaking equipment add another layer of friction to guidance electronics that motor production does not face. The practical result is that even if DPA dollars flow at the same rate to both sectors, motor capacity is likely to reach steady-state production well ahead of comparable guidance-chip lines.
That asymmetry has direct consequences for missile assembly. A finished motor sitting in a warehouse cannot become a deliverable weapon until its matching guidance unit arrives. If chip production trails motor output by 18 months or more, the slower component dictates the pace of the entire program, regardless of how much money has been spent on the faster one.
What Public Records Do Not Yet Show About Motor and Chip Output
Several important questions remain unanswered in the public record. Neither the Department of Defense releases nor the GAO report include quarterly production volume figures for solid rocket motors before or after the $14.3 million Anduril award. Without that data, outside analysts cannot measure whether the investment has moved the needle or simply added a new entrant that has yet to deliver at scale.
The guidance-chip side is even more opaque. No primary source document available identifies specific semiconductor foundries or chip part numbers currently limiting guidance-unit output. The presidential determination confirms that the government considers the problem serious enough to invoke emergency industrial authorities, but it does not publish contractor-level delivery schedules or milestone metrics that would let the public track progress.
The GAO review, while broad in scope, does not break out motor versus guidance contributions to overall missile delivery delays. Reports linking missile shortfalls to Ukraine aid describe the problem in aggregate terms, making it difficult to isolate which bottleneck is binding at any given moment.
For defense contractors, congressional appropriators, and allied governments waiting on U.S. weapons deliveries, the next development to watch is whether the Pentagon publishes production benchmarks tied to its DPA investments. The GAO’s finding that monitoring has lagged behind commitments suggests that without explicit public milestones, these programs risk repeating the pattern of authorized spending that fails to close the gap between demand and actual factory throughput. Until both motors and chips reach production rates that match current drawdown speeds, U.S. missile inventories will continue to shrink faster than they can be refilled.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
