Made in Australia

Why America Is Offshoring Its Missile Factories to Australia

In March 1941, before the United States formally entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the phrase “Arsenal of Democracy.” It wasn’t a slogan — it was a strategic fact. The United States had everything a wartime economy needed: abundant coal, oil, and steel; the world’s largest industrial base; a young, trainable workforce; and vast geographic insulation from attack. By war’s end, American factories had outproduced every other nation on Earth: 300,000 aircraft, 100,000 tanks, 6 million rifles, and enough trucks, ships, and bombs to fight a two-front war and supply half the free world.

Eighty years later, that arsenal is struggling to reload.

In the age of hypersonics, AI-enabled warfare, and endless precision-guided munitions, the U.S. defense-industrial base has become hollowed out. Factories are backlogged. Engineers are retiring. Power grids are straining under peak load. Even the most urgent Pentagon orders for long-range missiles face multi-year delays.

And so, in one of the most underappreciated moves in recent defense history, Washington is quietly shifting part of its weapons manufacturing base — not to China, not to Mexico — but to Australia.

Welcome to the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise.

Launched in 2021 and backed by over $16–21 billion, GWEO is Australia’s plan to establish domestic production of advanced guided munitions: air-to-air missiles, anti-ship weapons, long-range strike systems, and the chemicals, propellants, and warheads that make them deadly. The core facilities are being constructed in partnership with major U.S. defense primes — notably Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — and the effort is explicitly designed to “complement allied industrial capacity.”

Translation: this is where the U.S. plans to build the weapons it no longer has the capacity — or grid — to make at home.