CARLISLE, PENNSYLVANIA—Titans of the defense and tech spheres descended on the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle this week for Sen. Dave McCormick’s (R-PA) Defense & Innovation Summit, where President Donald Trump’s and McCormick’s defense manufacturing boom in the commonwealth was on full display.
The president announced billions in new defense investments into the commonwealth, state leaders called for companies to invest and bring more defense business there, companies showed off their latest innovations, and the more than 1,300 attendees, representing 500 businesses, met in the Root Center in what is sure to build even more partnerships across industry, government, and academia surrounding the defense sector in the Keystone State.
During his keynote address on Wednesday, the president announced close to $10 billion in new investments for Pennsylvania, which McCormick’s office provided further details on in a press release.
“This afternoon, we’re announcing nearly $10 billion of new investments in our defense industrial base, right here in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and these investments will create more than 4,000 jobs,” he said.
“Pennsylvania workers will build the ships, submarines, trucks, weapons, and industries that will ensure America remains the strongest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done,” the president added.
He went on to applaud McCormick and give him the title of Pennsylvania’s greatest ever “warrior” in the U.S. Senate.
“I want to thank… Senator McCormick once again for this incredible get-together, but really much more importantly for the outstanding work that he’s doing as a senator,” Trump said. “He’s an incredible person, and Pennsylvania has never had a greater warrior at the U.S. Senate than Dave McCormick, and it’s an honor to be with you all. And we’re going to do things that nobody would believe.”
During an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Tuesday, moments before kicking off the summit, McCormick spoke glowingly of Trump for the revival in advanced manufacturing.
“He’s been an incredible force for bringing advanced manufacturing back, shipbuilding, submarine building. You know his vision that America needs to be at the forefront of our defense capability, but also that we need to be a place where we build things again, and using those skilled craftsmen we have—the welders, the pipe fitters, the steam fitters—to make sure they’re focused on the things that are going to make sure America has that strength,” he said.
“So we’ve seen enormous investment in Pennsylvania over the last 12 months since he’s been president, the amount of defense spending has gone up by about 30 percent,” he added. “What I’m trying to do here is make sure that we accelerate the path on rebuilding our defense capability, and frankly, it’s been broken. The procurement process has been broken. It’s too slow. We’ve had, you know, these major defense contractors that sort of own the space, and we need to have new emergent players also push the competition and the innovation. And we think Pennsylvania — and I think this summit reinforces — we think Pennsylvania should be at the front of that.”
During the interview, McCormick also noted that the summit’s purpose “is to reinforce President Trump’s agenda of peace through strength and the transformation that needs to take place in our defense industry, and make sure Pennsylvania is at the forefront.”
“We’re the point of the spear in delivering on that promise, and we’ve got a lot to offer, and into today at this summit we have 1,300 participants, we have 600 C-level executives, we have 500 companies, we have all the major defense contractors, many of the big defense investors, the president, his cabinet, the leader of building trades, the president of the building trades for the United States, so we’ve got all the right people in the room to push on this critical agenda,” he said.
Indeed, among those on hand from the private sector for the two-day event were prominent defense CEOs like Northrop Grumman’s Kathy Warden and Lockheed Martin’s James Taiclet, executives from major AI companies like Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar and Head of Defense Mike Gallagher, and from the banking world, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon.
Top federal and local officials like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) were all in town, with many participating in panels.
Caine was the keynote speaker on the first day of the affair, and after thanking McCormick for organizing the event, he spoke about the importance of the partnership among those in the tech and defense sectors, investors and capital allocators, and military officials and officers.
“The way I think about this is the three amigos of America’s defense: funders, founders, and fighters, and you’ve got to have all three to drive America’s combat capability,” Caine told the audience here at the War College. “The collective brain power, energy, and experience of all of you in this room represents what I believe to be America’s single greatest strategic advantage, and that’s each and every one of you. It’s a powerful reminder, and we… should never forget this: that when we go fight our nation’s wars, we never do it alone. It is always with our private sector partners.”
The chairman laid out what the military needs from the private sector, including on the AI front, after distinguishing the lack of time that military leaders have to make decisions in today’s world of extremely fast-paced information sharing, compared to the “time and space” leaders of the past had.
“The new reality of modern warfare, my friends, is competition at a speed and velocity that we haven’t planned for. And the integration of AI represents a whole new world for the U.S. military, but for our nation as a whole, fundamentally transforming how we see, sense, understand, and decide and act in modern competition and potentially conflict, and we’ve got to harness these technologies right now,” Caine said.
“And your joint force is entering an era in which real-time data, autonomous systems, human-to-machine teaming is not an option; it’s a requirement, and that’s why events like this here in Pennsylvania, the partnerships forged tonight between the joint force, entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and like I said, founders, funders, and fighters is so important,” he added. “You are critical in this line of effort to ensure that we are prepared if we are called upon; it’s you in this room, the people who write the code, build the sensors, design the capabilities, manufacture the capabilities, scale those capabilities so that we end up making sure that those young members of our all-volunteer force have the combat capability and capacity that they need before I ask them to go do something.”
Caine urged the innovators in the room to move even “faster,” acknowledging that it is easier said by him than carried out by them.
“What I need you to know, and I know this is simple for me to say, but hard to do, is to go faster. Please, go faster. Think bolder. Stay focused on real problems that soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, guardians, and coast guardsmen face every single day,” he told those in the Root Hall auditorium. “To everyone, to everyone — and I say this having spent time in the private sector and now back in the military — we all need to deliver quality weapons, delivered on time with shorter lead times and at lower costs.”
A drone at McCormick’s Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit (Matthew Perdie / Breitbart News)
He then pivoted to what the armed services can do for their private sector partners, including being better buyers.
“We owe you to be better buyers, to write better contracts, to be more predictable in our asks, and we’re working on this, but we cannot do this alone,” Caine said. “And I appreciate the efforts, the leadership, and the actions that Congress is doing on both sides of the Congress and on both sides of the aisle to help us properly arm America’s joint force before we need to go use it, so we’ve got to all keep going. Collectively, we all have to have a deep and shared sense of urgency and a clear-eyed understanding of risk.”
Caine’s remarks concluded the first day of the summit.
In the lead-up to Trump’s remarks on the second day, prominent officials, executives, and educators participated in panels, with the aim of driving further investment in Pennsylvania’s defense industrial base, bringing companies, investors, and innovators together in partnerships, and ensuring America’s national security serving as common themes.
A humanoid robot named “Digit” from Agility Robotics at McCormick’s summit. (Matthew Perdie / Breitbart News)
Gov. Shapiro was at the War College on day two and joined McCormick, Penn State University President Dr. Neeli Bendapudi, Hanwha Defense USA CEO Michael Coulter, and General Dynamics President Danny Deep on a panel. Shapiro’s presence and participation underscored the bipartisan support for McCormick’s smash-hit summit.
When each member of the panel was asked what their “dream for the summit” was, Shapiro praised McCormick for putting it together and underscored that the most important conversations were the private ones taking place among industry leaders in the hallways that could potentially drive more investment into Pennsylvania and help ensure America’s national security.
“I think the defense industrial base is changing rapidly. The fact that the senator has brought us all here together to create those partnerships with our tech companies, with our universities, with our traditional primes, with government, with the private sector, organized labor—that is only going to yield positive things for our national security and for our Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro told those on the panel.
“As I mentioned before, I’m proud of the fact that we’ve got a growing economy, 5.4 percent last year. I’m hungry to get to six, you mentioned we’re third in the country in that data you said. Third’s great; I want to be first. I want us to continue to create jobs and economic opportunity, and I think the defense space, with all the promise that it has, ends up being a key part of our growth in this Commonwealth,” he continued. “And so, my hope, based on this summit that the senator organized here, is not so much the conversations that take place up here, but the private conversations that you all have in the hallways that lead to commercial activity, that leads to more job creation in Pennsylvania, leads to more prosperity for Pennsylvanians, and most importantly, more national security for the United States.”
A robot reminiscent of a dog from Ghost robotics at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit. (Matthew Perdie / Breitbart News)
McCormick said he envisions the summit as “a catalyst that really creates more questions than it answers” and that participants should leave eager to do more, work in collaboration, and “to follow up on creating the kind of change that everybody on this panel has talked about.”
“We’re on the cusp, but we have to really drive a dramatic transformation in how we think about national security and who’s leading the charge, and we got a lot of those potential leaders in this room,” he said.
Another key panel on Wednesday featured Leoffler and Waltz, and both spoke with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow in exclusive interviews afterward about how the event is a rare intersection where the small business administrator and the ambassador to the United Nations can work closely in tandem.
Waltz said the shortest way to explain the “odd pairing” is to keep “the globalists out of the way of our industries and our companies and our small businesses.”
“You know, everything that is regulated and often overregulated federally is also regulated internationally: shipping, ports, telecommunications, undersea cables, space, spectrum; except instead of having some faceless bureaucrat making the rules in Washington, now you’ve got an international bureaucrat that could be from China, the EU, whomever writing the rules,” Waltz told Marlow. “And so a huge part of my job is to get in there and fight and win for our industries, for the very small businesses that Kelly Loeffler is trying to help.”
“And I laid out some of those success stories,” Waltz said, reflecting on his remarks during the panel. “One of them — there’s an International Maritime Organization, never heard of it, right? It was within a week of putting the world’s first global carbon tax on every ship in the world. It would have amounted to over a billion dollars a month that one, would have been passed on to American consumers, and two, would have then made this like climate slush fund for the UN to the tune of $15 billion a year. We got in there and fought and won and defeated it to the point where the EU ambassador called us ‘diplomatic gangsters.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, so we’re getting our diplomatic gangster T-shirts made.’”
Loeffler told Marlow she “had no idea” she would ever end up on a panel with Waltz, but said the session was “very productive” and underscored overregulation concerns as Waltz did.
“In fact, we said let’s take the show on the road and talk more about the importance and… from his perspective, just zooming in, you know, he’s looking at the global impacts on American producers from the top down, and I’m looking bottom up, saying, ‘What are we doing in our own country that is limiting production?’ Whether it’s massively overregulating, as they did during the Biden administration, applying trillions of dollars of excessive Green New Deal garbage regulations on our small producers, things like that,” she said. “And then just talking about how the defense industrial base here, the strength is a deterrence and, you know, peace through strength mechanism around the world. So it shows we’re working… for the same purpose from different directions.”
McCormick’s highly impressive summit this week comes a year after his Pennsylvania Energy & Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University, where he and Trump announced $92 billion in investments into the commonwealth.
Breitbart News asked McCormick what might be the next hottest topic, which no one may be talking about yet, following his two world-class summits.
“Well, I don’t know if nobody’s talking about it, but a third area that offers huge promise for Pennsylvania is life sciences, biosciences, pharmaceuticals,” he said. “I mean, our pharmaceutical costs are through the roof. We’re dependent on China. Life sciences is enabled by AI… In many ways, in Pennsylvania, we’ve solved blood cancers. We found many of the cures for blood cancers at the CAR T lab in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, rather. So this is the next big frontier. We need to do all these things, and Pennsylvania can be at the lead.”