Allies are more than customers of America’s defense industrial base. They can help rebuild it.

Cell guides on the Ane Maersk, A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S’s newest methanol-powered container ship, foreground, at the HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea, on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024. (Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Trump administration officials speak often of the responsibility of American allies and partners to do more for the common defense.

The good news for Washington is that most of those countries agree. This is particularly true in Asia, where Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea are increasingly unsettled by Chinese maritime coercion. In response, they have sought to build-up their military capabilities and deepen their cooperation with the United States in the interests of preserving a favorable balance of power.

Yet there are differences between the administration and its allies over how best to burden share. Trump’s team have touted larger and more timely Foreign Military Sales as their preferred means for doing so. But for many allies, simply buying American weaponry — much of which won’t arrive for years — is no longer enough. They want to help design and build it, too.

It’s in that context that the looming reform blitz at the Pentagon must account for what allies can and should contribute to the foundations of American military power.

The reality is that America needs the help of these same countries to develop and produce the very capabilities that it hopes they will purchase — let alone to meet the Trump administration’s goals of rebuilding the US defense industrial base.

Rarely has US defense industrial capacity and technological prowess been under such strain. The COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and high-intensity operations in the Middle East have sapped Washington’s ability to meet both its own and its allies’ material defense needs. In Asia, these challenges are compounding with legacy maintenance and production shortfalls and with China’s growing ability to contest US military logistics, all of which pose serious challenges to America’s long-term strategic position in the region.

It’s no coincidence, then, that defense industrial and technology cooperation has become central to modernizing America’s Indo-Pacific alliances.

Indeed, partners like Australia, India, Japan and South Korea are increasingly willing and able make direct contributions to the industrial and technological foundations of American military power. This is exactly what defense innovation initiatives like AUKUS and INDUS-X, along with ship maintenance and munitions co-production agreements with all four countries, are intended to facilitate.

Trump’s team now have the chance to own that agenda.

The early signs have been encouraging. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s early engagements with his Australian and Indian counterparts and Navy Secretary John Phelan’s recent visits to Japanese and Korean shipyards have reflected an appreciation of the role that allies can play in revitalizing the US defense industrial base, through making their world-beating technologies and production capacities available to the Pentagon.

But maximizing these contributions will require reforming the ways in which the Pentagon develops and procures weaponry to make it easier for allies to work with Washington.

Fortunately, both Trump and Congress are clearly intent on doing just that. Trump’s April 9 executive order directed the Pentagon to submit plans for a “comprehensive overhaul” of relevant policy and workforce functions within the next 120 days. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker’s Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense (FORGED) Act similarly proposes a sweeping overhaul to regulations and policy settings governing the way that the Pentagon buys what it needs.

These proposals emphasize speed, flexibility, and embracing commercially available solutions in the interests of outpacing Chinese and Russian military innovation and scale. But they leave it rather unclear as to where allies fit into these plans beyond buying what America is selling.

Continuing to overlook allied advantages would run contrary to the administration’s objective of bringing disruptive new players into the US defense industrial base. In other words, reforms to the Pentagon’s business practices would be incomplete without revisions to the ways in which the department works with allies and their companies, not just how they purchase American weaponry.

At a minimum, this should include directives for US acquisition officials to actively consider allied solutions, particularly for priorities like AI, hypersonics, quantum and unmanned systems — all areas where American allies have plenty to offer. Reforms could also revisit contracting and tender processes that disadvantage non-US companies, and fine-tune export controls and information-sharing practices to encourage allies to more readily share their technologies without fear of losing control of them.

Trump could also revise US policy settings vis-a-vis international agreements like the Missile Technology Control Regime which limit what the US can arm its partners with and, perhaps more importantly, inhibit co-development and co-production initiatives through the likes of AUKUS.

Making it easier for allies to work with the Pentagon will make it easier for them to share the burdens of collective security in an increasingly insecure world. Australia, India, Japan and South Korea are ready and willing to do so, and support reforms to that end. But these efforts will only succeed if the Trump administration accounts for what these countries have to offer America’s defense industrial base, not just what they might buy from it.

Tom Corben is a research fellow in the foreign policy and defense program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.