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The Once and Future US National Technology and Industrial Base: An American Perspective
AEI
2025.10.10
The United States’ National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB) is a congressionally mandated policy framework intended to foster integration and collaboration between defence companies and authorities based in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The NTIB remains among the most readily available yet underutilised instruments for alliance-based industrial integration for US policymakers. This stems from a combination of cumbersome and outdated regulatory measures, government-unique acquisition processes, protectionist instincts in both major political parties, bureaucratic inertia and a growing distrust of multilateralism.

The expanded NTIB was intended to serve three related purposes: to better equip the United States with the industrial capacity and sources of technological innovation required to compete with China; to address long-standing barriers to such cooperation with allies and partners; and as a legislative means to insulate alliance integration imperatives from domestic protectionist instincts.

Despite being amended in 2017 and 2023 to encompass all Five Eyes nations, the NTIB has seemingly been ignored in favour of bilateral projects or other multilateral arrangements such as AUKUS, even though many of these partnerships face the same challenges as those that the expanded NTIB was intended to address. Successive administrations have also struggled to reconcile the NTIB’s integration objectives with political pressures to prioritise domestic products and parallel struggles to reform outdated defence acquisition processes.

These challenges are readily observable in the second Trump administration. Though willing to pursue politically difficult regulatory and cultural reform, the administration has yet to articulate a role for allies in its defence industrial strategy beyond buying US weaponry, while tariffs and other protectionist measures threaten to further complicate key defence cooperation initiatives like AUK