With President Trump’s inauguration coming up soon and Beijing already levying new export restrictions and sanctions, 2025 promises to be an eventful year for the U.S.-China trade war. And while the impact is likely to be widespread, Beijing is explicitly targeting the American defense sector.

The actions by China are forcing a reckoning with the uncomfortable reality that America has outsourced large parts of its military supply chain to President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Breaking this dependency will require incentivizing the private sector to find and create alternatives.

Successfully infiltrating an adversary’s supply chain presents opportunities to conduct devastating acts of sabotage. Last September’s detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies by Israel is a prime example. It also enables exceptionally effective espionage. After covertly acquiring a company that sold cryptography machines, American and West German intelligence were able to read the classified communications of dozens of countries for the next half century.

Such coups typically require significant effort and no small amount of luck. Sometimes nations inadvertently compromise themselves. Germany and Japan’s widespread use of forced labor during World War II gave their prisoners ample opportunity to sabotage the production of everything from

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