Testimony · Administration
Colby at confirmation: alliances of capable industry, not permanent dependency.
The Under Secretary of Defense for Policy nominee tells Senate Armed Services that allied industrial capacity is a structural deterrence requirement, not a goodwill gesture.
A favorable balance of power requires capable allies with real military strength, real industrial capacity, and real political resolve. President Trump has consistently argued that alliances are strongest when they are based on shared responsibility rather than permanent dependency.
Colby's testimony is the defense-side foundation of the doctrine. The pairing is exact: real military strength, real industrial capacity, real political resolve, and it makes private operator commercial bases inseparable from host-country defensibility. The same allies who carry the deterrence burden have to be capable of defending the industrial base that lets them carry it.
The line about national mobilization later in the same hearing, arming both U.S. forces and partners at scale, quickly, and at a reasonable price, reads as the procurement complement to Forward Deployed Industrial Base logic. Capital legibility is a design requirement of deterrence, not a financial nicety.