The ABCs of National Security

Capstones, December 2, 2025

“The Armed Forces themselves are nothing but the cutting edge of a great machine that must have power and must be properly applied, must be sustained in all its strength, before it can be effective,” President Dwight Eisenhower observed in the early chapters of Cold War I. “The vital source of all our military strength,” he added, is “an industrious and productive America.”

If we hope to power and sustain a military capable of deterring China and Russia and their partners, if we intend to keep Cold War II from turning any hotter, if we aim to be prepared for the unpredictable national security challenges that await us in the coming years, the American people must be as industrious and productive as they were during Cold War I.

America’s Heartland is postured to do its part by contributing to the arsenal of democracy, the breadbasket of democracy and the circuitry of democracy—what might be called “the ABCs of national security.”

Arsenal of Democracy
“The defense of the United States is accomplished by all the United States,” Eisenhower explained. He knew this innately because he saw what the great arsenal of democracy—anchored in America’s Heartland—had achieved to win World War II.

Ford’s plant in Michigan produced a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes. Just a year after shifting to wartime production, Chrysler’s Michigan plant had delivered its 2,000th tank. In a single month in 1942, the Chrysler factory churned out 907 tanks. Republic’s plant in Indiana built 6,242 P-47s. Boeing’s plant in Kansas pumped out 1,644 B-29s. Martin’s Nebraska plant produced 1,585 B-26s and more than 500 B-29s. Shipbuilders in Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois produced 600,000 tons of warships during the war. Eleven shipbuilders based along the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Illinois Rivers built 900,000 tons’ worth of warships. Evansville Shipyard in Indiana alone produced 167 landing-assault ships. Factories in northern Indiana processed uranium that helped end World War II and then bolstered America for Cold War I.

Indeed, although the nature of conflict changed, the need to defend our democracy and deter our enemies continued after the defeat of the Axis Powers. And the Heartland continued to make outsized and often-overlooked contributions to the common defense. Shipbuilders along the shores of the Great Lakes produced 67,000 tons’ worth of warships between 1950 and 1956. Proving grounds in Indiana tested and refined weapons systems throughout Cold War I. More than a hundred nuclear-capable B-52 bombers were built in Kansas. ICBM sites could be found in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Missouri. Ohio and Tennessee were among the states that provided nuclear material and components for those weapons.

Fast-forward to the present day, and the free world’s defenders are still relying on America’s Heartland: artillery shells and antitank rounds made in Iowa, forged with steel from Ohio and shell casings from Pennsylvania; fuel produced and refined in Ohio and Illinois; propulsion systems, unmanned aircraft, fighter-bombers and smart bombs produced in Missouri; tanks, drones and AI-enabled systems built in Ohio; fighter-bombers refurbished in Ohio and sustained by production lines in Wisconsin; light-transport vehicles and assault vehicles built in Wisconsin and Indiana; hypersonic systems and their payloads integrated in Indiana; warships constructed and tested in Wisconsin; antiship missiles built in South Dakota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio and Minnesota. And as it did during Cold War I, the Heartland holds America’s ultimate deterrent and last line of defense: The prairielands of North Dakota still bristle with hundreds of ICBMs. Among the states hosting America’s nuclear-capable bombers are Missouri (B-2s) and North Dakota (B-52s). America’s next-generation nuclear bomber (the B-21) will be based in South Dakota and Missouri.

Add it all up, and the Heartland is playing a central role stocking the arsenal of democracy. Indeed, wherever democracy is in the crosshairs—Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan—free men and women are relying on tools and technologies from America’s Heartland to defend themselves.

Breadbasket of Democracy
The free world cannot survive on weapons alone, of course. America’s Heartland is the breadbasket of democracy—providing food and other essentials to feed and sustain the free world.

Napoleon is credited with saying, “An army runs on its stomach.” Not surprisingly, America’s breadbasket is helping feed America’s military: Ameriqual in Indiana and Wornick in Ohio are producing and packing meals for our troops on the frontlines.

However, it’s not just armies that depend on food from America’s Heartland; entire nations do. 

Elanco (headquartered in Indiana) produces medicines and other products that ensure productive and sustainable dairy-cattle herds; protect meat-producing cattle, swine and poultry herds and flocks from disease; and contribute to healthy animal herds in 90 countries. ADM (headquartered in Illinois) develops and delivers medicines, feed additives, and fertilizers that ensure healthy and growing farms, crops and livestock sources that feed much of the world. Numerous other agriscience companies and agriculture-focused universities in the Heartland—Penn State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois, Corteva/Pioneer, Plastomics—produce disease-resistant crops, herbicides, and insecticides that save and sustain millions of human lives.

Six states—Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Michigan—account for 18 percent of global corn production and 13 percent of global soybean production. About 50 percent of America’s wheat is exported annually, with Kansas and Nebraska leading in U.S. wheat production.

What’s all this have to do with national security?

First, hungry people are desperate people, and desperate people will do anything to survive—including migrating by the millions or even waging war against their neighbors. Either of these can threaten America’s security, as history reminds us.

Second, wars and other manmade scourges create food and other resource deficits. For example, before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the country once known as “Europe’s breadbasket” accounted for 10 percent of global wheat supply and 15 percent of global corn supply, with countries such the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, Thailand, Indonesia and Tunisia especially reliant on Ukraine’s cereal crops.

With Ukrainian croplands scorched by Putin’s war and many Ukrainian farmers fighting for their land rather than tilling it, U.S. corn production increased in 2023 by more than 12 percent, and U.S. wheat production increased in 2023 by more than 9.3 percent and again in 2024 by more than 9.2 percent.

Circuitry of Democracy
Finally, we come to the circuitry of democracy. Silicon Valley may get the most of the publicity, but America’s Heartland is imagining and producing many of the technologies that serve as the brains for the systems and weapons that protect us. (The list of Heartland contributions in this area is long and growing longer, as detailed by the work of Sagamore’s Midwest Defense Forum.)

“In the last 30 years,” as Defense News reports, “the U.S. has gone from producing 37 percent of the global microchip supply to about 12 percent.”

To reverse this trend, the Pentagon is investing $238 million to assist industry and academic partners in standing up regional microchip hubs. Two of those hubs are located in the very heart of America’s Heartland: Ohio and Indiana.

Data tallied by the Semiconductor Industry Association reveals that more than four dozen semiconductor fabricators, precursor facilities, materials manufacturers and university partners are clustered in nine Midwestern states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

Semiconductor giant MediaTek is building a chip-design center at Purdue University in Indiana, and SK-Hynix (the world’s leading producer of high-bandwidth memory chips) is spending $3.87 billion on an R&D facility in West Lafayette, Indiana—all part of an emerging microelectronics ecosystem in that region of Indiana.

The federal government has invested $325 million in Hemlock Semiconductor in Michigan to boost production of polysilicon—an essential ingredient for microchips and a material found in virtually every modern electronic device.

Most dramatic of all, Intel is pouring more than $20 billion into an Ohio facility primed to become the world’s largest chip-making campus and what the company calls its “most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility.” Over the next several years, Intel plans to invest $100 billion into its Ohio campus.

In the information-technology space, Battelle Memorial Institute (Ohio), University of Chicago–Argonne (Illinois), Harris (Pennsylvania) and STG (Michigan) are among the top 40 federal IT providers. Northrup-Grumman’s facility in Illinois is engineering new software and hardware systems for America’s defenders, while Raytheon’s facility in Indiana focuses on cyber-resilience and circuit-card design and production. An L3Harris facility in northern Indiana is primed to provide on-orbit technology support to the forthcoming Golden Dome national missile defense system.

The University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Purdue University and University of Wisconsin are charting the new frontier of quantum

computing. DARPA and Silicon Valley firms are standing up operations at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, which sits north of Chicago.

In the related area of artificial intelligence, the National Science Foundation is funding AI research institutes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. And perhaps the most important contribution of all on the AI front comes from America’s Heartland: The University of Notre Dame recently brought together hundreds of thinkers and executives from the tech sector, faith community, academia, civil society, and government to begin grappling with the new and rapidly changing AI frontier.

“We still have the capacity to direct how this history-altering technology goes,” cautions Meghan Sullivan, director of the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. “But we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and do that work.”

Up
That’s exactly what the Heartland is doing as America and the rest of the free world wade ever deeper into Cold War II—rolling up our sleeves, building up our defenses, stocking our food storehouses, and designing and refining new technologies for our defenders.