He’s drafted important legislation, and has recently been focusing on the airline industry, labor issues, and a lot of the major antitrust litigation I’ve written about here, including the trials of the Meta-Within merger, the Microsoft-Activision acquisition and the Google monopolization case.

One of the more important side stories to the recent wars in Ukraine and Israel, and competition with China over Taiwan, is that the U.S. defense industrial base, composed of 200k plus corporations, is being forced to actually build weapons again.

In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police.

To put it in boring GAO-speak, Pentagon “officials could not say with certainty how many defense-related M&A now occur annually because they no longer track or maintain data on all M&A in the defense industrial base.” So the DOD is almost totally blind to the corporate owners of contractors and subcontractors, which might be one reason that, say, Chinese alloys are being discovered in sensitive weapons systems like the state of the art F-35.

They do no analysis of industry sectors, as their “M&A office is not collecting robust data or conducting recurring trend analyses that could help them identify M&A in risky areas of consolidation among defense suppliers.”

The FTC and DOJ now have significant amounts of national security-related information on mergers due to a Congressional change in pre-merger notification laws in 2022, so the DOD could easily do a better job of tracking what’s happening in the defense base.

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