During a press conference with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at The Pentagon March 31, 2026, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Dan Caine made a statement thanking those that design, create and make America’s military weaponry.
“24/7 they build the tools that we need to do our business,” General Caine said.”The skill, the commitment, the patriotism, the dedication poured into every piece of combat capability and hardware is seen and felt out at the edge of the of the force… You can see it. You can feel it. And, and it’s real. And we’re grateful.”
General Caine’s complete statement:
Today I want to talk a little bit about a different frontline, a line that doesn’t have bunkers or guard posts, but it’s just as critical to our national security: our national assembly lines,
Today, I want to recognize a group of Americans who live at the beginning of our nation’s combat power – the Americans who actually make our weapons both inside our defense industrial base, but even more broadly inside our national industrial base.
In every military option, we could not and cannot do our jobs without the men and women across our country who show up every day around the clock to a factory floor, a workshop, a laboratory, who build the weapons and capabilities we need to project American combat power.
At the time and place of our choosing, these great Americans, and I’ve had a chance to spend some time with them when I was in the private sector, are the core of American combat power. They’re the machinists running high tech CNC machines, cutting raw blocks of metal into incredibly precise parts. They’re the assembly workers, painstakingly taking a kit of parts and turning that into a complex guidance system, or precision munition, or a rocket motor, or building a jet or submarine. Or they’re quality assurance technicians who ensure that when a war fighter pulls a trigger, the weapon works every time.
This can be and is tough and gritty work. It’s not a quiet office and a desk with paper, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But this is exactly the way this group of Americans likes it. I know this. I’ve seen it myself, and I remain deeply honored by the IBF.
It’s often loud and dangerous work, demanding, that requires absolute focus for hours at a time with deep commitment to get it right every single time. It’s hands on work where one uncaught mistake or deviation can put an American’s life at risk. A single misplaced wire, a microscopic flaw, and a weld. Incorrectly calibrated sensor could mean the difference between mission success or mission failure.
The difference is measured in the lives of our sons and daughters who we put out around the field and on the field of battle. We rely on and trust in these great Americans, and it’s not just their manufacturing skill. It’s their innovative minds and their entrepreneurial spirit, from those who build exquisite capabilities down to the mom-and-pop machine shops all over this great country.
They live at the beginning of and the core of America’s combat capability. Constantly adapting, constantly improving, constantly learning. There are examples of this throughout history and current days to include building things like the F-117 stealth fighter, the B-2 stealth bomber, making our combat capability undetectable over the enemy, to today’s B-21 and F-47.
It’s work, like in the shipyards of the East Coast and Northeast side of the United States, that go out and build America’s nuclear submarines, that allow us to patrol around the world at the time and place of our choosing.
These innovators, these workers, these incredible Americans don’t get the same glory as a fighter pilot returning to a carrier deck at night or an artillery man sending rounds downrange, and yet they show up every single day and without them we could not do the work that we are tasked to do.
24/7 they build the tools that we need to do our business. The skill, the commitment, the patriotism, the dedication poured into every piece of combat capability and hardware is seen and felt out at the edge of the of the force – as the secretary talked about those young bomb builders out in the desert that he had the chance to see. You can see it. You can feel it. And, and it’s real.
We’re deeply grateful.
So to the American workforce out there, both inside our defense industrial base and in our national industrial base, thank you on behalf of the joint force. We carry the weapons that you build. We rely on the systems that you create. The distance from that factory and that assembly line to the front line is incredibly short. Thank you! Keep it up!
And to our adversaries out there, I remind you to beware of the American workforce.
