What Changed? | The U.S. is slipping into a familiar pattern: when private demand feels uneven, Washington's most reliable "order book" becomes the backstop. What's different this cycle is that defense demand is no longer just about readiness. It is starting to behave like industrial policy—shaping factory utilization, supplier expansion, and capital spending decisions that usually depend on consumer-led growth. | The FY 2026 defense funding path reinforces that shift. Appropriators have coalesced around a base defense topline of about $838.7B, while the FY 2026 NDAA authorizes a higher level for Department of Defense programs. The signal to industry is straightforward: demand is multi-year, politically durable, and increasingly tied to domestic capacity. | | The Lithium Boom | | Did you know it takes 10,000 iPhone batteries worth of lithium to make one EV battery pack? With 350M+ EVs projected to be sold globally by 2030, lithium demand is looking steep. | Current recovery methods involve waiting for liquids to evaporate in ponds the size of 100 football fields. This inefficiency can't keep up with forecasted demand. But EnergyX's technology can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods. | Investors are taking note. EnergyX has $130M+ of investments from General Motors and others. They even earned a $5M DOE grant. | Now, they're scaling their 100,000-acre Chilean project, which has a potential target annual revenue of $1.1B. | Perfect timing. You can still join 40,000+ people as an early-stage investor today. | *Disclaimer: This is a paid advertisement for EnergyX's Regulation A+ Offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.energyx.com. Under Regulation A+, a company has the ability to change its share price by up to 20%, without requalifying the offering with the SEC. | | The Numbers | FY 2026 Defense Appropriations conference summary: $838.7B base discretionary topline. FY 2026 NDAA authorization cited at $856B for DoD programs (context: continuing-resolution baseline comparisons). Top five U.S. defense primes' capex is projected to rise about 38% to $10.08B in 2026, per Melius Research. Business equipment investment rose at a 5.2% annual rate in Q3 2025, even as "core" capital goods orders looked more modest late in 2025. Congressional Research Service notes multiyear procurement (2–5 year contracts) is designed to lock in production runs and supplier commitments—useful when surge capacity is the goal. U.S. Government Accountability Office has flagged ongoing industrial-base risks, including supply-chain visibility and foreign-dependence concerns that complicate rapid scaling.
| | Why It Matters | For markets, the defense impulse changes the texture of "growth." Instead of waiting for households to spend more, the marginal demand shows up through longer procurement timelines, steadier backlog conversion, and supplier onboarding that supports utilization across aerospace, electronics, metals, and specialty manufacturing. | That has two investable implications. First, margins become less about quarterly volume and more about execution: qualifying second sources, reducing sole-source bottlenecks, and investing in throughput without breaking quality. Second, the capex cycle shifts from discretionary to quasi-mandated. When policy leans on delivery speed, contractors are nudged to trade shareholder returns for plant, labor, and tooling—exactly the kind of reallocation that can sustain an industrial upcycle even if consumer spending cools. | The risk is timing. Procurement is sticky, but not fast: multiyear contracts help, yet supply chains and workforce pipelines do not rebuild overnight. That gap—strong demand signals meeting constrained capacity—is where both upside (pricing power, high utilization) and downside (missed deliveries, penalties, political scrutiny) live. | | Takeaway | Defense spending is increasingly acting like an anchor tenant for the U.S. industrial base. The key signal to watch is not the headline topline, but whether procurement structure and capacity investment stay aligned—because that is what turns budgets into real output. | — Lauren
Editor, American Ledger | Resources | Senate Appropriations Committee, January 2026
https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/download/fy26-defense-bill-summary-conferenced | Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, January 2026
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/assessing-fy-2026-appropriations | Reuters, February 2026
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-defense-firms-boost-spending-after-trump-calls-expedited-arms-deliveries-2026-02-02/ | Reuters, January 2026
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-factory-orders-rebound-november-commercial-aircraft-demand-2026-01-29/ | Congressional Research Service, December 2025
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41909 |
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