WASHINGTON — America’s defense industry needs “generational” change to keep pace with competitors like Russia and China.

This is the Pentagon’s assessment in its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, released Thursday. The document is a self-described “call to action,” with almost 50 pages of recommendations to build a “fully capable 21st century” industrial base.

The strategy shows the Pentagon’s most up to date thinking on the health of its suppliers, stretched thin after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic. America still builds the best weapons in the world, the strategy says, but that alone isn’t enough in a more competitive world.

The U.S. “must have the capacity to produce those capabilities at speed and scale to maximize our advantage,” it says.

That advantage may be narrowing in part because of America’s main competitor. In the last 30 years, the document says, China “became the global industrial powerhouse in many key areas — from shipbuilding to critical minerals to microelectronics.” China’s capacity, the document says, in some cases surpasses that of America and its allies in Asia and Europe.

But Cynthia Cook, a defense industry expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told Defense News that concern over China is only a part of the Pentagon’s thinking toward its industrial base.

“I would not say that that’s the entire purpose ... behind the strategy,” she said.

Instead, Cook said, the strategy is meant to be the summit of more than six years of Pentagon work — made more urgent by wars in Ukraine and Israel and the pandemic. Former President Donald Trump ordered the Defense Department to review its industrial base early in his term, leading to a report issued in 2018. Since then, more reviews have followed, including one on supplier competitiveness.

“All of these factors together make it fairly clear that it’s time for a rethink of how the department manages industry,” said Cook. “Without a strategy, it’s going to be one-offs here and there.”

The document is split into four sections, focusing on supply chains, workforce, Pentagon acquisition and the American economy overall. The recommendations include diversifying the Defense Department’s suppliers, training more workers for industry-related careers, increasing commercial acquisitions and sharing more technology with U.S. partners.

Neither the problems nor the remedies listed are new. They aren’t meant to be, said Cook, who is hosting Pentagon officials for a rollout of the strategy later Thursday. The value of the strategy, she said, is its ability to coordinate industrial base work across the Pentagon, including in the services.

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante said the document is also meant to be a signal to industry. The strategy argues the Pentagon needs to show its suppliers more stable commitment and better recruit non-traditional companies.

“We’ve got to show that we’re going to production and we’re going to stick with it so that it’s worth your while,” said LaPlante.

That said, some former defense officials and analysts who spoke with Defense News were skeptical of that value. Heidi Peters, a defense industry expert at the RAND Corporation think tank, wondered why there needed to be a new strategy when the Pentagon already publishes so much literature on the topic.

David Berteau, president of the Professional Services Council, which represents government contractors, said the strategy was a good “first step,” but he wants to see more attention paid to sustaining systems rather than just buying them.

Even more, Berteau said he was focused on how the strategy would be implemented, something he said is “more important than the strategy itself.”

While reshaping the defense industry may take a generation, the document said, it has shorter-term goals for the next three to five years. A classified plan to implement those will appear in a classified report, to be issued later.

Doing so successfully will likely require funding from Congress, which hasn’t passed its routine spending bills, including for the Defense Department.

Still, Berteau said he is confident the strategy wouldn’t fall into the Pentagon ether.

“You can get a lot done in the last year of a four-year term,” he said.

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.