Prior to his current position, Patrick N. Kelleher was the prin- cipal deputy director for Strategic Logistics, Joint Staf, J4. Earlier, he served as executive director for operations and sus- tainment at the Defense Logistics Agency. Kelleher was interviewed July 22, 2025, by Defense Acquisi- tion managing editor Benjamin Tyree. Q Please share any specifc initiatives and what results you hope to see in the near and long term that are possible in terms of U.S. reindustrialization. A. The [government-owned] organic industrial base, or OIB, is an important component of the overall defense in- dustrial base. And I always like to make that point because I think a lot of times, when we use the term defense indus- trial base, people by default believe that we’re only thinking about the commercial industrial base. And so, I do like to remind folks at the outset that the defense industrial base writ large has two components, the commercial industrial base and the OIB. The OIB and U.S. industrial capacity generally are very much priorities for the DoD in making sure that we have the depth and resilience that we need. And this is not just to take care of any challenges today but to be prepared for protracted confict if it ever comes to that. So, we have an awful lot going on, as you can imagine, across the OIB. And all of the Services are doing great work. They are focusing on the challenges associated with maintaining legacy plat- forms, developing and maintaining a sustainment strategy for aircraft or what have you that are now 30, 40, or more years old. As part of that, we’re looking at emergent requirements and how we can leverage the OIB to assist the department. The OIB exists to provide depth, agility, and responsive- ness to emergent DoD requirements. I’ll highlight three initiatives that we’re working on. First, with the recent focus on critical minerals and the obvious importance of establishing greater independence with regard to critical minerals and the production of items that require critical minerals, we’re initiating a study to assess how we potentially could pivot the department’s industrial capacity aspects to reclamation capability of critical material. The DoD throws away an awful lot of excess every day, and there are quite a bit of harvestable resources avail- able in things we are disposing of that perhaps we could capitalize on more efectively. Now organizations like the Defense Logistics Agency [DLA] are already ahead of the game and thinking about this and looking at ways to en- sure that we have the capability to reclaim aspects of what we’re throwing away. But I think there’s a potential to assess across the OIB how we could more deliberately create a reclamation ca- pability and pivot from conducting maintenance to using that industrial capacity to disassemble excess and harvest critical material. We have a study underway that I think will be very in- formative in helping the department shoot its way forward
- - A sailor stationed at Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center show cases a gas turbine engine to Patrick Kelleher, deputy assistant secre tary of defense for materiel readiness, during a visit onboard at Naval Station Norfolk, in Va., Aug. 7, 2024. Source: U.S. Navy photo by Harrison Cox This image was cropped to show detail and was edited using multiple flters plus dodging and burning techniques.
September-October 2025 | DEFENSE ACQUISITION | 7
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