President Donald Trump wants defense companies to ramp up weapons and ship manufacturing, but the workers that would be needed to supersize the Pentagon’s arsenal are in increasingly short supply.
Less than half of the aerospace and defense executives surveyed by PwC and the Aerospace Industries Association said they were confident that their companies could double production within 18 months, according to findings published Wednesday. Seventy-four percent identified a shortage of skilled labor as a major constraint.
The survey underscores a major obstacle confronting Trump’s push to quadruple munitions production, accelerate submarine construction and expand the nation’s shipbuilding industry: Manufacturers are competing for a limited pool of blue-collar workers with the specialized skills to crank up factory output.
“We don’t have the luxury of a built-in manufacturing labor force,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Connecticut), a lawmaker who has spearheaded training programs for shipbuilding in his state.
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Defense companies consistently say that they’re struggling to recruit and keep skilled workers, in part because many experienced workers are aging out. A 2025 workforce study by McKinsey found that engineering and skilled manufacturing jobs were among the highest in demand and the hardest to fill. Nearly one-quarter of manufacturing and engineering employees are already 55 or older, while industry attrition remained at about 14.5%, with some employers reporting turnover about 40% among skilled trade workers in certain regions.
Courtney said the U.S. has long lacked the kind of blue-collar labor pool President Franklin Roosevelt drew upon when the country mobilized for World War II.
“There’s been a collapse or shrinkage of the manufacturing base in the U.S. across the board,” Courtney said. “When people talk about‘Freedom’s Forge’ and Roosevelt and all that kind of stuff, well, remember he started from a base of workers already in metal trades, and it was easy to pivot to wartime production.”
As part of Trump’s broader effort to revive U.S. manufacturing, he has increasingly cast the defense industrial base as an engine for domestic investment. At a defense summit in Pennsylvania last week, he urged top industry executives to accelerate weapons production and expand manufacturing capacity.
“We have the best quality in the world,” he said, “but we need a little more speed.”
The PwC survey suggests the industry’s capacity would buckle amid a major production surge. While 85% of executives said they could accommodate a 25% increase in demand within 18 months, that share fell to 47% when they were asked to double output. At three times current demand, one-third said they could not see a path to deliver at all.
Defense executives ranked materials as their top challenge, followed by labor and wages. They also cited sole-source suppliers, long lead times and uneven supplier performance as risks. Skilled trades ranked as the largest workforce constraint, followed by engineers, line technicians and machine operators.
“The workforce issue has been simmering for a long time, but now with this rapid scaling, that’s what’s really amplifying the magnitude of the issue,” Scott Thompson, PwC’s global aerospace and defense lead.
The workforce shortage has existed for years, Thompson said, but it accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when many experienced workers retired, leaving manufacturers to scramble for replacements.
While artificial intelligence is expected to reshape many occupations, Thompson argued the industry could emphasize that the jobs it needs to fill — such as welders, machinists and other skilled tradespeople who need to be on the factory floor — are “AI-resilient.”
Solving the shortage, Thompson said, means manufacturers will have to become more aggressive in recruiting and retaining workers, including paying for training, offering stronger financial incentives, and potentially, drawing more government support for workforce development.
“Usually relocation bonuses are for high-profile white-collar workers, but I think you can look at things like that,” Thompson said.
The labor squeeze is visible around Camden, Arkansas, where manufacturers produce rocket motors, guidance systems and other components for weapons including HIMARS rockets and Patriot air-defense missiles — all of which are in demand as the Russia-Ukraine war and the conflict in Iran drag on.
A defense manufacturing boomtown, Camden is drawing in workers from all over Arkansas, as well as Louisiana and Alabama — so much so that local officials are grappling with how to handle the influx of people. But defense contractors are also competing for labor with the region’s lithium, timber, steel, and food-processing industries, so the demand for workers still outstrips supply.
“The demand and the growth have never been more than it has right now,” said David Mason, the vice chancellor for workforce and career technical education at Southern Arkansas University Tech, which trains workers for Lockheed Martin and other manufacturers in the region.
“What our defense partners have told me is that they’re pulling workforce from everywhere they can find it,” Mason added.
To meet the growing demand, the school is building a new defense-manufacturing training facility with a $20 million federal grant, a project expected to train hundreds more students each year.
The shipbuilding industry and its suppliers have also felt the labor crunch acutely. The industry would need to hire 250,000 workers over the next decade to realize the Trump administration’s vision of a “Golden Fleet,” which includes a new class of frigate and battleship. Then-Navy Secretary John Phelan said in January that meeting that goal would require new skilled labor training pipelines and higher wages.
Bollinger Shipyards is among companies that have responded by building their own workforce pipeline. The Gulfport, Mississippi-based company, which recently landed major Coast Guard contracts for icebreakers alongside its Navy and commercial ships, last week opened a 7,200-square-foot “bootcamp” for electrical, electronics, structural welding and other trades.
The programs compress training that might traditionally take several years into a 14-week course, with trainees becoming paid employees and graduating into shipyard work.
Since 2024, Bollinger has received more than 4,000 applications for its skills training programs. It enrolled 143 applicants and graduated 130 — meaning it turned away about 19 people for every worker it accepted. The new center will more than double the number of trainees enrolled at one time to about 100.
“We see in our data and in our experience that Americans are ready to go to work,” said Allan Martin, Bollinger’s chief human resources officer. “Now it’s a matter of how we help them close that skills gap so they can begin building those careers.”
Some see a mixed picture. The 10,000th worker recently graduated from a Southern New England training pipeline established in 2020 to meet a hiring surge at the Electric Boat Shipyards in Groton, Connecticut, and Quonset Point, Rhode Island, to satisfy the shipbuilding backlog of the Columbia- and Virginia-class submarines.
But Courtney, the Connecticut lawmaker, said the administration’s efforts to boost weapons procurement need to be coupled with workforce-development funding through the Education and Labor departments. In their proposed 2027 defense appropriations bill, House lawmakers increased funds for job training and higher wages beyond Trump’s budget request.
“That’s where I give the administration very low marks, and they don’t connect the dots,” Courtney said. “And frankly, a lot of defense CEOs don’t connect the dots about the fact that public education and job training are core functions of creating a defense industrial base.”
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