The Trump administration’s drive to speed military deliveries brought U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to a Wisconsin manufacturer on Oct. 20, following a stop at an Ohio aviation facility.
Riverside Machine & Engineering, based in Eau Claire, says it makes precision components for defense, aerospace and medical applications. Speaking about Wisconsin production more broadly, Hegseth told workers that parts made in the state are used in equipment supporting U.S. personnel in Operation Epic Fury in the Middle East. He did not identify the parts or their manufacturer.
The Wisconsin visit was Hegseth’s second stop that day on his Arsenal of Freedom tour. The Department of War said the tour began Jan. 5 and had reached more than a dozen locations by Oct. 20. Hegseth has used it to press for greater U.S. defense production capacity and faster deliveries to the military. After the Riverside visit, he told reporters that “it truly is a golden age of American manufacturing.”
Earlier, Hegseth toured SNC’s aviation facility in the Dayton, Ohio, area. SNC said it briefed him on its Survivable Airborne Operations Center program and that he addressed about 400 local employees. The company described the program as work on a next-generation airborne command center.
SNC CEO and owner Fatih Ozmen called for “open architectures, shared data rights and the right to repair” in defense procurement. He said those principles support innovation and national security. Separately, Ozmen pointed to programs such as the airborne command center as examples of how competition and customer choice can deliver advanced capabilities.
The visits come amid a broader administration effort to change defense contracting. A Jan. 7 executive order directs the Secretary of War to identify contractors that fall short on performance while making stock buybacks or corporate distributions. Its criteria also address insufficient investment and slow production. For future contracts, the order calls for restrictions on those payments during periods of underperformance and for executive incentives tied to delivery and production.
