There’s a default preconception among many Americans—both in the Beltway and the Heartland—that everything related to national security begins and ends in Washington, as if national-security contributions are measured by distance from the Oval Office or Pentagon. This preconception is a misconception. America’s Heartland is key to America’s security.

Directions and Definitions
Before exploring the Heartland’s contributions to national security, we need to explore the definition of Heartland. After all, “America’s Heartland” is an amorphous region and term. “The Heartland is,” as journalists Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy observe, “somewhere central. But where the center begins and ends—what it encompasses and excludes—is harder to say.”

During their years in office, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Clinton included states as far afield as Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, the Dakotas, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin in the Heartland. That’s almost half the country.

Their expansive definition underscores that the Heartland represents something more than the geographic center of America. The Heartland is an idea—an expression of the heart of America.

World War II
The nexus between America’s Heartland and America’s security was perhaps never more obvious than during World War II, when seemingly every inch of American territory and every element of national power were focused on building “the great arsenal of democracy.”  

Ford’s plant in Michigan produced a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes. Republic’s plant in Indiana built 6,242 P-47s. Boeing’s plant in Kansas pumped out 1,644 B-29s. Martin’s Nebraska plant produced 1,585 B-26s and more than 500 B-29s. Bell’s plant in Georgia built 600 B-29s.

The U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) notes that shipbuilders in Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois produced “47 different types of naval vessels totaling 600,000 tons” during the war. Eleven shipbuilders based along the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Illinois Rivers built 900,000 tons’ worth of warships. Evansville Shipyard in Indiana produced 167 landing-assault ships. The Crane Naval Support Facility (also in Indiana) produced, tested and stored weapons during the war.

The University of Chicago supplied much of the intellectual firepower for the Manhattan Project. Tennessee supplied the enriched uranium.

The war underscored that national security is very much a national effort. As Gen. Omar Bradley observed: “Battles are won by…soldiers living in the rain and huddling in the snow. But wars are won by the great strength of a nation—the soldier and the civilian working together.”

Cold War
In the early chapters of the Cold War, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations reconfigured the arsenal of democracy to face a new enemy—harnessing the energy, talent and creativity of Americans in every state to meet the global challenge posed by Soviet communism.

USNI recalls that Great Lakes shipbuilders produced 67,000 tons’ worth of warships between 1950 and 1956.

More than a hundred nuclear-capable B-52 bombers were built in Kansas. ICBM sites were spread across Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, the Dakotas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Missouri and Montana. Colorado, Ohio, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee provided nuclear material and components for those weapons. USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, relied on a propulsion system developed in Idaho. The Nautilus crew and officers even trained in Idaho.

Designed, in part, to rapidly reposition military assets in the event of nuclear attack, the interstate highway system enfolded 41,000 miles of road and knitted together every state in the contiguous 48, as historian Garrett Graff details in his book “Ravenrock.” Related, Graff notes that there were some 900 “improvised emergency hospitals” sprinkled across the country, on call to treat survivors of a nuclear attack.

During a visit to Fort Worth, President John Kennedy explained that “the success of our national defense depends upon this city…10,000 miles from Vietnam, 5,000 or 6,000 miles from Berlin, thousands of miles from trouble spots in Latin America and Africa or the Middle East.” Kennedy was lauding the Heartland’s contribution to the nation’s security.

Just a few years earlier, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson raised what he called the “central issue of our time”: “Can a free society so organize its human and material resources as to outperform totalitarianism?”

The Apollo program—with its military, geopolitical and propaganda implications for the Cold War—emphatically answered that question. As historian Derek Leebaert recounts, Apollo enfolded 300,000 workers and 20,000 companies in all 50 states.

Cold War 2.0
Today, with America’s democratic partners under attack in Ukraine and Israel—and under threat in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan—the free world is turning yet again to the arsenal of democracy. And the Heartland is yet again doing its part.

Thirteen states across the South and Midwest are churning out military hardware for Ukraine’s defense: Javelins from Alabama, HIMARS and ATACMS launchers from Arkansas, Stingers from Arizona, 155mm artillery rounds that rely on steel from Ohio, shell casings from Pennsylvania, explosives from Iowa, propellent and charges from Tennessee. Facilities in Texas, Arkansas and Kansas are coming online to produce more 155mm rounds.

Patriot systems protecting Israeli and Ukrainian cities—and U.S. troops in the Middle East, Europe, South Korea and Japan—are made in Arizona. THAAD missiles are assembled in Alabama. The M777 howitzers on the NATO line, 38th Parallel, and Ukraine’s eastern front are assembled in Mississippi. HIMARS rockets are being built in Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arkansas. JDAM kits that turn unguided bombs into “smart” bombs are manufactured in Missouri. Massive “bunker buster” bombs are produced in Oklahoma.

America’s nuclear weapons are assembled in Texas. New Mexico is home to America’s sole plutonium-production capability. The prairielands of Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota still bristle with hundreds of ICBMs. America’s nuclear-capable bombers are based in Missouri (B-2s), North Dakota (B-52s) and Louisiana (B-52s). Next-generation B-21 bombers will be based in South Dakota, Missouri and Texas.

Some 13,000 Americans at 2,450 companies in 48 states build and maintain Nimitz– and Ford-class aircraft carriers.

As in Kennedy’s day, factories in Fort Worth are building aircraft—F-35 variants nowadays—to defend the free world. Places like the Lima Army Tank Plant (Ohio), AM General (Indiana), Fincantieri Marinette Marine (Wisconsin) and Oshkosh Defense (Wisconsin) also equip today’s military.

Naval Station Great Lakes (Illinois) is the Navy’s largest training facility. The Navy uses Wisconsin’s Green Bay for sea trials. U.S. and allied units conduct multidomain exercises at Muscatatuck Training Center (Indiana) and the National All-Domain Warfighting Center (Michigan).

Rolls-Royce LibertyWorks (Indiana) develops vertical-takeoff technology and hypersonic-flight systems. Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame (both in Indiana) house hypersonic wind tunnels. “There are only 11 hypersonic wind tunnels in the United States,” as Capt. Jerry Hendrix (USN-RET) points out, “and four of them are in Indiana.”

Hendrix adds that in 2024, Michigan’s Lake Huron region hosted military assets and industry partners for exercises testing how unmanned systems respond to electromagnetic jamming.

As to the technologies that serve as the brains for modern weapons: Intel is pouring $100 billion into an Ohio facility primed to become the world’s largest chip-making campus. Semiconductor giant MediaTek is building a chip-design center at Purdue University. The Pentagon is collaborating with corporate and academic partners to stand up microchip hubs not only in California, Massachusetts and New York, but also in Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina and Arizona. The National Science Foundation is funding AI research institutes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado. The University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Purdue University and University of Wisconsin are charting the new frontier of quantum computing.

Hendrix proposes leveraging these military, technological, industrial and natural-resource assets clustered around what he calls the “Midwestern tech corridor” into “a research, development and prototyping test range” on Lake Michigan—a Navy version of the Air Force’s Area 51.

Of course, without the skill of U.S. military personnel and without the training that takes place all across the country, those technologies are just heaps of metal and silicon. America’s military embodies the beating heart of America’s security—and the Heartland contributes a healthy share to the military.

During the Vietnam War, America’s Heartland bore some of the heaviest sacrifices: West Virginia (42 troops killed per 100,000 population), Oklahoma (38.5), Montana (38), Alabama (35), Georgia (34.5), Kentucky (32.8), North Dakota (32.2).

In relation to population size, South Carolina, Georgia, Colorado, Alabama, Texas and North Carolina represented six of the top ten states of origin for troops serving in the post-9/11 wars.

Today, Georgia, South Carolina, Idaho, Alaska and Texas boast the highest military-enlistment rates.

None of this to downplay the Beltway or the coastal megalopolises that lie outside the hard-to-define Heartland. That would be as wrong as dismissing the Heartland as “flyover country.” Every part of America is important—especially when it comes to America’s security. That’s the point. “The defense of the United States,” as President Eisenhower explained, “is accomplished by all the United States.”

Roots
It’s noteworthy that many of the individuals who have crafted America’s foreign and defense policies over the past 80 years were from the Heartland.

George Marshall (Pennsylvania) steered America’s military through World War II, reoriented American statecraft for the Cold War, and envisioned a plan that transformed Western Europe from an incubator of conflict into an exponent of peace and prosperity.

Adlai Stevenson (Illinois) turned the UN Security Council into a courtroom to prosecute Moscow for its reckless gamble in Cuba and pull the world back from the brink.

After serving as Defense secretary, Thomas Gates (Pennsylvania) led a commission that developed a roadmap for transforming the military into today’s all-volunteer force.

John Glenn (Ohio) championed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, which slowed the spread of nuclear-weapons technology and protected America from nuclear rogues for a quarter-century.

Bill Nichols (Alabama) and Barry Goldwater (Arizona) drafted legislation that transformed the Defense Department, strengthened and clarified the chain of command, and spurred the emergence of today’s joint force.

Sam Nunn (Georgia) and Richard Lugar (Indiana) forged an initiative that dismantled nuclear weapons across the former Soviet Union, retrained Soviet nuclear scientists, and made America more secure.

Madeleine Albright (Colorado) championed the effort to bring Eastern Europe under NATO’s protective umbrella. 

Condoleezza Rice (Alabama) planted the seeds of PEPFAR—a revolutionary development program that has rescued 25 million people in Africa and Asia from the scourge of AIDS.

Robert Gates (Kansas)—Defense secretary for presidents of both parties—led the CIA through the Soviet Union’s dangerous death throes, guided the Pentagon through the bloodiest years of the war on terror and helped rescue America from defeat in Iraq.

Mike Gallagher (Wisconsin) forged bipartisan agreement to create a congressional committee—which he led until his retirement—to expose and address the threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Yes, those men and women served inside the Beltway, but they were products of the Heartland. What President Lyndon Johnson said about Stevenson—who was governor of Illinois long before he was ambassador to the UN—applies to each of them: “He was rooted in America’s Heartland, yet his voice reached across every boundary of nation.”

Ideas
While on the subject of voices that reached across boundaries, Winston Churchill delivered his seminal “iron curtain” speech not in D.C. or at the UN, but in Missouri, as the guest of a Missourian, President Harry Truman.

That’s a reminder of the power of the ideas that flow from America’s Heartland—and the importance of the organizations that nurture those ideas.

Harry Colmery, who’s considered the father of the GI Bill of Rights—among the most transformative pieces of legislation in U.S. history—was a Kansan. He also happened to have served as National Commander of the American Legion, which is headquartered in Indiana.

Service and membership organizations such as the Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars (Missouri), NGOs such as the Carter Center (Georgia), convening organizations such as the Aspen Institute (founded in Colorado), educational centers such as the Truman Library Institute for National & International Affairs (Missouri) and National Churchill Museum (Missouri), and think tanks such as Sagamore Institute (Indiana), Chicago Council on Global Affairs (Illinois), Foreign Policy Research Institute (Pennsylvania), and Baker Institute and Bush Institute (Texas) generate ideas, conduct research, and organize events in America’s Heartland to strengthen America’s security. Their voices “reach across every boundary”—bridging the Beltway and the Heartland, making the case to the Heartland for American engagement abroad, reminding the Beltway that national-security initiatives need national support, and serving as proof of something Alexis de Tocqueville noticed about America almost 200 years ago: “The intelligence and power of the people are disseminated through all the parts of this vast country…Instead of radiating from a common point, they cross each other in every direction.”

A Soviet official remarked after the Cold War, “The Americans beat us not because they had more tanks, but because they had more think tanks.” Historian Hal Brands cites this anecdote in his book The Twilight Struggle to underscore “how well America harnessed its intellectual strengths” during the Cold War—strengths, ideas and contributions from the Beltway and the Heartland. A similar formula is essential if we are to effectively wage and peacefully win Cold War 2.0.

Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute, where he leads the Center for America’s Purpose. A version of this essay was published in the March 2025 issue of The American Legion Magazine.