By: Ret. Brig. Gen. John Teichert
On August 23, IndyCars will scream past the Capitol and the National Mall at 200 miles an hour, as part of America’s 250th birthday celebration. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is a fitting spectacle for the moment: a test of speed and engineering on the very streets of our nation’s capital. But a race like that is also a stress test for the pavement itself. At those speeds, tires grip, skid, and shear against the road surface with tremendous force, and the margin for error is thin. It’s worth asking what that road is actually made of, and whether drivers and the public can trust it.
Something is quietly wrong beneath our feet. U.S. cement production has been sliding even as demand climbs, and imports now account for 21% of domestic consumption. This translates to roughly one in five metric tons of the material holding up our roads, bridges, and buildings now coming from overseas, made under questionable standards outside of our control. It lacks the safety, the reliability, and the responsiveness that our nation needs.
Cement doesn’t grab headlines, but it’s the quiet backbone behind nearly everything we’ve built as a country: the Pentagon, the Interstate Highway System, Hoover Dam, the driveway outside your front door. It’s in the roads our kids bike on and the runways our jets take off from. When we ignore where it comes from, we’re not just risking potholes, we’re risking the integrity of our nation’s foundation.
This is more than a civil problem. Military infrastructure is buckling under a maintenance backlog now estimated at $278 billion. Barracks across the country are plagued by mold, failing HVAC systems, and water damage so severe that the Government Accountability Office has found service members getting married just so they can move out. In an era of intensifying global competition, a nation that can’t guarantee a secure, reliable cement supply for its own bases and depots has built a vulnerability into its defenses.
This isn’t just about preexisting buildings – it’s about whether we can build what comes next. Nearly 39% of major U.S. roads are in poor or mediocre shape. Bridges are aging past the lifespans they were designed for, just as climate stress and heavy traffic push them harder than ever. Repairing and rebuilding them will take millions of tons of cement. If we can’t produce enough of it ourselves, we’ll be at the mercy of whoever can. Unfortunately, our dependency is growing rapidly.
The risks to our domestic supply chains are real. Turkey, our largest source of foreign cement, has a track record of subsidizing key export industries in ways thatundercut American workers. China, the world’s largest cement manufacturer, is sitting on a collapsing real estate sector and a glut of product with nowhere to go – and the U.S. is an easy place to dump it. Even a small diversion of Chinese cement into our markets could flood the country with subpar material.
Offshoring our cement supply chain isn’t just an infrastructure problem, it’s a growing national security threat. If supply chain disruptions hit, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic, we could find ourselves unable to build bridges, military installations, weapons factories, and water systems. Something as foundational as cement shouldn’t be hostage to geopolitical whims.
Fortunately, there’s a clear path forward, and it starts with a decision Congress can make right now. Lawmakers can include Build America, Buy America protections for cement in this year’s Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill, ensuring American tax dollars support the domestic workforce and incentivize the production of cement here at home. Pair that with trade remedies to address foreign market manipulation, and we can strengthen not only our infrastructure, but also ourindependence.
America has plenty to celebrate this year. As we watch IndyCars tear down Pennsylvania Avenue at the end of August, the roar of engines and squeal of tires will be a reminder that our infrastructure is not judged by how it looks at a ribbon-cutting, but how it holds up under real pressure over time. That same lesson should push Congress to back domestic cement production, so the roads, bridges, and everything in between are built to withstand more than a parade. Celebration means little if what we build rests on a foundation we can’t trust. If the next 250 years are going to be built as strong as the last, we need to start with cement made by American workers on American soil.
United States Air Force Brigadier General John Teichert (ret) is a leading expert on foreign affairs and military strategy. He served as commander of Joint Base Andrews and Edwards Air Force Base, was the U.S. senior defense official to Iraq, and recently retired as the assistant deputy under secretary of the Air Force for international affairs.