Laura Taylor-Kale

Senior Fellow for Geoeconomics and Defense

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Laura Taylor-Kale is a senior fellow for geoeconomics and defense at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) where she conducts research on economic security and defense industrial policy and investments. 

From 2023 to 2025, Dr. Taylor-Kale served as the first presidentially-appointed, senate-confirmed assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy. In this role, she led all defense industrial strategy, investments, and planning, including the Defense Production Act and industrial base investments, supply chain resilience, small business programs, international defense industrial cooperation, and economic security and review of domestic mergers and acquisitions and foreign investments (CFIUS). She led the Department of Defense in developing and publishing the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy and Implementation Plan. During her tenure, she led the expansion of strategic investments in rare earth elements, critical and strategic materials, solid rocket motors, and other upstream supply chain materials. To further accelerate investment in the Defense Industrial Base, Dr. Taylor-Kale launched the DoD’s largest other transaction contracting vehicle, the Defense Industrial Base Consortium. Under her leadership, the Office of Industrial Base Policy awarded a record of $3.3 billion of grants to manufacturing and defense industrial supply chain businesses through the Defense Production Act and the Industrial Base Fund. Additionally, she established the first Board of Directors for the strategic and critical materials for the National Defense Stockpile. 

Previously, Dr. Taylor-Kale was fellow for innovation and economic competitiveness at CFR. She also served as a CFR international affairs fellow from 2017 to 2018, when she was also deputy director of CFR’s Independent Task Force on the future of the U.S. workforce and co-author of the Task Force’s published report, The Work Ahead: Machines, Skills, and U.S. Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

Dr. Taylor-Kale has extensive experience in finance, business, economic policy and managing in complex organizations. As deputy assistant secretary for manufacturing in the international trade administration in the Department of Commerce, she led a team of trade policy professionals in breaking barriers in the export of U.S. manufactured goods around the world. She has also held positions at the World Bank and the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Dr. Taylor-Kale began her career in the U.S. Department of State serving as a career foreign service officer (diplomat) in India, Cote D’Ivoire, Afghanistan, the Executive Board of the World Bank, and the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. 

Dr. Taylor-Kale is the founder and CEO of Strategic Capital Advisory LLC, an advisory firm working with venture capital firm, defense, and deep technology companies. In 2018, she was a Zhi-Zhing Eisenhower fellow in China where she studied Chinese technology innovation in artificial intelligence. She holds a BA in economics from Smith College, an MPA from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and an MBA in finance and management from New York University’s Stern School of Business. Honored as an “Engineer of the Future” in 2021, she has a PhD in management science and engineering with a concentration in organizations, technology and entrepreneurship from Stanford University’s School of Engineering. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.