Julia Torrence is the Deputy Director of the Joint Production Accelerator Cell, within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment, where she is responsible for building enduring industrial production capacity, resiliency, and surge capability for key defense weapons systems and suppliers. She leads a team working to bring innovative, new approaches to the production of defense weapons systems to create more flexible and expanded capacity in the defense industrial base. She most recently served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy (2020-2023). In that role, she led nine assessments of production capacity and constraints for critical weapons systems and their sub-components. She also worked with Industrial Base Policy’s Chief Technology Officer on developing mitigations for defense industrial base challenges pertaining to strategic systems, hypersonics, missiles and munitions, microelectronics, rare earths, and critical chemicals.

Before joining OSD, she was a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, where she co-authored over a dozen publications. Her research spanned nuclear and conventional deterrence and doctrine, defense acquisition and the industrial base, and South Asian security issues. While at RAND, she spent 18 months providing analytical support to the office of the DASD for Industrial Policy, Industrial Assessments. Prior to joining RAND, she was a research associate for the Stimson Center’s South Asia program.

She holds an MA in War Studies from King’s College, London, and a BSFS in International Politics from Georgetown University.