Its goals include finding alternatives to silicon for manufacturing and packaging small “chiplets” together instead of making big monolithic chips.

“We have vulnerabilities we really need to address, but we are still the dominant producer of electronics in the world,” said Mark Rosker, the director of DARPA’s microsystems technology office. He said questions about the American semiconductor industry called for “a graceful and considered kind of panic.”

Much of the recent urgency stems from China’s growing stature as a chip innovator. Designers there have developed chips for sensitive applications such as supercomputers. Many of the designers — including Huawei, a key target of the Trump administration in the trade war — also rely on TSMC for manufacturing.

Another impetus for action stems from a recent pullback by GlobalFoundries. The chip maker, owned by investors in Abu Dhabi, has spent around $12 billion on a sophisticated factory in Malta, N.Y. But it announced last year that it would stop trying to create smaller circuitry than that on its existing production processes.

GlobalFoundries now produces classified chips under the trusted foundry rules in two former IBM factories it took over in 2015. Company executives believe the technology in its Malta facility remains advanced enough to also serve military needs for years, and it is negotiating with officials to handle future classified work through proposed modifications to the government’s trusted foundry regulations. It recently filed a lawsuit accusing TSMC of patent infringement, an action that it said was aimed partly at protecting the American manufacturing base.

The company, which announced plans for a $10 billion factory in China in 2017, is also rethinking that project as the promised demand from customers there now seems uncertain, said Thomas Caufield, the chief executive of GlobalFoundries.

Influencing the chip industry used to be easier when the Defense Department accounted for a major portion of chip sales. Now defense applications are dwarfed by civilian uses, such as smartphones and personal computers. More of the Pentagon’s budget now goes to chips like memory and processors whose designs are shaped by commercial needs.