By Charlie Zisette, Executive Director of the National Armaments Consortium
The Pentagon recently shared a blunt preview of what the public can expect from the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy. According to the report, the U.S. defense industrial base –makers of the most advanced, effective weapons in the world –is at its current limit. The U.S. defense industrial base, the report says, “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale.”
This is a stark warning that should serve as a wake-up call to everyone interested in defense innovation and acquisition.
So how do we answer the call? How do we encourage innovation and build resilient supply chains for the technologies, large and small, required to meet the needs of our warfighters, support the conflicts of today, and deter the conflicts of tomorrow?
The key is this: increased collaboration between government, industry, and academia.
This challenge is too large for any one stakeholder group to address. It will take the combined power, ingenuity, and know-how of the government and industry and academia to build resilient supply chains that can rapidly develop, manufacture, and field the technologies our warfighters need to maintain our decisive edge on the battlefield.
Path Forward
There are two ways that the Department of Defense (DoD) can support a more collaborative engagement with industry.
First, more aggressively utilize acquisition strategies that operate at the speed of the need. If the Pentagon needs to rapidly build capability with flexibility, expanding the use of contracting tools like the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) that carry those characteristics will help tremendously.
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The OTA authority has been a critical acquisition tool for the U.S. Army’s current modernization efforts, including their push for more long-range precision fires capabilities. For example, key technologies in the recently delivered Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which delivers new deep-strike capability out to 500 kilometers, were developed via OTA consortium prototyping efforts.
Second, the Pentagon and Congress should do everything in their power to support expanding the defense industrial base to build out our supply chains and access innovative technologies.
For example, OTA consortia bring to bear thousands of small, innovative companies that are driving technology development across advanced technologies in armaments, aviation, energetics, spectrum, and more. A George Mason University study found that more than 70 percent of awards made through consortia go to nontraditional defense contractors (NDCs).
In addition to awards, consortia-enabled collaboration between NDCs and large traditional contractors leads to partnerships and supplier agreements that deliver value to the DoD and defense industrial base beyond the initial prototyping effort.
We must do more to recruit NDCs and small businesses into the industrial base, educate them on how to work with the DoD, and lower the barriers to entry to tap into their capabilities to help us solve the complex supply chain challenges we face as a nation.
The Pentagon’s findings are particularly concerning when viewed in the context of our ongoing support for the war in Ukraine, the war between Israel and Hamas, and the need to maintain a deterrent posture in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific.
I am hopeful that the National Defense Industrial Strategy will identify additional ways to enhance collaboration between government and industry to strengthen these types of partnerships.
The time is now to act to ensure our warfighters have the decisive edge they need to dominate the battlefield of today and tomorrow. Nothing less than our national security is at stake.
Charlie Zisette is the Executive Director of the National Armaments Consortium, a 1,100+ member strong organization working with the DOD to develop armaments and energetics technologies in support of our Nation’s Security
