Industrial Athleticism: Calibrating Defense Production to Address Evolving Threats

Conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific have prompted the United States to pursue a deeper inventory of military equipment and platforms deployable at speed and scale. U.S. defense planners are also encouraging new commercial entrants to harness technological innovations and autonomous, attritable assets. While efforts to place the industrial base on a wartime footing are welcome, two persistent factors make designing more advanced systems or simply building greater volumes of equipment unsustainable or even counterproductive.

First, the dominant demand signal driving U.S. and allied defense production is too dependent on the nature and intensity of immediate threats, resulting in solutions to near-term challenges. Yet geopolitical threats evolve and military technologies advance faster than the systems designed to counter them. In short, the greatest threat to U.S. and allied military systems and equipment is not in Beijing or Moscow; rather, it is these assets’ absence from the battlefield or their obsolescence if they arrive ill-suited to the fight.

Second, the material and human resources needed to fund, build, and field these systems are finite, forcing policymakers to allocate scarce assets and time while making difficult decisions about which security threats and contingencies to prioritize. While a larger defense budget may reduce this tension, fiscal constraints and sustained strategic competition require government and industry to categorize and calibrate defense production for competing contingencies.

How can policymakers forge an industrial base that adapts to new security challenges and rapid technological changes despite resource constraints? How do they reconcile defense innovation and inventory while institutionalizing enduring industrial health?

By recognizing the need for agile, scalable defense production within bounded inputs, this analysis proposes a framework for the industrial base that shifts focus internally and constructs a foundation of underlying capacity and capability able to field what is needed, at what volume, and within the time horizon the threat environment demands. “Capacity” encompasses the physical inputs and enablers of industrial power: materials, capital, technologies, facilities, and logistics. “Capability” includes intangible human features: education, science and innovation, workforce development, intellectual property, design architecture, and the relationship between workers who build a system in the factory and warfighters who use it on the battlefield.

To operationalize this foundation and organize defense production, this analysis classifies defense systems—from nuclear submarines to small drones—into three categories that vary along the time scale to build, field, and sustain. While government and industry should develop each tier in this framework in tandem, an industrial base built upon a bedrock of physical capacity and human capability should be able to balance and tailor inventory and innovation within each class as threat environments and resource constraints demand. Like an athlete training for multiple sports rather than specializing in one, an industrial base that is both agile and scalable will be conditioned for the simultaneous, shifting strategic competitions and specific contingencies the United States and its allies will face.

Scalable Production: A Necessary but Insufficient Focus

Supply chain bottlenecks, scarce raw materials, and workforce shortages often present U.S. officials with a trade-off between procuring cheap, readily available equipment or investing in exquisite, expensive systems that will take years to develop. To navigate this dilemma, policy officials and observers have provided useful, though siloed, concepts for scaling production of certain defense assets. These include calls to focus on the “producibility” of systems through standardized designs and requirements reform; their “scalable execution” through high manufacturing rates, predictable quality, and distributed supply chains; and their “regeneration” through modular design architectures. The term “affordable mass” has also widely resonated with policymakers and commentators who believe national security needs are satisfied less by the quality of weapons and more by the quantity that they can afford to field and replace.

While these concepts rightly focus on the need for expanded manufacturing lines, they risk growing inventories for systems that will be obsolete by the time they are stocked. The war in Ukraine, for example, has led to calls for ramping supplies of unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), yet the tactical value of Kyiv’s propeller-based interceptor drones has reportedly decreased as Russia equips its Shahed offensive drones with turbojet engines and transforms them into faster, missile-like weapons. Analysts advocate for the United States and Indo-Pacific partners to deter or defeat China’s aggression, but the resources needed cannot be known for a conflict of uncertain location, length, and level. As regional contingencies, resource constraints, and rivals’ creative strategies apply pressure to national security interests in unforeseen ways, policymakers, defense primes, and new entrants alike must not only build more equipment. They must also equip the industrial base with the muscle memory—the capacity and capability—required to manufacture and maintain whatever is most needed.

Surge, Scale, Sustain: Calibrating the Industrial Base for Simultaneous Commitments

To achieve this flexibility, this analysis proposes a three-tiered structure that organizes defense systems according to the time required to field them, their unit cost, and the corresponding objective behind their production: to surge in the immediate term, scale in multi-year procurement cycles, or sustain over decades. While these are not rigid categories, viewing the industrial base through these three rates and modes of production provides policymakers an agile framework to shift effort and emphasis between lanes, prioritize finite physical capacity and intellectual capability resources, and achieve both agility and scale where most needed for a particular set of challenges.

Surge Systems

Featuring simpler designs, expendable uses, replicable production, and tight design-to-field iteration loops, systems such as UAVs, short-range air and missile defense interceptors, and munitions represent the shortest time-to-field. Digital infrastructure, software solutions, and electronic warfare systems also belong to this class of systems based on their rapid evolution cycles and widespread applications.

As “Surge” connotes, the ease of building—and rebuilding—these systems allows them to address pressing threats through a sharp production ramp. While current efforts to grow inventories of Surge systems such as drones are necessary to hedge in potential conflicts, over-producing cheap, simple systems risks warehouses full of obsolete hardware and misallocated resources. In Ukraine, for example, the effectiveness of small first-person-view drones controlled via radio frequency has rapidly declined in favor of jam-resistant and fiber-optic-controlled variants.

When pursuing strategic competition and preparing for a conflict, Surge items should be produced to support the first months of a future conflict, but not beyond. Subsequently, resources should be focused on leveraging the breakneck pace of advancements in targeting, navigation, and manufacturing software to facilitate competition across new entrants and defense primes. This includes efforts such as the “gauntlet” within the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program, the pre-positioning of manufacturing equipment and testing close to the battlefield, and the acceleration of prototyping-to-fielding feedback loops. These initiatives, along with containerized manufacturing facilities and 3D printing equipment, aim to ensure that when the mass production of UAVs and attritable systems is needed, these systems will hold a technological edge over adversary equipment and can be built at scale and close to the battlefield. Institutionalizing industrial health within the Surge tier, therefore, calls for focusing less on stockpiles of systems and more on their underlying production infrastructure and innovation networks.

Scale Systems

Military equipment that commands higher unit costs, more complex designs, and more layered supply chains straddles the proposed defense industrial framework in the Scale category. While they may be attritable and require substantial volume, these systems take longer to produce and are more difficult to regenerate than military consumables in the Surge class. This category encompasses a breadth of military equipment, ranging from smaller platforms and precision missiles to larger unmanned aircraft and vessels and complex command and control networks.

These solutions must be ready and available at scale at the onset of conflict. Production in early stages of wartime could be accelerated, but would be difficult to grow exponentially. Common wisdom would suggest that the United States simply stockpile these assets, but they must also be sufficiently adaptable to address future and ill-defined challenges or outlast yet-to-be-disclosed adversary countermeasures. In practice, Scale systems should be designed, built, and updated with features for flexible applications across domains, such as ground- or air-launch capabilities; deployments, like effectiveness in Arctic or maritime environments; and operations, including offense, defense, maneuver, electronic warfare, or surveillance and reconnaissance utility.

Because Scale solutions must largely be produced in advance of a conflict, the only rational way for them to achieve volume while managing obsolescence risk is to invest in their underlying capacity and capability at the same time. Through modular designs and functional versatility, Scale solutions can be “empty vessels,” able to rapidly integrate future components and software or deploy to yet undefined missions. Consider, for example, warehouses full of semi-complete missiles waiting for their sensor modules, which, aided by an increased focus on innovation and factory-to-frontline feedback loops, can be rapidly programmed and completed to determine their function, such as strike, reconnaissance, or decoy, and optimize their performance when future crisis strikes. The Scale category, therefore, requires a careful balance of capacity to build the long-lead components now and capability to tailor and complete the final product for a future, still uncertain, mission or threat.

Sustain Systems

With the highest unit costs, intricate designs, multi-decade lifecycles, and limited replaceability, major platforms such as manned aircraft, manned capital naval ships, and large reconnaissance satellites comprise the final category, “Sustain.” Because the core functions and attributes of these systems are relatively fixed and their construction lead times are lengthy, they must be continuously built and consistently fielded by leveraging the very best of our technology and forecasts of future missions and threats. Production in the present requires physical capacity investments bolstered by clear government demand signals, consistent multiyear funding, and efficient, specialized facilities.

Yet one goes to war with Sustain systems on hand, so when crisis arrives, inventories of these capital platforms may rapidly decline. Their availability in the conflict would no longer be a function of production capacity but rather the rapid capability to sustain, support, and deliver what is already in inventory. While industrial capacity must be geared toward steady production now, Sustain systems demand exponentially more readiness capacity and capability—secure spare parts, repair infrastructure, resilient logistics networks and supply chains, and, above all, a workforce and facilities able to absorb wartime pressure—devoted to ensuring long term availability. By rebalancing the focus of resources toward sustainment and logistics support of these products—or, in other words, favoring readiness of the overall force over marginal increase in unit numbers—policy officials will be best positioned to not only place fleets in the field but keep them there.

Conclusion

Through developing physical and intellectual foundations of defense production and shifting their emphasis across three categories of output, policymakers can optimize the resource-limited U.S. and allied industrial base for the heavy, changing burdens placed upon it. For Surge systems, rather than warehousing cheap hardware that adversaries will render obsolete within months, this means channeling investment toward designs, innovation, and production capacity, including the facilities, inputs, and tooling needed to build rapidly when conflict arrives. For Scale systems, it means more modular, “empty-vessel” production, building long-lead components now while deferring the integration and customization of mission systems until the threat picture clarifies. For Sustain systems, it means steady production today to keep pace with strategic competitors, with significant investments and attention shifted toward sustainment and logistics capability when conflict nears to keep the entirety of the fleet fielded in the fight.

When the timing and nature of the next conflict is uncertain, the industrial base must be able to calibrate physical capacity and intellectual capability investments to prevent the absence or the obsolescence of U.S. and allied defense systems. For the United States to uphold its simultaneous national security commitments while prioritizing production across them requires an industrial base that, like an athlete training for the competition ahead, combines raw strength with specialized skill, scale with agility, and inventory with innovation.

Alek Jovovic is deputy director at the Center for the Industrial Base and a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. A.J. Dilts is a research assistant with the Center for the Industrial Base at CSIS.