Re: Building Defense is a limited series that highlights 91ÆÞÓÑ’s policy recommendations for revitalizing the US defense industrial base for great power competition. Subscribe here.
The list of facing Congress and the Pentagon to rebuild America’s defense industrial base is comprehensive but imperative for American security in this great power competition. The next step is to implement and scale these ideas. Below are three top items for the Department of Defense’s 2025 checklist to achieve this.
The To-Do List
2. Adopt a mass production mindset.
3. Focus on joint experimentation to develop real-world solutions.
Sketching Out the Details
1. Take a comprehensive approach.
Reindustrialization is not all about additional government spending. It is about incentivizing new supply and demand opportunities and unleashing American capital and ingenuity. The second Trump administration could redefine America’s industrial future by focusing on six lines of action. These are the underlying conditions required to make the progress that Donald Trump is driving toward:
- Focus on strategic sectors.
- Reform regulations.
- Make energy abundant and reliable.
- Develop the US industrial workforce.
- Mobilize capital.
- Reexamine trade policies.
This comprehensive approach would not only bolster national security but also ensure long-term economic prosperity, restoring America’s position as a global manufacturing leader.
2. Behave like a titan of industry, not an art connoisseur.
The Pentagon’s depleted weapons magazines don’t look like those of a military preparing to fight China in two years. Facing shortages for training and future contingencies, Washington has constrained weapons shipments to Ukraine. At home, industry is unable to keep up with demand and the changes needed to counter GPS jamming. But the uncomfortable truth is this—today’s scarcity is self-imposed. With their custom components and bespoke integration, the DoD’s preferred munitions are more like the artisan products featured on Etsy than the mass-produced weapons that came off assembly lines during World War II. The Arsenal of Democracy turned auto plants into aircraft and bomb factories by designing—or redesigning—military hardware for producibility. To prepare for protracted conflict, the DoD needs to think like a manufacturer and pursue weapons that leverage existing parts and elastic production facilities.
3. Pursue joint experimentation to solve real-world problems at scale.
The traditional approach of developing requirements first and then demonstrating individual systems struggles to address the new reality that warfighting advantage is increasingly derived from hyperconnected kill chains that cross service boundaries. Joint experimentation provides a way to discover how systems can be combined in novel ways, to understand the interactions between new technologies like uncrewed systems and legacy platforms, and to rapidly evolve concepts of operation alongside technical capabilities. Joint experimentation enables the rapid learning and adaptation needed to deploy cross-service operational capabilities in this dynamic environment. The potential for joint integration is not just about creating new concepts; it is also about finding ways to implement them, experiment with them, refine them, and scale them into the deployed force.
Read Bryan Clark and Dan Patt’s report “The Value of Experimentation, Not Demonstration.â€