Ending Self-Imposed Scarcity: Mobilizing Weapons Production by Leveraging American Commercial Advantages

Key Chapter Title List

1. Uncovering America's Advantages in the 21st Century
2. Fundamental Elements of 21st Century Mobilization
3. Software-Centric Weapons Development
4. Accelerating Test and Evaluation Required for Modular Design
5. Case Study: Long-Range Maneuverable Projectile
6. Broadly Sourcing Production
7. Case Study: Advanced Air-Launched Effects and Strategic Outsourcing
8. Designing for Producibility
9. Software-Centric Weapons Development Model
10. Case Study: Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node
11. Leveraging Digitalization for Adaptability and Scale
12. Recommendations for Modernizing Munitions Production

Document Introduction

The military dominance established by the United States after the Cold War is facing a foreseeable end. Competitors like China and Russia are leveraging technological proliferation and geographical advantages, increasingly integrating software, modular hardware architectures, commercial microelectronics, and commercial surveillance services to develop effective and adaptable weapons and reconnaissance-strike complexes. These trends indicate that future U.S. military success requires both scale and flexibility. However, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has moved in the opposite direction in weapons design: over the past three decades, the U.S. military has developed and manufactured highly integrated, monolithic weapons that are difficult to update with new features or subsystems, and cannot leverage widely available commercial systems or manufacturing methods to scale up wartime production.

The report points out that when facing adversaries like China, which possess a vast manufacturing base and fight on their home turf, the U.S. weapons' shortcomings in production capacity and adaptability will be particularly fatal. To meet this challenge, the U.S. military needs to pursue efforts along two main lines: first, counter-reconnaissance operations to degrade enemy reconnaissance-intelligence systems; second, new weapons capable of being produced at scale and with flexibility. Both efforts should fully utilize America's world-leading electronics manufacturing and software industries. The report's core argument is that the U.S. military must shift from its current model of pursuing ultimate performance through highly integrated, monolithic weapons (AUR) to a model of modular weapons designed from the bottom up. This new model aims to achieve a combination of relevant scale and rapid adaptability by leveraging widely available commercial components, resilient commercial contract manufacturing capabilities, and modular software architectures.

To this end, the report constructs a new "Iron Triangle" of program management to replace the traditional cost, schedule, and performance triangle. The new triangle's vertices are Time to Relevant Capability, Time to Relevant Scale, and Concept of Operations/Use Case. It emphasizes balancing relevant capability with relevant scale within available funding by adjusting the weapon's use case. This requires weapons design to start from available components, adopting a modular, software-defined approach to ensure easy integration of commercial parts and rapid upgrades.

Using multiple case studies (such as the F-117 Nighthawk, General Atomics' Long-Range Maneuverable Projectile, the Army's TITAN program, etc.), the report demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of bottom-up design, digital integration, and strategic outsourcing. Simultaneously, the report delves into the institutional and cultural barriers that must be overcome to achieve this transformation. These include the rigid Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) requirements process, outdated and inflexible technical standards, a linear Test and Evaluation (T&E) system focused on monolithic certification, and limitations imposed by the Financial Management Regulation (FMR) on procuring modular components.

To achieve 21st-century mobilization capabilities, the report offers a series of specific recommendations to the U.S. Department of Defense and Congress. These recommendations include initiating a new generation of adaptive weapons programs, adopting a new prime contractor model (separating mission systems, design, production, and testing), establishing persistent development and T&E infrastructure, utilizing new acquisition contracting tools like Middle Tier of Acquisition (MTA) and Other Transaction Authority (OTA), revising the Financial Management Regulation to allow modular procurement, and reforming the application of technical standards to be more risk-informed and flexible. The report concludes that the necessary reforms are relatively moderate in cost and scale but require a significant cultural shift within the DoD—from seeking the best weapon to seeking weapons that are good enough, producible at scale, and adaptable to new threats. Failure to achieve this shift will result in a persistently short-stocked U.S. munitions arsenal, thereby weakening deterrence against adversaries.