The Department of Defense (DoD) released its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) today, with an aim to catalyze generational change from the existing defense industrial base (DIB) and create a more robust, resilient, and dynamic modernized defense industrial ecosystem.
The 60-page document lays out four long-term strategic priorities to serve as guiding beacons for industrial action and resource prioritization. Those are: resilient supply chains; workforce readiness; flexible acquisition; and economic deterrence.
“The current and future strategic environment demands immediate, comprehensive, and decisive action to strengthen and modernize our defense industrial base ecosystem so it delivers at speed and scale for our warfighters,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in a statement. “DoD’s first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy will help ensure we build the modern defense industrial and innovation ecosystem that’s required to defend America, our allies and partners, and our interests in the 21st century.”
The NDIS calls out challenges, solutions, and risks of failure concisely for the four strategic priorities.
For example, to address the “resilient supply chains” priority, the strategy calls on DoD to incentivize industry to improve resilience by investing in extra capacity, diversify the supplier base and invest in new production methods, and leverage data analytics to improve sub-tier visibility to identify and minimize strategic supply chain risks and to manage disruptions proactively, among other tasks.
The strategy also flags the risks of not achieving resilient supply chains, including supply and materiel shortfalls, diminished surge capacity, and supply chain vulnerability.
The NDIS warns that insufficient workforce readiness could lead to the inability to successfully onshore critical manufacturing, the inability to compete globally, reduced productivity throughout the full supply chain, and limited innovation.
Some solutions the document offers to this challenge include an increased access to apprenticeship and internship programs at the DoD and expanded recruitment of non-traditional communities.
“Flexible acquisition will lead to the development of strategies that strive for dynamic capabilities while balancing efficiency, maintainability, customization and standardization in defense platforms and support systems. Flexible acquisition strategies would result in reduced development times, reduced costs, and increased scalability,” the NDIS factsheet reads.
To address this priority, DoD will take actions such as broadening platform standards and interoperability, and continuing to support acquisition reform.
The final strategic priority, economic deterrence, is intended to promote fair and effective market mechanisms that support a resilient defense industrial ecosystem among the U.S. and close international allies and partners.
It notes that DoD must fortify alliances to share science and technology, strengthen enforcement against adversarial ownership and against cyberattacks, and strengthen prohibited sources policies to protect the DIB from adversarial intrusion.
The Pentagon’s proposed pathway to modernize the defense industrial ecosystem also recognizes that this effort cannot be a DoD-only solution, repeatedly emphasizing cooperation and coordination between the entire U.S. government, private industry, and international allies and partners.
“We need to shift from policies rooted in the 20th century that supported a narrow defense industrial base, capitalized on the DoD as the monopsony power, and promoted either/or tradeoffs between cost, speed, and scale,” the NDIS reads.
“We need to build a modernized industrial ecosystem that includes the traditional defense contractors – the DIB primes and sub-tier defense contractors who provide equipment and services – and also includes innovative new technology developers; academia; research labs; technical centers; manufacturing centers of excellence; service providers; government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) facilities; and finance streams, especially private equity and venture capital,” the document says.
The document does not shy away from acknowledging that a number of serious challenges must be overcome for the Pentagon to achieve those priorities. These range from a lack of skilled workers and “inadequate” domestic manufacturing capabilities to DoD’s failure to adequately exploit innovative dual-use technologies.
“We are proud to release this ground-breaking strategy,” said Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante. “The NDIS recognizes that America’s economic security and national security are mutually reinforcing and, ultimately the nation’s military strength cannot be untethered from our overall industrial strength. We must act now to build on recent progress and ensure we have the capacity to produce at speed and scale.”
