With Ukraine support showing the limits of U.S. capacity and conflict with China possible, we need a national mobilization of our defense-industry capacity.
With Ukraine support showing the limits of U.S. capacity and conflict with China possible, the country needs a national mobilization of its defense-industry capacity.
P resident Biden recently admitted what should be clear to all: The United States is woefully ill-prepared to provide the weapons and matériel needed for our nation’s security. For the last year, there has been growing recognition that the nation’s defense-industrial base is inadequate to supply Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia while also equipping U.S. and key allied forces for a possibly impending war with China. Above all, U.S., Taiwanese, and other allied forces need to be ready to confront China’s forces in a conflict centered on the Taiwan Strait — yet the best analysis publicly available, most recently from the RAND Corporation, indicates that neither the U.S. nor its allies are as ready as necessary for such a momentous conflict.
Multiple studies and news reports have documented how inadequate U.S. defense production of key munitions and platforms is, and how long it would take to rectify this situation under current policies. The president’s admission to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that America could not even sustain Ukraine with relatively simple 155-millimeter shells shows how far our defense industrial base is from meeting even basic requirements.
This is an unacceptable situation. The United States simply cannot afford to lose a war with China in the Western Pacific, as such a defeat would have catastrophic implications for Americans’ prosperity and freedoms. At the same time, the enormous U.S. economy should be able to produce the weapons to help our allies in other parts of the world — such as NATO and Ukraine in Europe and Israel in the Middle East — assume more of the responsibility for their own defense in these important regions. It is, frankly, ridiculous that the United States, the world’s premier economy and once its greatest industrial powerhouse, is unable to produce the basics required by our military, ranging from specialty chemicals to munitions and aircraft castings to submarines. It does not have to be this way.
This is especially important because the Ukraine crisis should finally and fully drive a stake through the assumption of recent decades that the wars for which the nation should be prepared will be anything but long, hard, and resource-consuming. Above all, a war with China would almost certainly involve bewildering amounts of matériel, munitions, and platforms on the scale of what we planned for in the late Cold War — or more. Ensuring success in such a war — and thus effective deterrence — requires entering any such conflict with considerable resources held in reserve, starting with a significant expansion of the National Defense Stockpile to ensure the United States has the critical minerals and key inputs needed to reconstitute a military that would be lost to attrition in real time.
To rectify the situation, the country needs a national mobilization of its defense-industry capacity — right now. This requires both leveraging its remaining assets and fundamentally revising a broken model. The United States cannot simply pour more money into the existing, deeply broken paradigm. At the same time, it cannot hope to produce a revivified defense industry from one day to the next. Fortunately, a clear agenda for such a mobilization exists.
First, Washington must leverage what is available for the near term. The threats the country faces are here and now — China above all — not in some distant future. So Washington should quickly prioritize and direct investment in the “organic” industrial base that already exists: a network of government-owned and government-operated arsenals, depots, and shipyards across the country that produce everything from small-arms ammunition to tank barrels and that repair significant quantities of Navy and Air Force ships and aircraft. This industrial base requires immediate expansion, with additional weapon systems that struggle for sustained private-sector investment placed within its remit. Such expansion of key organic industrial-base functions has occurred before, including during the Iraq War.
Second, the administration should use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to direct investment in the highest-priority national-security efforts — revitalizing our ability to produce weapons and military platforms at scale, with particular focus on the capabilities required to deter China. Title III of the DPA exists to incentivize defense functions the private sector has failed to undertake. Congress should dramatically increase, by an order of magnitude, the funds available under Title III to direct the administration’s significant resources to begin working with industry partners. The goal would be to expand the key facilities needed to fulfill the nation’s strategic requirements. These kinds of funds may be hard to come by under existing caps for appropriations. If this proves true, given the urgent need to strengthen our nation’s defense, then Congress should shift funds from other programs, including defense programs, to support Title III.
Third, the United States must ensure a more open, accessible, and fairer defense industrial base. The American people will not support more money going into the current system, with the terrible results that it has produced. Instead, we need a return to the kind of robust competition among many more defense companies that existed in the Cold War. Congress should couple needed increases in investment in the defense industry with incentives and guidance to expand the number of industry participants — including but not limited to a budgeting process that gives nondefense companies the confidence required to enter the market or existing companies to expand their offerings. This will produce more variety and competition for the military from a broader set of industry players while providing more value to the taxpayer.
A war with China may well be looming. Beijing is certainly preparing for one. To have any real chance of deterring it, let alone prevailing in one, the nation must reinvigorate its defense-industrial base. The hour is already late. There is no time to waste.
Elbridge A. Colby, a principal at the Marathon Initiative, served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development (2017–18). Alexander B. Gray, a senior adviser at the Marathon Initiative, served as chief of staff of the White House National Security Council (2019–21) and special assistant to the president for the defense-industrial base (2017–18).