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. Essential Elements of 21st Century Mobilization
3. Software-Centric Weapons Development
4. Accelerated Testing 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

For a long time, 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 America's future military success requires both scale and flexibility. However, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) weapons design has moved in the opposite direction: over the past three decades, the U.S. military has developed and manufactured highly integrated, monolithic weapons that are difficult to introduce new features or subsystems into, and cannot leverage widely available commercial systems or manufacturing methods to scale wartime production.

The report points out that when facing adversaries like China, which possess a vast manufacturing base and fight on home turf, the shortcomings of U.S. weapons in production capacity and adaptability will be particularly fatal. To address the challenge, the U.S. military needs to work along two main lines: first, "counter-sensing" operations to degrade enemy reconnaissance-intelligence systems; second, new weapons capable of being produced at scale and flexibly. 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 peak-performance, highly integrated monolithic weapons (AUR) to modular weapons designed "bottom-up." This new model aims to achieve the 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 project management "Iron Triangle" to replace the traditional cost, schedule, performance triangle. The new triangle has "Time to Relevant Capability," "Time to Relevant Scale," and "Concept of Operations/Use Case" as its vertices, emphasizing balancing relevant capability with relevant scale within available funding by adjusting weapon use cases. 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.

The report uses several case studies (such as the F-117 Nighthawk, General Atomics' Long-Range Maneuverable Projectile, the Army's TITAN program, etc.) to demonstrate 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, including the rigid Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) requirements process, outdated and inflexible technical standards, a linear Testing & Evaluation (T&E) system focused on monolithic certification, and the limitations imposed by the Financial Management Regulation (FMR) on procuring modular components.

To achieve 21st-century mobilization capabilities, the report presents 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 contract tools like "Middle Tier of Acquisition" and "Other Transaction Authority," revising the Financial Management Regulation to allow modular procurement, and reforming the application of technical standards to be more risk-oriented and flexible. The report concludes that the necessary reforms are relatively moderate in cost and scale but require a significant shift in DoD culture—from seeking the "best" weapon to seeking a "good enough" weapon that can be mass-produced and adapted to new threats. If this shift cannot be achieved, the U.S. military's munitions stockpile will remain chronically short, thereby weakening deterrence against adversaries.