Opinion: The How, Who And When Of U.S. Defense Mobilization

Debates and discussions about U.S. defense mobilization began a decade ago after the realization that great power competition entails a need to scale conventional military forces if there is a war or to deter one. The discourse meandered up to 2022, although with some attention paid to supply networks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic experience.

The Russia-Ukraine War and the stresses it placed on U.S. and allied industrial bases—plus the eye-popping losses of Russian armor and artillery and the consumption of munitions and missiles by both sides—further invigorated mobilization discussions. In this period, they were leavened by war games that showed the scale of force losses in a war over Taiwan.

The mobilization debate in the U.S. may be further along than in Europe, but in the U.S., it seems to have settled into two primary camps.

Well-established, large defense contractors have argued for a more consistent “demand signal” before committing to expanding facilities, equipping them and hiring workers. That demand signal was to come from multiyear contracts so that management could make commitments with a reasonable degree of assurance of a return on these investments.

The other camp is populated by smaller defense technology entrants, funded by venture and private capital, which do not wait for a “demand signal.” Instead, they are willing to invest because they believe demand will emerge or be sustained. They have promised to build products and systems more quickly and at a lower cost than more established companies. Examples include Anduril’s Arsenal-1 Hyperscale plant announced last January, a 5-million-ft.² facility it will build in Columbus, Ohio, and Saronic’s Port Alpha next-generation shipyard, where it plans to build autonomous naval vessels.

Washington think tanks have also recently weighed in on U.S. defense industrial base expansion and mobilization, and a Defense Science Board report released in April, titled “21st Century Industrial Base for National Defense,” took up this theme as well. The Heritage Foundation issued its report, “A Strategy to Revitalize the Defense Industrial Base for the 21st Century,” and the Center for a New American Security released “From Production Lines to Front Lines: Revitalizing the U.S. Defense Industrial Base for Future Great Power Conflict.” These reports pick up some of the themes noted above and add others, including financial incentives, sourcing from allies, regulatory changes, use of different contract vehicles and support for U.S. defense exports.

They contain some good ideas, but to the point above on stable demand signals, the likely cutoff of U.S. aid to Ukraine shows how demand can change from one administration to another, or how external circumstances, such as the start or end of a conflict, also influence demand. It may not make sense for contractors to keep idle facilities, tooling and parts inventories on hand just in case there is national need. Parts, machine tools and test equipment can obsolesce over time, and people will still be needed to staff facilities. Buying minimally viable quantities of older designs might be sustained but could be seen as wasteful if they are more expensive or less capable than current options.

Two other mobilization pathways should be considered by the U.S. and allied countries:

(1) Rely on other parts of manufacturing and services, which, if need arose, could be converted to military production. Conversion of commercial sectors to military production was largely how the U.S. and the UK massively expanded armaments in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Automobile companies were a key part of this conversion, but so were broad swaths of commercial enterprise. In some instances, aircraft had to be redesigned for mass production. The B-24 bomber was designed and initially built by Consolidated Aircraft, but Ford Motor Co. built more than 6,700 of the 18,000 aircraft produced.

There are some current examples of weapon systems in development that draw on existing commercial production lines. Textron Systems offers the Tsunami small autonomous naval surface vessel. It relies on a commercial Boston Whaler hull and Mercury outboard engine, both of which are in volume production for civilian use.

(2) Develop “wartime” standard designs that could be refreshed as needed but would be capable of large-scale production if the need arose. These would not be as robust as weapons designed for peacetime, but they could complement ones already in service. Autonomous systems may be today’s equivalent of the Liberty ships, Flower-class corvettes and escort carriers built swiftly and at scale in the 1940s.