Production Throughput, Not Just Innovation, Shapes Future of US Defense Readiness

By Lindsey Berckman, Aerospace & Defense leader, Deloitte

For decades, competitive advantage in aerospace and defense centered on an organization’s ability to design an advanced capability and secure a contract. Today, the complexity is greater, asking the question: Can organizations deliver product at rate, with quality, with certainty, and can they sustain it under pressure?

In a word, can they deliver throughput? Optimal throughput, with a dependable industrial system behind it, is becoming an advantage with respect to both new and already fielded technologies.

It’s a challenge. Public filings show that the three largest U.S. defense primes together hold a combined backlog of US$557 billion, equivalent to 2.7 times 2025 annual sales, implying an order coverage horizon of 30 months at current revenue run rates.^[i] At the same time, policymakers and industry leaders have signaled intentions to expand production of critical systems^[ii], including air and missile defense interceptors and long-range precision munitions, with discussions of doubling output over the next several years to address stockpile replenishment and operational demand^[iii].

A report from Deloitte, “Throughput, Not Just Innovation, May Define the Future of US Defense Manufacturing and Industrial Scale,” offers leaders ideas for countering this challenge. In sum, A&D companies could benefit by actively improving industrialization across their operations, supply chains, and emerging industry ecosystems.

Industrialization defined

Accelerating high-quality production should include a reassessment of traditional ways and a renewed focus on the industrialization of defense manufacturing. Industrialization in this context is the ability to:

• Translate proven designs into certified, supply-secure, repeatable production.
• Quickly qualify suppliers and processes.
• Sustain output under the demand shocks in high-intensity military operations.

Accelerating and sustaining production volume means overcoming constraints like sub-tier fragility, qualification throughput limits, quality-at-rate challenges, workforce availability, and compliance requirements.

Sub-tier fragility

Some of the most acute production constraints rarely reside at the prime contractor level. They often sit deeper in the sub-tier supply chain, where multitier visibility is limited, working capital is tight, and qualification timelines are long. In practice, you cannot surge what you cannot see.

An organization or program can add capacity by attracting new vendors or automating time-consuming manufacturing processes, but fixes can take years.Many constraints sit outside final assembly, including qualification capacity, cyber readiness, supplier working capital, and workforce availability. A bottleneck can be a limited workforce, rigorous cybersecurity certification requirements, or lack of capital for automation investment. Industrialization at scale should include aligning solutions for constraints across suppliers, teams and plants.

Compliance as a throughput constraint

Compliance is an example of a veiled constraint at the sub-tier level. It increasingly shapes who can participate in the defense industrial base and how quickly suppliers can scale. Federal rules enforcing strict cybersecurity standards throughout the defense supply chain can introduce onboarding friction, particularly for smaller suppliers that lack dedicated compliance teams.

Insufficient qualification capacity, cyber readiness, and supplier capital to address these constraints can narrow the near-term pool of eligible vendors. Schedule and execution risks shift to primes, which should treat certification as more than a simple pass-through requirement. Primes can help suppliers scale through joint readiness or qualification efforts. That’s an example of an ecosystem approach to industrialization.

Automation and distributed manufacturing

Automation is another way to address workforce constraints. Some companies are investing in robotics, digital manufacturing tools, and advanced inspection technologies to increase yield, quality, and consistency without adding additional labor in a constrained workforce environment.

Distributed manufacturing can be enabled by digital/automation capabilities to help orchestrate a company’s industrial ecosystem. It is the practice of shifting production across a network of internal sites and external partners, sometimes enabled by digital technologies and automation. One example is a U.S. military shipbuilder expanding capacity with a distributed network of shipyards and fabrication providers in multiple states to meet rising naval demand.^[iiii]

Distributed manufacturing means taking on more partners, who are likely to introduce additional challenges in quality assurance, configuration control, cybersecurity, and schedule coordination.

Partnerships demand proof

Orchestration of one’s supply chain or manufacturing network can involve a range of partnership models. Partnerships often start out as pilots and capability integration, focusing on a single program or product, but they can broaden into joint ventures, minority investment, or capacity lock-ins. In some cases, removing a production bottleneck requires direct ownership. Here, acquisition can become a strategic tool to address limited production capacity, specialized certifications, sustainment challenges, or fragile sub-tier supply chains.

A question for primes is whether a partnership, investment, or acquisition measurably increases production throughput within the program’s time horizon.

A final word

In an era where time-to-replenish is a strategic metric and technical advantage matters only when it can be produced, certified, delivered, sustained, and regenerated at the rate readiness demands. That’s throughput. And a dedicated ecosystem industrialization strategy can help leaders convert their intent to optimize throughput into execution, thereby narrowing the consumption-replenishment gap.

Lindsey Berckman is a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP and leads Deloitte’s Aerospace and Defense practice. She helps aerospace, defense, industrial, and automotive clients address complex supply chain and manufacturing challenges through enterprise-scale digital transformation, product innovation, and portfolio design.

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