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LONDON—The conflicts in Ukraine and Iran have underscored how industrial capacity and the ability to replenish expended munitions stocks are critical to future war planning, NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander argues.
“If you do not have a well-sized and at least scalable and resilient industrial base, your deterrence is not credible,” Air Chief Marshal John Stringer told the Global Air and Space Chiefs Conference.
How to position for that reality is not straightforward, though, he notes. If a war requires a million or more pieces of varying ammunition, from low-end drones to high-end cruise missiles at the outset of fighting, then governments need industrial potential to restock at that level to sustain the inventory in 30 days.
However, producing that level of munitions in peacetime makes no sense, he says, given the weapons could be obsolete. “What I want to do is make sure that I’ve got the means to do it,” Stringer says.
That could be achieved in various ways, he says, including dual-use systems as well as spending money on ensuring industry has surge capacity and new production techniques, like additive layer manufacturing. The ambition is to have “fundamentally different ways to scale.”
Addressing that could take a change in approaches on system design, says Tom Jones, president of Northrop Grumman's Aeronautics Systems. “Design for scalability” is something companies need to think about, he told the event.
Another emerging concept is a Kongsberg proposal to allow governments to subscribe to company production capacity that would be ready to scale up missile output on a fixed timeframe.
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