Pentagon unveils plan to ‘restore’ US dominance of global weapons production

(Originally published Oct. 30 in “What in the World“) The Pentagon has released early details of a plan to revive U.S. weapons production to keep up with Washington’s growing conflicts with the rest of the world.

The Defense Dept.’s “National Defense Industrial Strategy” aims to reverse a generation of contracting production capacity that has left the American military industrial complex unable to keep up with any sudden need for an expanded arsenal—as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated.

The U.S. and its allies have drawn stockpiles of artillery dangerously low to supply Ukraine’s trench warfare against Russia. More recently, shooting down Russian, Iranian, and North Korean missiles over Ukraine and now Israel has also created a shortage of air-defense missiles. In short, the Pentagon worries that feeding weapons to Israel and Ukraine is leaving it with too few to fight what Washington seems to agree is an inevitable war with China. Never mind that it was Russia that yesterday conducted a simulated nuclear retaliation that involved the launch of nuclear-capable missiles by from onshore silos, submarines and bombers.

The Pentagon report seems to address the criticisms and suggestions leveled by a string of experts about how years of increasing oversight and consolidation have left the industry unable to innovate or expand fast enough to respond to the rapidly changing face of modern warfare.

But to craft these 93 pages of bureacratese, gobbledygook, and 117 individual acronyms, the Pentagon consulted with U.S. arms manufacturers. So, it reads a bit like an industrial policy for not only global military hegemony, but also domination of the global arms trade. Executing the kind of tributary system of protectionist, mercantile vassalage it envisages will require not only application of the Defense Production Act of 1950 but concerted vigilance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Of its six broad initiatives, for example, the first is “Indo-Pacific Deterrence,” the principal risk of which is that falling competitiveness results in lower global market share for U.S. arms makers, thereby lowering their capacity to ramp up production for Washington’s needs in wartime. American weapons companies’ share of global arms exports already stood at 42% last year, with the U.S. supplying weapons to 107 nations, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, more than any other arms exporter.

Part of the solution, the report says, is to expand the number of suppliers in allied nations to improve supply lines and production capacity. And manufacturers in allied nations, like Sweden’s Saab, will build production facilities in the U.S. The policy’s goals, in a nutshell, are to:

1. make more artillery shells and missiles;
2. build more submarines;
3. reduce vulnerability of weapons supply chains to disruption;
4. move more weapons production back to the U.S. from abroad;
5. reduce the weapons industry’s vulnerability to cyberattacks;
6. reduce foreign investment in U.S. technology that can be used by foreign militaries;
7. accomplish items 3-6 specifically for naval technologies that can be used to influence maritime trade;
8. build up stockpiles of weapons, parts, and vital materials—even minerals used in making weapons;
9. increase sales of interoperable weapons and components between allies in the Aukus (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance (how this jibes with goal #4 is unclear, but Australia has announced both expanded purchases of U.S. missiles and production of them);
10. promote allies’ participation in the development and production of weapons with countries like Australia, Japan, and South Korea (also unclear how this supports goal #4);
11. reduce bureaucratic bottlenecks that slow sales of U.S. weapons to foreign allies;
12. overhaul and modernize the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons;
13. expand the U.S. military’s own weapons service centers for keeping weapons working longer;
14. speed deployment of newer technologies, notably autonomous systems controlled remotely and/or by “artificial intelligence” (computer software);
15. reduce the cost and time it takes to adopt and deploy cutting-edge military technology;
16. cut red tape in defense contracts so the Pentagon can buy new technology more quickly from a wider range of companies;
17. develop regulatory authority to coordinate and cut through conflicts between different vendors’ intellectual property;
18. do #17 to enable the Pentagon to develop its own machine-learning tools to coordinate, analyze, and innovate across different companies’ weapons and control systems;

Each of these initiatives includes some back-of-the-envelope budget estimates, but nowhere does the report seem to offer a bottom line of how much this will cost U.S. taxpayers on top of what they already spend on the military. But it’s a safe bet that this is all going to cost a lot a more than the $877 billion U.S. taxpayers already spend annually on making the world safe for whatever version of “democracy” will unfold next Tuesday. While Donald Trump may inveigh against the “enemy within,” both parties seem to agree the U.S. faces an increasing number of enemies abroad.

The biggest threat to the Pentagon’s plan?

Peace.