Beyond Strategy: The Quest for Effective Implementation in Defense Mobilization

Jan 22, 2024

Mobilizing and engaging small businesses to support national defense has long challenged the Defense Department.

During the opening session of the Truman Commission, Undersecretary of War Patterson highlighted the difficulty in engaging small businesses during the Second World War, stating

Speed is of the essence, and speed made it necessary that orders be placed with concerns with whom preliminary arrangements for production of munitions had been made under the industrial mobilization plan in the years preceding the emergency. We needed medium tanks in large numbers, of uniform design, and we needed them quickly. We made contracts for them with Chrysler, Baldwin Locomotive, and American Locomotive. It would have been folly to have ignored the great productive facilities of these concerns and to have placed our business with companies that could not produce quickly.1

The War Department ultimately found ways to mobilize small businesses and increase the labor supply during the war.

Unfortunately, we’ve unlearnt many of the lessons. Today, numerous small businesses wish to support our national security but find it difficult to do so—even with the development of Small Business Innovation Research funds, Other Transactions, and other vehicles.

Nearly 99% of all manufacturers in America are small businesses; more than three-quarters of manufacturers have fewer than 20 employees.2

Earlier this month, the Department of Defense released the inaugural National Defense Industrial Strategy, a noteworthy step towards mobilizing the economy to rebuild America’s infrastructure and ensure our national security.

Unfortunately, the strategy fails to fully connect ends, ways, and means appropriately. To their credit, the Pentagon is continuing work on developing an Implementation Plan, which hopefully connects those ends, ways, and means.

This implementation plan is scheduled for release later this year. Don’t hold your breath on being able to read it, though, as the full plan will be classified, adding a layer of complexity.

One particular aspect that I find disconcerting about the strategy is the relative lack of discussion on integrating more SMBs into the defense industrial base. For example, in the introduction the strategy states:

We need to build a modernized industrial ecosystem that includes the traditional defense contractors…and also includes innovative new technology developers; academia; research labs; technical centers; manufacturing centers of excellence; service providers; government-owned, contractor-operated (GOC) facilities; and finance streams, especially private equity and venture capital.

True supply resilience will require a federated approach that finds efficiencies through a broader manufacturing base.

We didn’t have the technology in 1941 to create this sort of federated approach, but we do today.

A federated manufacturing marketplace can address at least four of the challenges that the strategy identifies:

Inadequate domestic production
Non-competitive practices
Long lead times and sub-par readiness
Fragility of sub-tier suppliers

Fortunately, I know some people in industry working to build this federated approach allowing rapid scaling of production to meet the needs of our national security. (Reach out to me directly if you want to learn more about this work).

Our national security and our economic health are far too important for us to neglect.

I’m thrilled to see that we’re starting to take the important steps necessary to address these concerns.

We’ve not seen such a powerful alignment of the government, defense industry, and tech industry in a long time. We need to get this right. We need to…

Keep building!

Andrew

This post is part of a larger discussion on revitalizing the Defense Industrial Base. If you haven’t had the chance to read the other posts, you can access them at: