A Guide to Refactoring the Defense-Industrial Base  (Shands Pickett and Zach Beecher, War on the Rocks)
When most Americans remember President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, they think of his warning of the power of the “military-industrial complex,” but he also offered the positive vision of an industrial base “ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.” Over 60 years later, America’s adversaries are increasingly testing their luck, often by leveraging inexpensive, commercial off-the-shelf systems to impose asymmetric costs on the United States and its allies and partners. This is causing both a tactical deficit and technical debt the defense-industrial base is struggling to reconcile.
In the Red Sea, the U.S. Navy has been launching $2 million Block V Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles at the Houthis, who use cheap Iranian systems with unit costs starting at $20,000. In Europe, the Russians have also successfully paired inexpensive DJI drones manufactured in China with sophisticated electronic warfare systems to terrible effect in Ukraine. For all the fanfare around U.S. defense innovation in Ukraine, U.S. systems delivered by defense tech start-ups continuously underperform homegrown solutions fielded by the Ukrainian Army of Drones program, with problems ranging from failure to take off, to the inability to complete missions at the distances advertised, to crashing before returning to base.
A divide in America’s industrial base is at the heart of this challenge. The U.S. defense industrial base is split between traditional original equipment manufacturers (or the “primes”) and emerging dual-use and defense technology companies (the “non-traditionals”). Primes, the longstanding backbone of American defense, excel at delivering complex, large-scale systems but are often criticized for being slow, risk-averse, and overly focused on major programs of record. In contrast, non-traditionals can build capabilities quickly using top U.S. talent and commercial best practices, but they struggle to integrate those capabilities into existing mission systems or manufacture them at full-rate production ready for fielding.
The defense-industrial base is beginning to resemble two sets of code. Right now, prime contractors resemble legacy code — reliable and proven but often inefficient compared to newer, more agile approaches. Non-traditional companies, by contrast, are like modern programming languages, offering innovative solutions to complex problems but lacking compatibility with essential legacy systems. Much like in coding, where deferred upgrades and temporary fixes lead to technical debt and greater waste of time and resources, so will this deepening divide between the primes and non-traditionals result in incompatible or unreliable systems.