Beyond giants like Boeing, the defense supply chain's lower tiers consist of small, often sole-source firms. Their financial instability presents a critical, often overlooked, national security risk, as their failure can halt production of essential components.
Naveen Krishnan proposes a dual mandate for economic security, similar to the Federal Reserve's. It balances a defensive goal (minimizing GDP exposure to adversary-controlled choke points) with an offensive one (ensuring the industrial base can surge production in a crisis).
Guy Ward-Jackson suggests a strategy where the U.S. maintains the industrial capability to rapidly scale production in critical sectors during a crisis, without maintaining full production in peacetime. This mirrors the concept of nuclear latency, where a country can build a bomb quickly without possessing one.
A core challenge of industrial resilience is paying for idle but ready capacity—"warm factories" and trained staff. This is politically difficult because it's a costly insurance policy that looks like paying people and companies to do nothing during peacetime, making it a hard sell for policymakers.
A recent Middle East conflict exposed a critical vulnerability: the U.S. and its allies used three years' worth of Patriot missile production in just 39 days. This highlights an unsustainable gap between peacetime industrial capacity and the consumption rates of modern warfare.
The practice of using expensive interceptors, like $4 million Patriot missiles, to destroy cheap drones creates a severe economic imbalance. This cost-imposition strategy by adversaries can bankrupt a nation's defense budget long before its military is defeated, revealing a critical flaw in current air defense doctrine.
Policymakers find it easier to implement offensive measures like sanctions because they appear decisive. In contrast, building domestic industrial resilience is a harder political sell, as it requires significant, long-term spending with no immediate, tangible benefit to voters until a crisis hits.
Instead of pure defense, a proactive, alliance-based 'counter-coercion' strategy is needed. This involves sharing industrial intelligence to identify and hold an adversary's own economic choke points at risk, creating a credible threat of retaliation that deters them from using economic coercion in the first place.
Guy Ward-Jackson notes a critical shift in transatlantic relations. European policy discussions are increasingly centered on building sovereign capabilities to reduce dependence on the United States, not just China. This erosion of trust complicates US efforts to build economic resilience through alliances.
US policy and funding are often drawn to high-profile, 'sexy' areas like AI. However, the most pressing vulnerabilities lie in 'unsexy' domains like munitions production volume and basic manufacturing capacity. This focus on the frontier neglects the foundational industrial base required for sustained conflict.
Throwing money and political will at resource shortages faces a hard reality: the fastest timeline to open a new mine anywhere in the world is 16 years (26-29 in the U.S.). This demonstrates that for critical physical infrastructure, there are fundamental, long-term constraints that cannot be bypassed during a short-term crisis.
The ultimate solution to industrial base erosion is educational reform. The West has devalued and lost capacity in foundational fields like mining, material science, and manufacturing. Rebuilding economic security requires a generational shift to re-prioritize the skills needed 'to make the stuff that makes the stuff.'