The U.S. is facing a reckoning with its ability to manufacture enough weapons to fight a well-stocked, near-peer adversary while also continually modernizing its arsenal. For all the talk about “magazine depth,” and individual efforts with specific munitions, experts say the problem can’t be tackled without a major shift in how weapons are developed and manufactured overall.
Modular weapons—made of easily sourced materials with manufacturing standards that commercial factories can accommodate—will be key, according to a panel of experts who spoke Monday at the Hudson Institute.
“For the last 20 years, 25 years, DOD hasn’t invested in magazine depth—they’ve been obviously consumed by the War on Terror and other things that happened during that time period,” said Ben Nicholson, chief growth officer at aerospace technology company Ursa Major. “It’s very difficult to devote capital and costs and funds appropriations for a number of years to just refilling the magazine constantly when you have got to modernize at the same time.”
That drive to modernize has resulted in “highly integrated, monolithic weapons,” according to a Hudson report released earlier this year, which makes them difficult to upgrade without completely replacing them.
“Incorporating dozens of specialized components, the DoD’s bespoke munitions may be class-leading but cannot take advantage of widely available commercial systems or manufacturing methods that could allow expanding production in wartime,” according to the report’s executive summary.
Contrast that with China’s massive manufacturing base, and it’s likely that during a conflict, the U.S. will not be able to keep up with replacing the number of rounds it expends.
“We found in our research that propulsion—both jet propulsion and rocket propulsion—are one of the areas where the DOD has the most trouble in terms of getting to the kind of scale it needs, as well as offering options to be able to build more affordable weapons that have the flexibility to adapt to battlefield conditions,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson and co-author of the report, said Monday.
The main reason for that is that everything involved in propulsion systems, like jet engines, is exquisite, said Eric Hostetler, CEO of manufacturer Volund Industries, from the materials to the engineers who work on them.
“And because things like…all these types of alloys are so difficult to work with, they’re uncommon in most consumer goods, they haven’t had that pressure from the consumer market to develop efficiencies and build automation, build a lot of the ways to move quicker, to drive costs down that we’ve seen in circuit boards and machining and sheet metal composites in almost every other area.”
Standardizing the parts to build a jet engine, Hofstetler suggested, and stockpiling them so they’re ready to assemble, could make their manufacture both faster and cheaper.
“So if we did have mixed modular manufacturing, where we could meet some of those needs, especially as many different weapon systems come online and they demand different sizes of motors … that’s definitely the way we’re going to have to move manufacturing,” Nicholson said.
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