What non-defense production enterprises could quickly be retooled to make war materiel?
American political and military leaders want to modify the way the industrial base of defense manufacturers and military planners work together. This will be done by improving flexibility, elasticity, and surge capacity.
The system, as the illustration above shows, is complicated--with hidden vulnerabilities.
The Army started acquisition changes:
The year 2025 will go down as a year of transformation for the US Army — quite literally, thanks to the Army Transformation Initiative and its sweeping acquisition overhaul. With this came new programs, more funding and shifts to how the Army potentially plans to work with its vendors.
Dealing with the existing vendors is great. But America's economy is huge. And the defense industrial base that supplies our peacetime military is limited. How could it expand to sustain a great power war?
The Pentagon is on that with the new national defense strategy:
While the NDS does shift inward, it includes calls for scaling up the country’s defense industry at a level that will require large influxes of funding. The Pentagon calls for a “once-in-a-century revival” of industry by reshoring strategic industries and increasing capacity. ...
Doing so requires growing nontraditional vendors while partnering with traditional vendors, Congress, allies and partners and other departments, the document says.
So the defense industry doesn't have to rely solely on the major peacetime vendors for expansion, the Pentagon should have a periodically--if not continuously--updated list of large and small American non-defense industrial and software firms matched to their potential for war production.
The smaller companies couldn't compete with the primes, but perhaps they could bolster bottlenecks and vulnerabilities or provide the foundations for major system production.
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NOTE: Illustration from the second article.
