Executive Summary
The United States military’s dominance over potential adversaries, a fixture of the international security environment since the Cold War, is coming to a predictable end. Exploiting technology proliferation and geographic advantages, China, Russia, and Iran-backed proxies are all testing US forces from Europe to the Western Pacific. These rivals are also becoming more creative. Rather than relying on mass alone, they are combining software, modular hardware architectures, off-the-shelf microelectronics, and commercial surveillance services to evolve effective weapons and ersatz reconnaissance-strike complexes.
Opponents with modest industrial and technology sectors can achieve agile capability and robust capacity in part because of the increasingly blurry line between commercial and military systems. And while small drones like quadcopters are generally not relevant in a vast maritime theater like the Indo-Pacific, the principles behind their adoption—easy assembly from available components, rapid iteration, and tight coupling between developer and operator—are becoming central to modern warfare.
These trends suggest US forces will need a combination of adaptability and scale to succeed in future conflicts. But in its weapons designs, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has moved in the opposite direction. During the three decades since the Cold War, the US military has developed and built highly integrated, monolithic weapons to which it cannot easily introduce new features or subsystems. 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.
Shortfalls in US weapon capacity and adaptability will be most problematic against an adversary like China that has a large manufacturing base and would be fighting from its home territory. To counter China’s geographic and industrial advantages, the US military will need to pursue two main lines of effort:
- Counter-sensing operations to reduce enemy fires performance
- New weapons that the DoD can build in larger numbers and with greater flexibility compared to today’s preferred munitions
Both lines of effort should harness America’s world-leading electronics manufacturing and software sectors. Like auto and appliance factories during World War II, future US military mobilization will depend on these twenty-first-century commercial industries to support the development and fielding of militarily relevant capabilities.
The US military is increasing its efforts to develop concepts and capabilities for counter-sensing operations. However, the DoD will need to substantially change its approach to developing and building weapons to tap America’s industrial strengths and achieve a combination of adaptability and scale. The tightly integrated munitions that comprise most of the US military’s portfolio rely on specialized parts and components and are generally monolithic products that prime contractors design and build. Developers are unable to incorporate off-the-shelf commercial components—such as sensors, radios, guidance computers, or control systems—into these weapons. Acquisition program offices also cannot outsource the manufacture of monolithic weapons because they generally require custom assembly processes.
To enable surge production of weapons during mobilization, the DoD will need to design new munitions from the bottom up so that they use widely available components and can be manufactured in commercial factories. In contrast to traditional acquisition models that design weapons to meet analytically derived requirements, this new approach reflects a new iron triangle of program management that balances relevant capability and relevant capacity within the available funding by adjusting the use case or operational concept of the weapon.
This bottom-up model of munition development exploits improvements in commercially available technologies for nearly every weapon component, including elements such as rocket motors and control systems that were previously unique to military applications. Program offices will need to ensure that their bottom-up designs exploit software and hardware modularity to easily incorporate and exchange these off-the-shelf components. As a result, some new munitions may more closely resemble uncrewed air systems than traditional missiles.
The most important area of commercial technology that new weapons can leverage is software. US companies dominate the software industry, but today’s monolithic weapons fail to exploit this advantage. New modular weapons will need to draw more of their capability from software in individual components and use digital integration for more rapid and wide-ranging adaptation. Using modular software, weapons developers—which could include software companies as prime contractors—could upgrade munitions before and after deployment, as they often do today in Ukraine.
The DoD will also need to rely on commercial providers to manufacture new weapons. Instead of establishing dedicated factories like those for today’s tightly integrated munitions, mobilization will require elastic manufacturing capacity that allows activation when necessary. US contract manufacturing firms routinely build products, from medical equipment to electric car chargers, according to a client’s conceptual or detailed design. They could do the same for weapons programs.
Enabling this new approach to weapons development and production will require program offices to adopt new practices within their existing acquisition authorities, such as collaborating more with operators and decoupling weapon design from production. The DoD could further enhance its ability to create and adapt weapons by establishing enduring digital infrastructure for development and test and evaluation as part of a weapons consortium. And the DoD and Congress will need to change regulations and laws to enable program offices to truly modularize the procurement of weapons and related components.
The reforms necessary to implement modular weapons and enable twenty-first-century mobilization are relatively modest and inexpensive. However, they require a substantial cultural adjustment away from seeking the best possible weapons to seeking those that are good enough for their initial use case, can be built in relevant numbers, and are able to adapt to new threats and countermeasures. If the DoD cannot make this shift, the US military’s magazines will continue to come up short and undermine deterrence of America’s adversaries.