Amid a turbulent transition into a new presidential administration in Washington, senior figures in the government are urging a continued commitment to the USA’s defence industry, at a time of precarious global security.
A robust defence production capability, they argue, will give American leaders a stronger position geopolitically and lessen the chances of a large-scale conflict amongst industrial nations.
“Industrial might is deterrence,” says Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to outgoing President Joe Biden.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on 5 December, Sullivan acknowledged discussions of defence industrial policy can be arcane, but said he believes the subject to be of “profound consequence” for the country.
“A stronger defence industrial base is necessary for us to deter military aggression against NATO or our Indo-Pacific allies and partners,” Sullivan says. “It’s necessary for us to equip our partners when they come under attack… and it’s necessary to strengthen our hand at the negotiating table as we pursue diplomacy to end conflicts.”
In some cases, that strength will come from the development of powerful, exquisite systems to which no adversary has access. A current example of this is the Northrop Grumman B-21 stealth bomber now in testing with the US Air Force (USAF).
“It will provide our nation, the Department of Defense, and combatant commanders the ability to negotiate from a position of strength,” said General Thomas Bussiere, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, in a 5 December appearance at the Mitchell Institute.
The new flying-wing type will replace the USAF’s small fleet of ageing Northrop B-2 stealth bombers and the variable geometry Boeing B-1B heavy-bomber.
A small number of B-21s are currently undergoing assembly and testing, and Bussiere says the air force will field the new bomber “soon”. The USAF operates the only fleet of dedicated bomber aircraft in the Western world.
While Bussiere focused on the ability to deliver the exquisite, high-cost B-21 (a single aircraft is expected to cost $100 million), Sullivan centred his pitch around the need to produce mass quantities of cheaper, long-range munitions.
At the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, he says the USA and its allies had largely lost that capacity, following what Sullivan described as a long-running lack of investment in key segments of the arms industry.
“Decades of under-investment and consolidation had seriously eroded our defence industrial base,” he argues.
“Our defence enterprise atrophied,” Sullivan says of the post-Cold War period. “In part due to the urging from the government, mergers collapsed significant defence companies into each other; from 50 to the five major prime contractors that we have today. Factories closed; production lines shut down. Our skilled workforce declined, the number of defence suppliers shrank, and many of our supply lines migrated overseas,” he adds.
The outbreak of a high-intensity conventional war in Ukraine served as a “strategic warning”, Sullivan notes, with artillery shells and guided missiles being expended at rates far beyond the production capacity of the American defence industry.
It is a situation the outgoing Biden administration sought to change, he says, citing some $1.3 trillion in spending on research and development and acquisitions over the past four years. Sullivan says that level of expenditure, adjusted for inflation, exceeds similar figures from any four-year period of the Cold War.
“Our task has been to reverse years of decline, while simultaneously increasing agility, innovation and integration,” Sullivan says of the US defence industry.
Whether that level of spending can be sustained going forward carries some measure of doubt. High-profile allies of President-elect Donald Trump have already targeted big budget defence items like the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter as wasteful.
The chairman of America’s central bank on 4 December described the debt-financed US federal budget as being on an “unsustainable path”.
“We’re running very large budget deficits at a time of full employment and strong growth, so we need to address that, and we’ve got to do it sooner or later – and sooner is better than later,” says Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.
Sullivan acknowledges there will be debates about defence spending within the second Trump administration and Congress. While he did not speculate on the top-line budget number for fiscal year 2025, he identified long-range munitions, air defence capabilities and attribute/autonomous systems as areas where available funds should be focused.
“The bottom line here is that we’ve got to keep growing our magazine depth,” the national security advisor says. “Future conflicts are going to consume munitions and equipment at a rate we have not seen in a very long time.”
In addition to increasing production capacity for those munitions, Sullivan says Washington must also build up stockpiles before a conflict erupts.
Accomplishing that first means replacing the thousands of missiles sent to Ukraine over nearly three years of war. The latest Pentagon figures indicate at least 3,000 Stinger anti-air and 10,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles have been shipped to Kyiv.
Raytheon has been forced to call retired engineers back to work in order to restart Stinger production, which had ended 20 years ago. The joint venture between Raytheon and Lockheed that produces Javelins has sought to expand production of that all-important weapon from 2,100 units per year to 4,000 – still just a fraction of the total expended in Ukraine.
Larger, more advanced munitions like Lockheed’s Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile have lower production rates, but will likely see even greater use in any naval conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.
“Any war with a country like the [People’s Republic of China]… is going to involve the exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly,” Sullivan says, based on observations from Ukraine.
The Pentagon is now working with munitions suppliers on multi-year contracts industry executives say are necessary for them to make the significant capital investments required to expand weapons production. New start-ups, such as California-based Anduril, have also entered the market with promises of new, low-cost guided munitions optimised for production on a much larger scale.
If the US government continues the current trend of long-term investment in such capacity, Sullivan predicts it will still take until the 2030s to achieve industrial capacity sufficient to meet wartime demand.
“I will be the biggest cheerleader of that ongoing effort,” he says, referencing his approaching departure from government. “[It’s] something that is going to take at least the next decade to get ourselves in a position where we can really breathe a sigh of relief.”
