“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Allyson Park
“This plan outlines metric-driven initiatives that will guide DOD’s focus program development and investment in the industrial base for the next fiscal year.”
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“The Defense Department published the National Defense Industrial Strategy Implementation Plan on Oct. 29, with a focus on cybersecurity as a significant priority for the department.
Laura Taylor-Kale, assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, said the implementation plan, and more broadly, the NDIS, is a multi-year, ongoing effort, and industrial cybersecurity will “certainly be a focus of this line of effort” in 2025.
“This instantiation of the implementation plan really just outlines what we are planning to do and what our priorities are for this first fiscal year of 2025,” she told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “Industrial cybersecurity remains very much a focus of importance for production and for supply chains. … There are certain segments of the defense industrial base, particularly smaller businesses that are particularly affected.”
The National Defense Industrial Strategy was released in January by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy. The strategy is intended to ensure that the U.S. defense industrial base meets the demands of a “challenging national security landscape well into the future,” the document stated. The strategy identifies four strategic priorities: resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition and economic deterrence.
The implementation plan outlines “metric-driven initiatives that will guide the department’s focus program development and investment in the industrial base for the next fiscal year,” Taylor-Kale said.
The plan is intended to serve as a “roadmap for integrating our priorities under leadership-driven initiatives,” she said. It details both ongoing and planned actions taken by department to address key challenges in the U.S. industrial base, outlining the risks the defense ecosystem faces and detailing investments and programs that will speed up implementation efforts, the document stated.
The plan outlines six implementation initiatives: Indo-Pacific deterrence; production and supply chains; allied and partner industrial collaboration; capabilities and infrastructure modernization; new capabilities using flexible pathways; and intellectual property and data analysis.
The first initiative, building a defense industrial base net framework to enhance integrated deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, will focus on missiles and munitions production, as well as strengthening the submarine industrial base, which are two of the “top requirements” in that theater, Carla Zeppieri, deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial base resilience, said at the briefing.
The second initiative is managing defense production and supply chains. The department will concentrate on onshoring critical defense capabilities and moving away from adversarial supply sources, and it will also conduct a “deeper analysis” of supply chain vulnerabilities, enhance industrial cybersecurity and reinvigorate critical materials stockpiling, she said.
The third initiative aims to further develop allied and partner industrial collaboration, including emphasis on the AUKUS trilateral partnership of the United States, and the United Kingdom to build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia and expanding interest in weapon systems co-production. Zeppieri said the department will “leverage our respective strengths into a network of allied [defense industrial base] capability for mutual effectiveness and resilience.”
The fourth initiative is capabilities and infrastructure modernization, which focuses on investing in infrastructure and fundamental industrial capability to meet strategic and key operational requirements. Zeppieri said modernizing the nuclear industrial base, the organic industrial base and its maintenance, repair and overhaul capacity will “lay the groundwork” for developing and fielding needed systems.
The fifth initiative focuses on utilizing more flexible pathways to field new capabilities more quickly. The department has crafted multiple new acquisition pathways for rapid prototyping and fielding, the implementation plan aims to continue that, pushing “adaptable acquisition to deliver cutting-edge technologies to the warfighter,” she said.
The sixth and final initiative, strengthening intellectual property and data analysis, looks to ensure effective use of resources throughout a program life cycle by “fully integrating intellectual property planning into acquisition and product support strategies.” Much of this work is already underway, Zeppieri said.
After the plan’s rollout, the department is focused on issuing a classified annex, which will outline the remaining efforts aligned to the six initiatives. Taylor-Kale said the department hopes to finish the classified annex “over the next couple of months,” preferably before the end of the year.
“For the classified annex, again, we are working very closely with the services and with other [Office of the Secretary of Defense] components to make sure that we have all the right details in there,” she said. “We’re also putting out a more fleshed-out risk mitigation framework in the classified annex.”
The department cannot execute the implementation plan on its own, Zeppieri said. The success of the plan is reliant on commitment, collaboration and cooperation between and among the entirety of the U.S. government, industry and international partners and allies. In fact, a “key focus” of the implementation plan is championing cross-cutting initiatives that are not the sole responsibility of a single military service or department office, Taylor-Kale said.
“DoD cannot address every industrial base issue alone, and the implementation plan has benefited [from] input from a wide range of stakeholders who remain committed to building a modern and resilient defense industrial ecosystem,” she said. “This unified collaboration among our partners is a first for defense industrial policy to develop implementation initiatives.”
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