“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Arnold Punaro
“National defense and defense modernization dictates the nation must not only continue the tremendous work begun in recent years but supercharge it. What does that mean tactically?”
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“Among the first few phrases in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution is, notably, to “provide for the common defense.” For nearly 250 years, the men and women of the U.S. military and intelligence communities have done a remarkable job doing exactly that.
But today, as the nation faces an unstable and threat-filled global landscape, debate in Congress on funding levels, policies and posture at the Defense Department and partisan arguments about America’s priorities put at risk the U.S. military’s ability to do what it has successfully done for more than two centuries.
If leaders put U.S. interests above politics, the nation can maintain its technological advantage over any adversary and ensure the men and women of the armed forces have the upper hand going onto any battlefield.
While defense modernization has long been a priority for the department, the 2018 and 2022 National Defense Strategies renewed that emphasis and even published lists of emerging and critical technologies for national defense.
Despite coming from two different administrations, the lists share many similarities, pointing to the bipartisan nature of national defense and defense modernization. As such, the nation must not only continue the tremendous work begun in recent years but supercharge it, no matter what this year’s election day brings.
What does that mean tactically?
First, the 2018 National Defense Strategy spoke of entering an era of “great power competition” and provided a clear-eyed assessment of our two greatest threats: “China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea. Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic and security decisions of its neighbors.”
The 2022 National Defense Strategy similarly defined China as a pacing threat and discussed “the acute threat posed by Russia.”
At the same time, both documents highlighted the United States’ strategic advantage in the face of such adversaries: its partners and allies. Investment in partnerships with like-minded countries — that are also working to develop technologies and tools to provide to the warfighter — may in fact mean the difference in the outcome of the inevitable next war.
Second, we must invest in securing resilient and healthy supply chains for defense emerging technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East laid bare the challenges U.S. supply chains face across numerous sectors. Defense supply chains, and especially defense emerging technology supply chains, are no different.
Over the past few years, the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute has undertaken an ambitious study to assess these supply chains, focusing in particular on the materials needed for hypersonics and directed energy weapons to provide actionable policy recommendations.
The outcomes of these studies, released in publicly available reports, are bleak. The supply chains for hypersonics and directed energy weapons — both high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves — are insufficient to support fielding these critical technologies at scale. Why? The answer is similar for both and comes down to the lack of a consistent, clear government demand signal over time. This lack of demand signal has led to manufacturing bases and workforces that are only capable of fielding small numbers of weapons with long lead times.
While the reports outline numerous actionable recommendations about how to address supply chain challenges, the single most important step that the Defense Department can take is to provide a clear, consistent, sustained demand signal to industry by transitioning appropriate initiatives to programs of record and utilizing multi-year contracts where possible.Good work is happening daily to advance this goal, but we must expand the depth and reach of that sentiment across the department if it is going to secure the emerging technology supply chains of tomorrow.
Finally, we must rush to act on the bureaucratic, structural and policy changes recommended by the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution Reform. To prepare the Pentagon to fight the next war, significant reforms are necessary to change how the department does business.
The commission made several critical recommendations, including: improving the alignment of budgets to strategy; modernizing business systems and data analytics; and strengthening the capability of the resourcing workforce.
The bipartisan commission’s recommendations must be implemented, and antiquated processes that slow down both innovation and delivering new capabilities to warfighters must be eliminated.
Whether it was the structural superiority and immense firepower of “Old Ironsides” in the War of 1812, the groundbreaking impact of night vision goggles, the remarkable impact stealth provided the warfighter during the first Gulf War, or the advances in personal protection in recent conflicts, technological superiority has always had an outsized impact and a measurable strategic advantage in U.S. conflicts. Providing for the common defense in 2024 as the priority mandate in our Constitution means ensuring that U.S. industry continues to provide warfighters the technological advantage so they are never in a fair fight. “
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro is the chairman of ETI’s advisory board and the immediate past board chairman of the NDIA board of directors. He is the CEO of The Punaro Group LLC.
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