American weapons have played a huge role in Ukraine’s success at repelling Russia’s invasion. But many of the weapons credited with that success—Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and the (HIMARS High Mobility Artillery Rocket System)—are out of production and drawing down fast, highlighting an Achilles’ Heel in U.S. military power.
“Production is deterrence,” undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment William LaPlante said at a Potomac Officers Club acquisition conference in October. Production can’t be an afterthought of development—“buying the minimum number we can get away with”—but must instead be the primary drive in acquisition. Production lines must be constantly humming, “And we’re going to have to pay for it,” he said.
A self-described “nerd,” LaPlante said he loves prototyping and experimentation with new weapons; but if they don’t make it to large-scale manufacturing, he noted, such efforts are pointless.
Adversaries are not deterred by “things in the lab,” he said, but by “real live” weapons that can be put into the hands of troops quickly. He also said that while he’s delighted with the surge in prototyping and experimentation since his last tour at the Pentagon, there’s “an excess of it, really” and it detracts from production.
“All that matters is getting [hardware] to warfighters at scale,” he said. “If you don’t get into production, it really doesn’t matter.” Ukraine is not winning with quantum computing or artificial intelligence, but “hardcore production of really serious weaponry,” according to LaPlante.
This, he said, has been the key lesson that has “hit home” from the Ukraine war, and it “amplifies” the approach he’s been taking to the A&S job: an emphasis on production.
Moreover, LaPlante thinks Congress is ready to adopt the same position and put money toward warming up production lines and allowing multiyear buys.
At a November streaming seminar hosted by George Mason University, LaPlante said Congress has been alarmed at the difficulty of replacing weapons supplied to Ukraine and is ready to give the Pentagon more room to stock up.
All that matters is getting into production, at scale.William LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment
“They are supportive of this,” he said. “They are going to give us multiyear authority and … the funding” to put billions into the industrial base “to fund these production lines. That, I predict, is going to happen.” In October, there was a bipartisan amendment from the Senate Armed Services Committee to the National Defense Authorization Act that would give the Pentagon power to conduct wartime procurements of in-demand munitions.
There’s no question China is serious about becoming, first, a regional hegemon in the Indo-Pacific, and later the world’s top superpower, LaPlante stated in the October address. Ukraine also teaches that “a real, high-end fight” with a peer adversary is not just something that could happen “five or 10 years from now” but “next year, next month.” That’s why the U.S. needs to change its sine-wave pattern of boom-and-bust munitions buys, and get to a routine pattern that will both build stocks and diversify their sources, LaPlante said.
Deterrence stems from “three C’s,” LaPlante said: “Communication, capability, and credibility.” The U.S. has to have the goods to back up its credibility for deterrence to work, he remarked.
“The other side … has to understand what you mean and intend,” he said. Healthy stockpiles or the ability to replace what’s used send that message.
In Ukraine today, deterrence “is working,” he insisted. NATO and Russia are not at war and “hopefully … will not be” and that is due, he asserted, to production lines.
The idea applies across the spectrum of capabilities, LaPlante said. If an enemy knows that the U.S. can produce “smallsats off the line in a couple of days” such that “if they take out a hundred of them, you can put up another hundred of them in three weeks,” the enemy probably won’t bother to try taking them out in the first place. “That’s deterrence,” he said.
Stock the Pile
Russia is watching to see if more weapons are waiting to backfill those used, LaPlante said. If “a country can keep going into its magazine and has production, that’s deterrence,” he repeated.
Steady production is essential because “you can’t predict … what you’re going to need. You can try, but you’ll be wrong half the time.” LaPlante added, “You have to hedge your bets.”
The Stinger production line ended in 2008, and the HIMARS ended production in 2017. The weapons going to Ukraine are being provided from U.S. stocks, and it has taken diligence to round up all that are available, LaPlante noted.
“The Army never throws anything away,” he observed, and many rounds have been found, forgotten in warehouses. When a service “tells you they’re … out, … tell them to look again,” he said. But that’s no substitute for being able to place a quick-turn order for more.
“If you can’t get something in three years, nobody cares,” he said.
LaPlante is banishing the “WalMart” model of just-in-time delivery schemes.
“Remember all this?” he asked, citing management models that “‘inventory is waste,’ ‘cut out redundancy,’ ‘tooth-to-tail.’” That system couldn’t “go wrong … until we have Ukraine.” The solution is to keep production lines going at some level even when stockpiles are healthy, LaPlante said, and the resulting cost is one the U.S. must simply bear in a quasi-Cold War environment.
“You have to pay for it; you have to plan for it,” and accept the cost of creating capability that may never be used, he indicated.
In September, LaPlante chaired a meeting of NATO armaments directors, and the consensus of the attendees was that NATO and partner nations must not only have warm production lines of staple weapons, but that there must be multiple, redundant production lines, and probably in multiple countries. Moreover, the weapons produced must not only be interoperable but “interchangeable,” LaPlante said after the meeting.
There’s “great power” in having multiple lines that can surge production on fairly short notice, he said. This was a consensus of the 45 NATO armaments directors, who were not only trying to plan a way forward for Ukraine, but also a long-term munitions plan for the alliance.
In recent years, acquisition officials have learned that many NATO partners expect to rely on U.S. stocks in a contingency and reimburse the U.S. afterward. This came into high relief during the 2011 Libya operation, after which the U.S. urged its allies to stock up for themselves, as it could not guarantee an alliance-wide supply in a future conflict.
The NATO group also agreed to jointly address single-point-of-failure supply chain issues that affect all members. These include ball bearings, microprocessors and solid rocket motors, among others, LaPlante reported. Smaller working groups were set up to address how these supply chain issues could be mitigated, possibly by setting up multiple public-private partnerships in a number of countries to produce components.
“Not for everything,” LaPlante said, but “where it makes sense.”
Contractors won’t like multiple production lines because “they are … setting up” their own competition and “lowering the barrier for entry” into the market, LaPlante acknowledged.
He told the November audience that the Pentagon will have to come up with incentives to persuade companies to do just that, but the biggest one will simply be a “clear demand signal” from the Pentagon showing that it’s worth companies’ while to facilitize for scale production. With the up-and-down munitions buys of the past, there was a reluctance to do that. The Pentagon and NATO allies broadly need to show “we’re serious,” he said.
Many companies have told him “ ‘sure, you’re going to put a lot of money against this now … but two years from now, you’re going to leave me holding the bag.’” They can point to times when “‘you’ve done that to me before,”’ he added. Multiyear contracts will go a long way toward easing those concerns, he said. It will also be “in the contract.”
The industrial base, “both in our country and around the world, want to know there is a sustainable longer-range plan for … production” so it can invest appropriately, he explained to reporters after the NATO armaments director’s meeting. The directors agreed they no longer want to buy “in panic mode,” going back to “minimal production when the crisis is over.”
The European Union and NATO want “more stable” buying plans “looking at the world ahead.” All the partners have “made commitments” to this, LaPlante reported.
Accelerate
In a post-meeting summary issued by the Pentagon, the U.S. delegation to the armaments directors “outlined the Department’s analytical approach to identifying supply chain constraints for major components and sub-components, and plans to increase production of ground-based long-range fires, air defense systems, air-to-ground munitions, and other capabilities” for Ukraine.
“Nearly 20 other countries briefed plans … to expand their nations’ industrial base to accelerate production,” according to the summary.
Both to help Ukraine and themselves, the participants “recognized the importance of standardizing requirements, thereby creating more interchangeable and interoperable systems.” In addition, they discussed building “sustainment capacity in Ukraine, including forward repair activity, access to spares, and other sustainment enablers.”
LaPlante also emphasized that the “defense industrial base” is now simply part of the national—and even international—industrial base, and changing this mindset will allow the Pentagon to broaden its sources of innovation as well as production, he said.
The NATO nations and their partners have wearied of highly complex weapon systems that take forever to get to the field, LaPlante voiced at the GMU forum, and they are collectively of a mind to embrace what others have done, in order to save time and not reinvent the wheel. He held out as an example the E-7 Wedgetail AWACS-type aircraft developed by Boeing for the Royal Australian Air Force. The U.S. Air Force has decided to adopt the E-7, after it is modified to better operate with USAF units.
“It’s in production. Imagine that,” he said. The allies “are going to want to do more of that.” With that sentiment goes a commitment from the U.S. to share more technical information. He said potential adversaries will “pay a whole lot of attention” if production lines “showed up in Australia and Japan for capabilities that had previously only been produced in the United States.”
Pentagon Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, also at the GMU forum, said that the collective response to the invasion of Ukraine—and the coordinated response of providing materiel and weapons—has worked surprising well. The U.S. also shared tightly held intelligence with its partners ahead of the invasion, and “everything” that was predicted “came true,” she said. That “builds trust,” she affirmed.
It should be pointed out, too, that “the stuff works,” LaPlante told the Potomac Officers Club.
“For all the criticism we give ourselves,” about the byzantine acquisition process and the ordeal of bringing weapons into production, “the stuff works, and it works really well.” That, too, is a strong deterrent, he noted.