The United Kingdom (UK) and European nations are finally beginning to rearm properly. However, Britain maintains military programmes with exquisite specifications and delivery many years, or even decades, away. These programmes require bespoke manufacturing to meet exquisite military requirements; a luxury of nearly four decades of conflicts without true time pressure – for Clausewitzians, these are ‘limited’, as opposed to ‘unlimited’, wars.
Those who set military requirements are unhabituated to considering time, cost or manufacturing capacity. Industry expects a separate defence pipeline, and for military budgets to pay for the plant and equipment investment. The Covid-19 pandemic dispatched similar considerations in medical equipment manufacture and procurement, where prompt and effective solutions were imported from other manufacturing sectors. The Second World War saw the same. Now, under both time and financial pressure, there is opportunity to energise these ideas in defence.
After the First World War, experienced American officers assumed industrial transformation would simply need a declaration, and production would switch to wartime. The United States (US) Army even had a term for it: ‘M-Day’, or Mobilisation Day. The idea – not a plan – was that reserves would appear, machine tools would begin producing rifles and the logistics chains would fall into place. One hears echoes of this delusion now – that once the ‘real’ crisis arrives, industry and society will transform on cue. Many months, or years, are required to convert to war production, even at full power.
In defence circles, one hears occasionally that only established and experienced defence companies are capable of the scale and expertise to design complex weapons. This attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as only very large companies have the financial endurance and the lobbying depth to elongate a military capability programme long beyond its operational relevance. Simplified requirements which fit existing manufacturing capabilities, drawing from all industrial capacity – not just defence – can help to dispel this.
Military requirements should therefore be made with knowledge of industrial capacities. Industry can only thrive if it helps guide these requirements. Strongly emphasising speed of delivery brought success during the Covid-19 response, accepting good enough and largely ignoring the perfect. These changes come from positive decisions: direction to accept higher risk, using new acquisition practices and working to iron-clad timelines.
The fastest pivots during Covid-19 were by non-medical plastics and printing companies to produce surgical masks and gowns. Designs rapidly iterated and best practice surged ahead of regulation. The same was achieved with more complex systems, such as ventilators. Designs were developed and swiftly built by partnering with the aerospace and automobile industries. Spirit Aerosystems, General Motors and Ford, having never built such devices, partnered with ventilator producers and increased production by 100 times within six months.
Manufacturing partnerships during the pandemic echoed the late 1930s, when the American automotive industry became the core of Allied military production, starting with a significant cash injection from the UK and France. In 1938, the two nations ordered US$350 million (US$8 billion, or £5.8 billion in 2025) of military equipment from US companies, amounting to 15% of their defence budgets. This was because their domestic military productive capacity was inadequate. Even though the two nations had refocused domestic industry to war production years before, they still could not service their own demand.
Today, Britain and European nations are constrained by both productive capacity and demand. The defence budget of the UK, historically 4-6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is now approaching 2.5%; too small to support the scaling of many businesses. Equally, defence-specific manufacturing is insufficient to service military requirements.
Britain should therefore design and build products which can leverage existing manufacturing capability in other industries. As in the Second World War and Covid-19, the military will need to collaborate with industrial expertise, and His Majesty’s (HM) Government should facilitate the participation of a wider swathe of industry. The resultant capabilities will be better, and the UK will make more of them. This increases their military value, decreases their cost and makes them more likely to be sold overseas.
The required transformation can only come from mass-production know-how, which then was found in the automotive sector. Fast-moving defence companies, such as Helsing, have partnered with automotive manufacturers to exploit mass-production expertise. This approach is also dual-use; the military components will be modular or software, easily inserted from elsewhere.
Military requirements are often expected to endure for decades, and are not made with knowledge of the potential of manufacturing and materials. Long-term capability forecasting was never realistic in conflict, and is now also highly unrealistic in peacetime. Rapid technology development and the low cost of highly capable consumer systems, from engines to lasers, means frozen specifications are a recipe for irrelevance.
Further technological pressures weigh on defence: that of software-defined weapons and precise autonomous mass. The solution is modular, off-the-shelf technology to permit rapid iteration. A place for exquisite capabilities will remain, but such capabilities are rendered unusable without mass, and mass is unaffordable unless it is simple.
In August 1940, the US Army gave the specifications for its M3 Grant tank to automobile companies that had never built armaments before. They soon dramatically changed the military-specified materials, components and process. Armour was welded instead of riveted, a process deemed impossible by US Army engineers. The aircraft-specification engine was replaced with automobile engines. The principles applied were common tooling and part reduction via a commercial workforce. The technological and materials developments, imported to defence from elsewhere, led to the most prolifically produced American tank – the M4 Sherman.
The US is driving competition through open architecture and modularity, reducing costs and improving capability. Government Reference Architectures, non-proprietary interfaces, and an assumption of modular and spiral development has widened the scope of American military procurement. Political boldness has brought new competitors to market by facing down lobbying and increasing departmental risk appetite.
Many small changes have helped, but the most consequential has been a focus on speed of delivery. Air-to-surface missiles from new competitors, such as Anduril’s Barracuda-500, Zone 5’s Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) and Leidos’ Black Arrow, came to market 3-4 times faster (less than 1-3 years) than traditional cruise missile programmes such as Tomahawk and the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), which take 8-12 years. Simplified and reduced specifications and processes (i.e., increased risk) have brought this impressive speed.
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) potent military development is fuelled by deep collaboration under its military-civil fusion strategy. It has shown that highly complex and cutting-edge military projects, such as the Shenyang J-35, a fifth-generation stealth fighter, can be co-developed. It incorporates originally civil-use technologies, from semiconductors to infrared sensors, which have been spiral-developed for military use. Not dissimilar from the F-35 Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft, the J-35 is approximately half its cost.
Free and open nations should take note of this fusion of manufacturing and civil-military development. Even with no direct military confrontation, the PRC’s products are attractive exports, and as Ukraine and India have done, Britain will likely eventually meet them on the battlefield.
The key difference between a pandemic and geopolitics is the nature of the enemy: Its capacity for actively disrupting what people do. Military specifications are too complex, driving slow development cycles and expensive manufacturing. Cross-industry collaboration was re-proven in Covid-19, but the UK should not wait for a crisis for defence to begin these practices.
Not only does broad collaboration speed development, but it also lowers cost, which will make British equipment more attractive for export. The US is driving competition through open architecture and facing down vested interests. Combining this with industrial best practice and driving speed through simplification can free the UK and its European allies and partners of their production constraints and drive further innovation. This is Britain’s moment, and it should be seized.
Wg. Cdr. Ben Goodwin MBE is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and a fighter pilot with experience in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and Central Africa. He has been posted to the Ministry of Defence and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Brussels. Previously, he worked at the trading arm of a large bank, focused on foreign exchange and government bonds.
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