Fifty One Ways to Build a Military

THE BIG STORY

An Untapped Lab for Military Innovation

Much of the defense budget runs to and through Washington, DC. What if some of it ran to and through state capitals, instead?

It’s a familiar drumbeat for readers of this newsletter: manufacturing in the U.S. and West can’t keep up with the demand for weapons and ammunition. The problems of 2022 and 2023 have made their way into the new year, with high-tech missiles in high demand and low supply, according to The Wall Street Journal (and many other outlets).

Over the holidays I caught up with several friends in defense industry and procurement, hoping to get a better understanding of the process. The responses ran the gamut from “we have a dog-wagging tail” / “we have built a self-licking ice cream cone” on the one side to “nothing is wrong with the system, it is designed to produce a certain output and the only people who complain about it don’t understand how it works.”

There’s a lot of space between those two conceptions of the defense industry and the military procurement process that it serves.

As we’ve written about here before, the Department of Defense has a monopsony on military purchasing — an understandable arrangement, the downside of which gets offset somewhat by defense industry being privately or publicly owned, rather than state-owned (and state-run) enterprises as is often the case elsewhere. A modern military requires firm guardrails on its procurement process. For the highest quality performance required by air and space flight and undersea combat, the DoD has to be able to issue requests to industry and be assured that those requests are fulfilled in a timely manner, and completely.

Nevertheless, the system is bulky, and slow. It produces what is asked of it, and what is asked of it depends on what the generals and admirals who are responsible for projecting future requirements know to ask. Fourteen (!!! Holy cow!!!) years ago, during the trainup for my second deployment, soldiers already knew to be dissatisfied with the drones we had available at the platoon level. Ten years ago I was the first one in my journalism class to order a Parrot Quadcopter for $300; my roommates and I flew it around in Harlem, eliciting surprise and curiosity. It handled far more intuitively than the Raven, and had better battery life. Drones have improved vastly since then.

A video on the WSJ yesterday explored the U.S. military’s new drone school, which aims to train 1,000 soldiers per year on drone warfare. Critics might say the U.S. could and should have begun fielding such a school a decade ago, while we were the ones who possessed a near-monopoly on the technology. People invested in defending the system would probably counter that it takes a long time to properly stand up a school training any particular skill, and that as the U.S. isn’t at war and hasn’t lost any battles due to a deficiency in drone warfare knowledge, no harm, no foul.

Even fans of the military procurement process acknowledged that speed is some concern under the current model. And whether one believes that procurement is badly broken or that things are basically fine, if slow, both sides seem to agree that it would be useful to have spaces where smaller businesses could develop low-cost solutions to tactical problems. Something that doesn’t rise to the top-secret level of special operations, still fits an emergent need, and isn’t sufficiently developed to resource the entire USMC or U.S. Army.

Enter the state national guards. National Guards have two bosses — the federal government (when called and activated) and their home state (the default, under which they can be activated in which case they report to the state’s governor). They can receive state-specific funding, are often overlooked as laboratories for innovation and — best of all — were originally conceived of (centuries ago!) as the nation’s primary defense force in the case of war. There’s plenty of precedent for state militias that draw on their own distinct traditions and industry.

Reimagining states as a place for procurement and military R&D has its limits. One can easily see a group of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute mechanical and electrical engineering graduates setting up shop in Troy and producing affordable drones sufficient for one of New York state’s battalions of national guard infantry, or entrepreneurs at RISD and Brown working to field a new military uniform for Rhode Island’s national guard unit that incorporates state of the art thermal defeat fabric and material.

It’s easy to see how the faster process would open up opportunities for innovation on the industry side, and create opportunities for play in training that could help reinvigorate a side of the military that has often felt underemployed and behind the times, rather than an exciting proving-ground for novel equipment. In giving National Guards this flexibility, and encouraging them to experiment and develop new ways to encounter emergent threats and problems, it will stimulate and diversify local economies while offering the national military more opportunities to grow. Best of all? It sidesteps the lengthy, exhaustive, and necessary procurement process required for the Department of Defense.

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HUMOR

There’s only so much a 1SG can do to stop being a jerk, and even the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future have their limits.