More than a decade before American troops fought their way ashore in Normandy and Okinawa, the U.S. military noted that “the success of a modern fighting force is directly and immediately dependent on the ability of the Nation’s resources to satisfy promptly its requirement in munitions.”
Eighty years later, the Defense Department has not lived up to that maxim. With arms transfers to Ukraine and military operations in the Red Sea exposing the deficiencies of U.S. arms production, Washington is awash with recommendations to bolster, strengthen, or otherwise revitalize the defense industrial base.
But these may be too little and too late. A protracted war with China would create immense demands for munitions and other defense materiel, requiring production to be increased far beyond peacetime levels and surge capacity.
It is time for the Defense Department to move beyond strategies and near-term efforts to revitalize the industrial base and begin developing mobilization plans to fill operational-industrial gaps and guide long-term preparedness efforts. In doing so, the department should look to the interwar period for lessons. Paired with the nation’s enduring military-industrial advantages — the free market, cutting-edge defense and manufacturing technologies, and a robust network of allies and partners — these lessons could help prepare America’s industrial base for the conflict we all hope never happens: a war with China.
Arsenal of Democracy Redux?
Policymakers and commentators from the former president down have called for the United States to reprise its World War II role and rapidly expand defense production to become the 21st-century “arsenal of democracy.”
This is good, but examining this history cuts two directions. On the one hand, policymakers should be clear-eyed and avoid popular nostalgia. The strategic, economic, and industrial conditions that led to the arsenal of democracy are long gone. On the other hand, a striking number of parallels exist between the 1930s and today: insufficient munition stockpiles, a consolidated defense industrial base, and the renewed specter of multi-theater war amid rapid technological, geoeconomic, and political changes.
What can this period tell us about the present? First, planning and preparing for expanded defense production are inseparable from planning for major war. Short, small-scale contingencies can rely on existing forces and stockpiles, but great power wars are typically protracted and therefore inherently reliant on industrial capacity. Technological advancements, wonder weapons, or strategies centered on decisive battle will not quickly resolve fundamental material and industrial shortfalls. As the experience of America’s World War II adversaries shows, any military strategy for prolonged war that is not a synchronized military-industrial strategy is destined to fail.
Closing these operational-industrial gaps is critical because industrial plans (or lack thereof) become de facto strategic decisions once a conflict begins. Pre-war industrial decisions, such as the type and number of munition plants constructed, had significant impact on the range of strategic options available to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and dictated the pace of operations for much of World War II. American industrial planning for a future conflict — and its responses to ongoing regional crises — will similarly impact its long-term capacity for war.
Second, industrial mobilization planning in peacetime remains critical for shortening the time required to surge and expand production capacity to wartime levels. Interwar mobilization plans were imperfect, but successfully identified items for which production would need to grow significantly during conflict, surveyed the total national capacity to produce these goods, and led to arrangements with manufacturers for wartime production. During the war, over 90 percent of ordnance contracts were given to companies surveyed during the interwar period. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company judged that pre-war engagements shaved an entire year off expanding production of the M1 Garand rifle. Today, industrial mobilization planning remains essential for setting strategic assumptions, identifying requirements, assessing national capacities, reducing timelines, and strengthening deterrence credibility.
Third, even with planning and preparation, expanding production will take time and resources. America’s glossy memories of the arsenal of democracy often obscure the actual amount of time, money, and sacrifice necessary to supply allied forces. Although interwar planners expected mobilization to require just 18 months, it took between two and three years to reach full production for many items. Even with emergency contracting measures such as the abandonment of competitive bidding in favor of direct negotiations and waived regulations to expedite plant construction, industrial mobilization was measured in years, not months. For this reason, estimating mobilization timelines is crucial for assisting policymakers in formulating military strategy and determining when to begin mobilization, where to invest in industrial preparedness during peacetime, and to what extent other measures — such as stockpiles — are needed to bridge gaps in supply.
Finally, perhaps the greatest lesson is that a nation should base its national military strategy around its competitive advantages. In World War II, the United States deliberately pursued a protracted strategy that delayed the war’s most intense campaigns to leverage America’s greatest strengths: massive latent industrial power contained within a virtually impregnable homeland.
Today, America trails China in manufacturing and raw materials production. The U.S. economy remains the world’s most powerful according to numerous metrics, but gross domestic product alone does not build weaponry. As the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, America’s services-based economy and manufacturing supply chains are increasingly globalized and reliant on China, even in the defense realm.
The homeland, its critical infrastructure, and its industries are vulnerable to cyber operations, sabotage, and conventional and nuclear strikes. Today’s consolidated defense industrial base still produces the world’s most advanced weapons systems, but most of these were designed for multinational and just-in-time supply chains. That world is gone.
Today’s Advantages
Where does this leave policymakers? The Defense Department’s recent industrial strategy and investments in munitions production are steps in the right direction, but fall short of the needs for a protracted conflict between the United States and China. This is the role of industrial mobilization planning. Policymakers should consider the advantages the United States currently enjoys relative to China: a dynamic free market system, advanced technologies, and a global network of allies and partners.
During World War II, Roosevelt effectively used the free market system to incentivize speed and maximize war output using profit motives. This encouraged business and technological innovation on all fronts and proved more effective than the authoritarian systems of the war’s other belligerents. Just because China beats out the United States in many industrial metrics, that does not guarantee that Beijing will effectively mobilize those resources toward war production or that Chinese industry will be flexible enough to adapt to the evolving demands of a conflict over time. China could outproduce America in weapons and platforms, but if they are the wrong ones, or if America produces countermeasures faster than China can adapt, then it may not matter. In the past, the American system has come out on top because it balanced centralized coordination with decentralized action, expertise, and ingenuity.
As the preceding three decades have shown, however, relying solely on the free market often results in industrial outcomes that hurt readiness. Firms seek to maximize efficiency and profit, which discourages the maintenance of excess capacity and can encourage cost-cutting measures such as consolidation and offshoring. Like in World War II, it remains up to the U.S. government to create the market incentives and demand signals vital to building and maintaining an industrial base capable of supporting its military strategies. Current endeavors to streamline acquisition are important, but insufficient.
Thanks to free market innovation, the U.S. defense industrial base has long developed and produced superior military technologies. Today’s industrial troubles are less about the quality of U.S. weapons and more about the scale at which these cutting-edge systems can be produced. In scaling the production of these weapons and their inputs, the United States can breathe new life into its industrial base with advanced manufacturing technologies. Just as advances in manufacturing and mass production were essential in the 1930s and 40s, automation, 3D printing, and software-defined manufacturing may be key to producing future weapons at scales previously thought impossible. The Defense Department should think broadly about innovative approaches to acquisition and production, such as decoupling system design and manufacturing or modern “dollar-a-year men” arrangements. Past weapons orders were often too small to justify automation, but future procurements should support these technologies through incentives or revised government-owned contractor-operated schemes.
Finally, the United States enjoys a multitude of economic and military partners throughout the world. Considered together, the economic and productive potential of the United States and its closest allies rival China across many metrics. The United States should utilize these partnerships in ways that maximize their benefits and minimize the risks of foreign dependencies. The Defense Department’s industrial strategy already promotes this advantage, and its efforts are manifested in missile co-production with Japan and Australia. Future mobilization planning should not only consider the capacities of domestic and foreign sources of critical defense materials, but also the lines of communication and sealift capacity vital to the transit of these supplies. Allies can support the U.S. industrial base in many ways, but production plans reliant on distant partners must be supported by military plans to keep materials flowing in wartime.
From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria to the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s occupation of Austria, numerous regional crises presaged the world’s descent toward global conflict in the late 1930s. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Roosevelt took deliberate steps to begin mobilizing America’s industrial base, leaving the nation better prepared for war in December 1941 than it would have otherwise been. With conflicts burning from Europe to the Middle East and military competition sharpening in the Indo-Pacific, it is time for the United States to ready its industrial base for great power conflict. Preparing for industrial mobilization and rebuilding American industrial capacity after decades of neglect will be a national project extending well into the future, but the feats of 1938 to 1945 stand as inspirational reminders of what the United States is capable of.
Tyler Hacker is a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the author of the recently released report Arsenal of Democracy: Myth or Model?, which draws lessons for contemporary industrial mobilization from World War II.
