Maritime (formerly Sea Domain): May 30, 2022

Righting the Ship: Positioning the U.S. Maritime Industrial Base to Mobilize in the 21st Century Strategic Competition

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, China’s maritime interests (the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), Chinese Coast Guard, and Maritime Militia) have rapidly accelerated on a path to challenge United States’ naval supremacy. As a result, the United States is moving to modernize its Naval Service, defined collectively as the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the U.S. Coast Guard, into an integrated all-domain force that excels in Distributed Maritime Operations to maintain the advantage at sea and enforce foreign policy objectives.

Microelectronics: May 30, 2022

Electronics

The United States government must take action now to secure the supply chain for semiconductors, promote economic growth, and sustain the United States’ technological competitive advantage for the future. China’s state-led efforts to develop its domestic semiconductor industry are unprecedented in scope and scale and represent a direct threat to the United States’ economic and national security interests. The Department of Defense (DoD) requires secure access to semiconductors to support both cutting-edge and legacy capabilities.

Missile Defense May 22, 2022

Missile Defense

The return of great power competition coincides with the emergence of an age of missiles. The United States competes with a rising China and increasingly unstable and provocative Russia to shape security architectures and global norms and practices. In addition to Russia and China, the missile threat emanating from the rogue nations of North Korea and Iran toward the United States and its interests is evolving, and so must the United States’ ability to counter these rising threats. The U.S. missile defense enterprise is challenged to effectively counter adversaries’ growing offensive capabilities, including cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles (HGV). A weak defense industrial base (DIB), the need to reallocate responsibilities amongst the entities involved with missile defense research, development, procurement, and sustainment, as well as the need to update the U.S. missile defense strategy and increase the speed and effectiveness of research and development hamper the U.S.’s ability to provide adequate missile defense.

Munitions: May 30, 2022

The Munitions Industrial Base: Is Good Enough Really Good Enough?

The ability of the United States to readily deter, deny, and defeat its adversaries is directly tied to its military capabilities. Coming out of the nation’s longest period of armed conflict, the United States continues to face challenges from adversaries in every operating domain. Whether the nation is at war or at peace, readiness is essential. As a top priority, the Department of Defense (DOD) continues to assess the best strategy for managing and operating the defense industrial base (DIB) as the operational environment continues to evolve at the pace of adversary motivation. Difficult choices must be made in prioritizing what is most important to field a ready, lethal, adaptive, and resilient military.

Organic Industrial Base: May 30, 2022

Reimaging the OIB of the Future

With Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China’s emergence as a near-peer competitor, the nation faces a critical inflection point. The Department of Defense (DoD) can innovate and embrace technologies and processes to strengthen industrial base effectiveness or continue to rely on legacy processes that struggle to keep pace with competitors.

Organic Industrial Base: May 30, 2023

The Defense Sustainment Agency: Leading the OIB of the Future

The Eisenhower School’s class of 2023 OIB industry study cohort, Seminar 16, set its sights on reimagining the OIB of the future with an academic focus on the depot-level maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), and modification services to sustain readiness of complex weapon systems. During the seminar’s journey, common themes were noted through several interactions with industry and government senior leaders across the MRO and sustainment enterprise -- flexibility, agility, interoperable, effective, efficient, forward projecting, and distributing to the point of need -- as key requirements for a future OIB. Seminar 16 welcomed the challenge of making this vision a reality in an OIB environment fraught with unfavorable market dynamics, aging and underfunded infrastructure, and a shrinking workforce. Accordingly, the conclusion of this report reflects the seminar’s aspiration for the creation of a new defense agency, the Defense Sustainment Agency (DSA), as a solution for mitigating the above issues and placing the U.S. on a stronger footing for prevailing in a peer conflict by 2030 and beyond.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems May 30, 2022

Shaping a Responsible and Security Future with Robotics and Autonomous Systems

The United States’ ability to promote innovation and growth in the robotics and autonomous system (RAS) industries directly impacts US national security and global stability. The character of warfare is constantly evolving. Recent events in Ukraine (and previously in Nagorno-Karabakh) revealed that RAS represents a disruptive technology at the leading edge of that evolution. RAS enable smaller, dispersed forces to effectively challenge legacy sources of military strength in the air, on land, and at sea.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems: May 30, 2023

The Rise of Robots and Autonomous Systems: Unraveling the Challenges in U.S. Commercial and Defense RAS Industries

General Douglas MacArthur is famously credited with saying, “Military failure can almost always be summarized in just two words: Too late.” Recently, the Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, resurrected this phrase to warn slow technological movement would place the United States at a strategic military disadvantage, with potentially devastating effects. As the U.S. faces a pacing challenge with China, with implications for the global world order, U.S. Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) advancement will play a critical role. The 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasizes autonomous technology as an asymmetric approach to deter aggression, change kinetic conflict, and complicate escalation dynamics. The Department of Defense (DoD) seeks to mature autonomous technology through strategic investments in the domestic ecosystem and with U.S. allies and partners. The rapid advancement of commercial RAS drives the need for DoD to be a fast follower, rapidly incorporating commercial capabilities into military-relevant capabilities. Unlike many industries, the greatest obstacles to full RAS incorporation, commercially and militarily, will be cultural, ethical, and social. Accordingly, for the DoD to achieve superiority across the RAS industry, the United States must deftly navigate not only the technological challenges, but also the “soft” challenges: safety, social acceptance, trust, and human-machine integration.

Shipbuilding: May 30, 2023

Navigating the Waves: Assessing and Addressing Key Issues in U.S. Shipbuilding and Repair

For over seven decades, the United States has championed a rules-based global order, allowing international commerce to flourish. The 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) reaffirms this vision, specifying the United States' commitment to “an open, prosperous, and secure international order…free from aggression, coercion, and intimidation.” Critical to fulfilling this ambition is ensuring the United States has the military capacity to protect its territory and project its global power. To achieve this, the United States Government must dedicate time and resources to modernize and strengthen its military, equipping it to successfully prevail in great power competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while addressing acute threats such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Space: May 30, 2023

Transforming the Defense Space Architecture with the Tools of the U.S. Federal Government

2023 Antonelli Award Winner -- The asymmetric advantage the United States has long enjoyed in space diminishes as adversaries threaten the space system architecture underlying that advantage. The U.S. space system architecture depends on large, exquisite capabilities and a ground segment to manage and link those capabilities. It was leveraged to devastating effect during warfighting in the nineties and proved that space capabilities could transform air, ground, and naval power. It also spurred steep growth in the U.S. space industry, which had both first mover advantage and generous government contracts to grow its knowledge base. In subsequent years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have sought to neutralize the advantage by developing strike and counterstrike capabilities of U.S. systems through kinetic, non-kinetic, electronic, and cyber-attacks. They have also sought to develop their own industrial base to compete with U.S. industry.