Organic Industrial Base: –
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.
The Academic Year 2021-2022 Organic Industrial Base (OIB) Seminar at the Eisenhower School for National Resource Strategy oriented on the forecasted needs of the warfighter in the year 20401 and the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) services necessary to sustain those needs. A multitude of challenges currently face the OIB, but there is an equal number of opportunities. To capitalize on the opportunities, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Materiel Readiness challenged the OIB seminar to design the OIB of the future.
The design process required several deliberate steps and functions. Figure 1 addresses the methodology the OIB seminar followed throughout the semester to assess, design, and reverse engineer the future OIB. This paper reviews the current state of the MRO services market and OIB, projects the future environment in 2040, identifies the desired future state of the OIB, analyzes alternative models, and generates recommendations to build the OIB of the future.
This paper leverages the previous OIB industry study’s Readiness Enabler Model (REM), what an economist would call a readiness production function, to further express the OIB’s challenges and opportunities. The five factor input elements of human capital, infrastructure, governance, finance, and materiel enable insight into the MRO services market’s ability to provide the services necessary to sustain and provide readiness for the DoD to meet the requirements in the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (INSSG) and National Defense Strategy.
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