Moving Toward Defense as a Service : War on the Rocks , November 29 , 2024
November 29, 2024
War on the Rocks
Moving Toward Defense as a Service : War on the Rocks , November 29 , 2024
November 29, 2024
War on the Rocks
From the article: "History and pre-history are littered with the corpses of competitors who failed to adapt as quickly as their adversaries. From animals to nation-states, victory rarely depends on strength alone but comes down to survival and adaptation. This lesson is being driven home on the battlefields of Ukraine. The United States must take heed, or it risks being rendered irrelevant on the world stage. U.S.-provided Excalibur precision artillery shells were devastatingly effective when they first entered service in Ukraine, but within a couple of months, Russian adaptation had rendered those precision munitions dumb. In war, concepts of operations change hourly, software is revised daily, and hardware is iterated on weekly — this is ever truer as technology cycles accelerate.
The traditional defense acquisition model, often slow, inflexible, and designed to be largely top-down, will struggle to keep up with these shifts. What this means for the United States in practice is that in a major shooting war against a modern adversary, we may very quickly find that adversarial adaptation renders U.S. technology obsolete as soon as the dust settles on the opening weeks of a conflict. If the United States hopes to keep pace with the capabilities of its adversaries, particularly in its adversaries’ backyards, it should consider a trio of policies including moving from product-based contracts to outcome-oriented service contracts, embedding engineers at the frontline, and developing expeditionary manufacturing capacity."
Authors - Chapman, Jake
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