NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (Jan. 26, 2013) Huntington Ingalls Industries celebrated significant progress today as the 555-metric ton island was lowered onto the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) at the company's Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) division. The 60-foot long, 30-foot wide island was the 452nd lift of the nearly 500 total lifts needed to complete the aircraft carrier. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy Huntington Ingalls Industries/Released)

USS Ford under construction at Newport News shipyard.

The United States could not make enough military equipment fast enough to sustain its military in the event of a major war. While much thought has been given to how a great power conflict might erupt or play out, far less has been written on how the U.S. industrial base could sustain U.S. wartime equipment losses in such a conflict.

Our study at the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that it would take many years to replace current inventories, even at surge production rates. And the situation is not getting better as industry consolidation has squeezed out excess capacity. The Navy would probably face the biggest problem. Each ship lost would be, effectively, irreplaceable during the conflict. The Defense Department would be well advised to make some modest investments to hedge against a protracted great power conflict.

Interest in Industrial Surge Is Back

During the Cold War, industrial surge was a key element of US defense strategy because a conflict with the Soviet Union would consume enormous amounts of equipment and might go on for a long time. With the end of the Cold War, that concern vanished. Instead, attention turned to regional conflicts, such as battle  against Iraq or North Korea. Although these conflicts would be intense, they were not expected to last long. Maintaining excess capacity for industrial surge looked like an unnecessary expense.

Now interest in industrial surge has returned. The 2017 National Security Strategy criticizes the notion that “all wars would be fought and won quickly, from standoff distances and with minimal casualties.” The Trump administration’s seminal 2018 National Defense Strategy focused on great power conflict, and the Biden administration will almost certainly do the same. 

Years To Make Replacements 

The CSIS study looked at industrial surge to gauge its ability to meet the demands of a long great power conflict. We calculated how long it would take to replace the current inventories of major items of equipment (defined as major defense acquisition programs, “MDAPS”). For surge production rates, the study used those in the P-21 budget exhibits with adjustment for production lead-times. On average, it would take 8.4 years to replace current inventories. This varied by industrial area with a low of 2.3 years for mission support activities to 20+ years for ships.

One bright spot is that systems with civilian equivalents had faster replacement times. For example, wheeled vehicles had an average replacement time of 3.3 years. Smaller programs (defined as non-MDAPS), which included many items with civilian equivalents, also had an overall average replacement time of 3.3 years.

Ships A Harder Problem

The time required to replace the existing ship inventories was far longer than for any other weapon. Replacement times ranged from 11 years for combat logistics ships to half a century for all 11 aircraft carriers, with submarines (20 years) and large surface combatants (40 years) in between. The replacement time for even one ship is so long (3-8 years), however, that, in effect, any ship lost in a conflict would not be replaced until the conflict was long over. The Navy would get smaller and smaller the longer fighting continued.

Surge Capabilities Are Not Improving

The current ability to replace inventories might be acceptable if the industrial base were getting stronger. However, it isn’t. The post-Cold War consolidation of defense industry squeezed slack out of the system to become more efficient. The industrial base has become more brittle as a result, with the average inventory replacement times increasing from 6.6 years in 1999 to 8.4 years in 2020. 

The famous industrial surge during the world wars — remember the Arsenal of Democracy? — are not good models. Faced with the challenge of a future great power conflict, many people think of that industrial mobilization. That was the last time the United States faced the production demands of  protracted great power conflict; both ended in victory, in part because of the enormous capacity of American industry. On closer examination, the experiences of the world wars are not encouraging models for today’s challenge.

The famous industrial surge during the world wars — remember the Arsenal of Democracy? — are not good models. Faced with the challenge of a future great power conflict, many people think of that industrial mobilizations. Those were the last time the United States faced the production demands of protracted great power conflicts; both ended in victory, in part because of the enormous capacity of American industry. On closer examination, however, the experiences of the world wars are not encouraging models for today’s challenge.

US industrial mobilization for World War I was almost all too late. The United States made only weak preparations before the declaration of war, so the military and industrial establishment scrambled to catch up when the war began. The British and the French ended up supplying most machine guns, artillery, and tanks to US forces. US industry did not deliver these in large numbers until either the very end of the conflict or after the armistice. For example, the United States produced only 64 tanks before the armistice; 735 more were delivered after the armistice, mostly in 1919.

World War II provides the iconic image of industrial surge, with Rosie the Riveter entering the workforce and the home front converting civilian industry to wartime production. (For example, no new civilian automobiles were built for the duration. The auto plants built tanks and planes and everything.) The United States not only equipped its own expanding armed forces but those of its allies, including the Soviet Union.

What’s overlooked in the narrative is how long the process took to get going. Surge began in 1938 with passage of the Naval Expansion Act and wartime contracts from Great Britain and France. The United States entered the war in 1941, but it wasn’t until 1944―six years after the effort began―that the United States could go toe to toe with the main forces of the Wehrmacht and Imperial Japan. Even with a long preparation time, there were limits on what the industrial base could produce. Almost all Navy capital ships ― fleet carriers and battleships ― that fought in World War II was authorized before Pearl Harbor. Those authorized after Pearl Harbor took too long to get into the fight.

In a future conflict, the United States, with its global network of alliances and forward positioned force posture, will be engaged from day one. There won’t be six years lead time to get ready.

The Real World Will Be Even Worse

The real problem, of course, is not to replace peacetime inventories, as the study calculated, but to replace wartime losses. These are much harder to estimate because they require analyzing historical experience and projecting those into the future. One data point comes from a previous analysis that looked at tank losses. Historical experience in World War II and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 indicated a loss of about 1% of the tank force every day. If all 15 US Army armored brigades were engaged, that means that the United States would lose 13 tanks per day or 390 per month. Surge production, however, is only 29 tanks per month. So, after 10 months, the armored force would be attrited down to 158 tanks or about two armored brigades worth and remain at that level until new production capacity came online. The bottom line: the real world will probably be much worse than the study indicated.

So, What To Do?

The services are unlikely to put much money into industrial surge. Their budgets are already stretched to modernize forces, sustain readiness, and maintain force size, particularly with the budget flat, at best, in real terms. Nevertheless, there are some useful things that the services could do:

  • Study industrial surge. Despite the importance of industrial surge, analyses of the industrial base focus almost entirely on peacetime production. Only two studies in the last decade were dedicated to examining wartime industrial surge. DOD needs to understand the challenges better if it is going to hedge against them. The Pentagon  could begin by reviewing the production data in the budget justification books. Many programs reviewed in the study had erroneous or anomalous data, indicating a lack of attention to surge capabilities. 
  • Identify low-cost ways to relieve bottlenecks. There are likely small investments that could greatly increase surge production, for example, the addition of a critical machine tool or support for a key supplier. The Defense Production Act provides a mechanism to provide the needed funding. 
  • Ascertain wartime attrition and expenditure rates. As noted with the example on tank attrition, combat losses might be very high. DOD should do historical analyses to shed light on what attrition rates for different kinds of systems might be under various scenarios.
  • Identify supplemental acquisition strategies ahead of time. Even with enhanced surge capabilities, the industrial base is unlikely to produce all that the services require. Thus, it would be worthwhile identifying civilian systems that might be quickly converted to military use and foreign systems that the United States might acquire in an emergency.

A long great power conflict is not the most likely scenario the United States faces in the future. However, it is a plausible scenario that the current and likely future defense strategies envision. Surging industrial mobilization did not happen overnight in the past two great power conflicts that the United States fought, and the United States should expect an even shorter lead time in a future conflict. Therefore, the Defense Department should take steps now both to understand the challenges that this surging industrial capacity presents and then to hedge against them.