Defense acquisition has long been described as a three-legged stool: requirements, budgeting, and acquisition management. In practice, the stool has always been missing a leg.
The Pentagon treats industrial production capacity as an afterthought rather than a design constraint. Requirements writers inside the services seek the most capable system imaginable. Their incentives reward performance, not manufacturability. If a new fighter aircraft can fly farther, see more, and carry additional weapons, the requirement grows accordingly. The acquisition community then accepts those requirements and attempts to translate them into a program of record. Predictably, the system becomes complex, expensive, and slow to produce.
What is insufficiently asked during these early stages is whether the industrial base can actually manufacture the system in meaningful quantities. This disconnect was tolerable during the relatively permissive post–Cold War era when the United States fought limited conflicts and assumed that it would fight only one short war. But the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, along with rising tensions with China, have demonstrated a basic truth: wars consume weapons at astonishing rates. Qualitative superiority matters, but we forget that quantity has a quality all of its own at our peril.
When adversaries, such as Iran today, look at American stockpile depletion rates and production timelines, the message they receive is that the United States can be outlasted. That is a terrible strategic signal, and it is a direct consequence of a procurement system that treats industrial capacity as someone else’s problem.
Over and over again, the Pentagon designs weapons systems without asking a simple question: Can the industrial base actually build this at the scale and speed the military needs? For the modern age of warfare, this question is not just a key one, it may end up being the central one.
A New Requirements Architecture, With An Old Blind Spot
The Department recognized part of this problem last November. The Hegseth-Feinberg memo on reforming the joint requirements process directed the disestablishment of JCIDS, devolved most requirements validation to the military services, and created new structures designed to move faster. The JROC will identify and rank Key Operational Problems, a new Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) will connect those priorities to funding, and a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA) will engage industry early to refine capability requirements and conduct experimentation campaigns.
But the reform doesn’t address the producibility issue. The memo mentions industry engagement repeatedly, but in terms of concept development, technology experimentation, ideation, and rapid prototyping. What it never mentions is manufacturing readiness, production scalability, supply chain capacity, or industrial base throughput.
The MEIA is tasked with assessing “solution suitability,” but suitability as described in the memo means operational suitability, not production suitability. The word “producibility” does not appear in the document. Neither does “manufacturing.”
The department’s own Acquisition Transformation Strategy does call for rigorous application of manufacturing readiness assessments throughout system development on the acquisition side, and that is a step in the right direction. But the strategy does not extend this discipline to the requirements side, where the design decisions that most constrain producibility are actually made. And even on the acquisition side, this kind of assessment has a long history of being waived, deferred, or treated as a checkbox exercise when schedule pressure mounts. If manufacturing readiness assessments are to matter, they must be enforced against the institutional incentives that have historically bypassed them.
So despite the best efforts of Pentagon leadership, the result is a new requirements architecture that is faster and better prioritized but structurally incapable of answering a fundamental question: Can the industrial base actually build the solution at the scale and speed the force design demands?
The gap persists because of three reinforcing failures that the November reform does not address.
First, the incentives are broken. Requirements writers are measured on specifying the most capable system, not the most buildable one. Nobody writing a capability document has ever been rewarded for making a weapon easier to build; no one advancing a requirement gets credit for saying, “We should accept a shorter range so the factory can produce five hundred a year.” The new framework devolves requirements to the services, but it does not change this underlying incentive structure.
Second, the acquisition community doesn’t push back. Program executives and program managers are measured on executing to the requirement, not on telling the requirements community that the design can’t be manufactured at scale. The new framework gives acquisition professionals more flexibility to make performance trades for speed and cost, a welcome change, but does not direct them to assess whether the industrial base can support the production quantities the force structure requires.
Third, the industrial base has no voice in the room. The Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment has industrial base policy responsibilities, but no defined role in the MEIA’s solution assessments or the RRAB’s programming recommendations. Under the current guidelines, the industrial base is consulted after requirements are set. It does not shape them.
Solutions Without More Bureaucracy
The good news: The new requirements architecture creates natural insertion points for producibility analysis, which won’t require additional bureaucratic layers. Three changes would close the gap.
First, the MEIA’s charter, ostensibly still being developed, should explicitly include a producibility assessment for each Key Operational Problem (KOP) solution it evaluates. When the MEIA conducts mission engineering analysis and engages industry on a given KOP, it should be required to answer three questions alongside its assessment of operational suitability: What quantity does the force design require? Can the current industrial base produce at that rate? If not, what would need to change in design, supply chains, factory capacity, or workforce availability to make production at scale feasible?
When the MEIA recommends solution components to the RRAB for Joint Acceleration Reserve funding, those recommendations should include this assessment. This does not add a new review layer. It adds a new question to an analysis the MEIA is already performing.
Second, the service-level requirements process reviews directed in the memorandum should incorporate producibility as a mandatory consideration. The memorandum directs the services to reform their requirements processes to accelerate delivery, strengthen force design, and enhance industry engagement. It should also direct the services to require that whatever document initiates a program, whether a traditional capability document or an industry-driven solution proposal, include an industrial base feasibility assessment before the requirement is validated or the solution is funded.
As the department shifts toward solutions-based acquisition, the form of the requirements document matters less than ensuring that producibility is assessed regardless of the pathway a program takes. Now that requirements validation has devolved to the services, each service has the authority to build this discipline into its own process. The question is whether any of them will do so without being told – and history says the answer is “no.”
Third, the RRAB should consider production feasibility when it makes programming and funding recommendations. A KOP solution that cannot be manufactured at the scale and timeline the operational problem demands is a poor investment regardless of how high it ranks on the priority list. The Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, who co-secretaries the RRAB, is well positioned to include industrial base analysis as a standard element of the board’s assessment of each recommendation. This is not a new gate. It is an analytical input to a decision the RRAB is already making.
Some will object that adding producibility assessments to the MEIA charter, service requirements documents, and RRAB analyses amounts to the kind of bureaucratic layering the November reform explicitly prohibits. It does not. None of these proposals require creating new review authorities, new approval gates, or new veto points. They add a question to analyses the new framework already requires: can this be built at scale?
The alternative is not less bureaucracy. The alternative is faster decisions made without critical information, followed by production crises that impose far greater delays than any upfront assessment ever could.
Connecting Design To Production
Speed without producibility is just a faster way to design systems the industrial base cannot build. The November reform creates better mechanisms for identifying what the Joint Force needs and how fast it needs funding. These proposals would complete it by adding what it lacks: a mechanism for asking whether the thing can actually be built.
The goal is to do something the Pentagon has never consistently done: connect the people who define what the military needs with the factories that must build it. Producibility enters at requirements definition, gets assessed during solution analysis, and informs resource allocation. Three checkpoints, each progressively more rigorous, none requiring new bureaucratic infrastructure.
Because in the end, no president should ever face the choice of limiting military operations simply because the country cannot produce enough weapons to sustain the fight.
John G. Ferrari, a retired Army Maj. Gen., is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. He previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service. Dillon Prochnicki is a research assistant at AEI