Josh Luckenbaugh
FORT WORTH, Texas — The United States needs more munitions — and more production capacity to build those weapons — if it wants to win the conflicts of the present and the future, a Defense Department official said Sept. 30.
Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated that the consumption of ammunition in modern warfare “defies our expectations,” Boyd Miller, principal deputy director for strategic logistics, J4, the Joint Staff, said during a keynote speech at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Future Force Capabilities Conference and Exhibition.
The modern operating environment is a “very different battlefield” with a “very different rate of consumption” than the past, Miller said. This evolution makes an affordable mass of munitions a “necessity,” he said.
“Deterrence requires both exquisite, high-performance weapons, and it also requires scalable and adaptable systems we can produce by the tens of thousands at cost that will not bankrupt the nation,” he said. On the modern battlefield, “platforms without munitions are glorified paperweights, and without the munitions, we can't do as a joint force what the nation requires in the most difficult circumstances,” he said.
“Make no mistake — the nation that scales first, wins,” he added.
The United States’ “secret weapon” in this race to scale munitions production fastest is its industrial capacity, Miller said.
“The arsenal of democracy has never been a closed club,” he said, and just as “it took the national strength of our industrial base and our economy” to win World War II, “we’ve got to do the same today.”
The future arsenal of democracy “must include startups, innovators, small manufacturers and entrepreneurs; the garage tinkerers, the coder up in a loft, the robotics team at a university lab,” he said.
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