Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle announced on Oct. 12 that the service plans to hold a “manufacturing rodeo” early next year to test the defense industrial base’s production capacity, identify supply-chain weaknesses, and determine whether manufacturers can scale production to meet military demand.
“We’re going to stress test the supply chain, the manufacturing processes, and see where it breaks,” Telle said during the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to find the weak links. We’re going to make them stronger, and we’re going to keep iterating.”
The manufacturing rodeo would extend the Army’s ongoing modernization efforts by testing whether its industrial base can produce equipment at the speed and scale military operations require.
According to the Army, the service has shifted its modernization focus this year from production targets for individual weapons systems toward expanding flexible advanced manufacturing capabilities across its organic industrial base (OIB). Telle said the rodeo will stress-test both the Army’s OIB and the nation’s broader manufacturing network to identify production constraints and supply-chain weaknesses.
“The biggest acquisition program in the Army is building a system of seamless, frictionless, symbiotic relationship with American ingenuity,” Telle said. “We’ve invested a lot in our organic industrial base. Now we need to strain it in the nation’s larger industrial base.”
The Army has established advanced manufacturing hubs at installations including Red River Army Depot, Anniston Army Depot, and Tobyhanna Army Depot. It has also formed public-private partnerships with companies including Hadrian and Siemens to expand its ability to manufacture components on demand.
According to a statement from the service, those capabilities are intended to support both legacy and future weapons systems, from electric motors to replacement parts such as tank engine transmission belt housings. The Army said the approach could reduce dependence on traditional supply chains and help sustain equipment readiness.
The planned rodeo will put those capabilities to the test, examining whether the Army and its industry partners can increase production quickly enough to meet operational demand.
“We can’t evolve the Army at the speed of government; we have to evolve it at the speed of business,” Telle said.
Drones put production capacity to the test
Telle also pointed to the growing use of drones on the battlefield as a major reason the Army needs to accelerate acquisition and expand domestic manufacturing.
He said soldiers can now connect to sensors ranging from satellites in geosynchronous orbit to autonomous ground systems, creating new opportunities to detect and respond to threats.
A video shown during his remarks emphasized the speed of the emerging drone threat: “1,000 drones don’t give you 1,000 problems; they give you one: time.”
Telle said the Army needs domestic manufacturing capacity to produce millions of basic attack drones but warned that the service still doesn’t control enough of the components needed to build them.
“It may look simple, but it’s a flying supply chain, a supply chain we don’t control enough of. If we control the parts, we control the pace,” he said.
The Army is also working to field low-cost interceptors to defend against missiles and drones. Telle said those systems must integrate with the service’s existing networks.
“We know we need thousands of these things, but they have to seamlessly connect to our network,” he said.
Telle also highlighted the Army’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) marketplace as another example of its efforts to connect soldiers directly with commercial technology providers and speed equipment delivery.
Developed with Amazon Web Services and the Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, the digital marketplace lets Army units, government partners, and allied nations compare vetted unmanned and counter-unmanned aircraft systems, provide feedback, and place orders.
“What we did is cut out the bureaucratic middleman and connected the soldiers directly with the builders,” Telle said.
He said the marketplace lets soldiers identify equipment and receive orders within days, rather than navigate lengthy traditional acquisition processes.
A video shown during his remarks said the marketplace had generated nearly $800 million in sales over four months.
The marketplace and planned manufacturing rodeo reflect two parts of the Army’s acquisition push – speeding the purchase of commercially available technology while testing whether the domestic industrial base can produce it at the scale military operations require.