Defense Business Brief: Shrinking stockpiles + Epic Fury; and an exclusive look at how AI can up UUV’s game
Will the joint war on Iran with Israel compromise the United States’ already taxed missile stockpile, challenged by sluggish production? The question is on the minds of many in the defense space.
“The stockpiles are not going to be replenished anytime soon,” said Jerry McGinn, who leads industrial base policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We were talking about this three years ago, in the early days of Ukraine, like ‘we're running out of missiles. How do we do this?’ Obviously, we haven't fixed the situation.”
The only way to change that is to make more. But it takes years to make these exquisite weapons that are being fired in high quantities in a conflict that has no clear end date. So the Trump administration’s push for defense contractors to make weapons faster is gaining more urgency.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump warned defense companies they were under “emergency orders” to build weapons faster.
Is there policy or legislation that could help, like the Defense Production Act? Not for such a long standing problem, but the Pentagon could do more with multiyear procurements, such as the recent Lockheed Martin announcement for Patriot missiles, for other munitions, McGinn said.
But there may just never be enough inventory.
“I'm starting to come to the conclusion that we're just never going to have enough precision-guided munitions. There's such a huge demand for them in conflict that I just think there's probably no stockpile big enough, to be honest,” he said.
Ultimately, the U.S. has to figure out how to build missiles that are easier to produce and scale as part of “a mix of really exquisite munitions and then some that are more expendable,” McGinn said. “But we're just…we're not there right now.”
Still, heightened attention on the matter from the White House and Pentagon could prove positive, said Jim Segelstrom, who leads the National Defense Industrial Association’s manufacturing division.
“There's an incredible focus on surge. We're engaged with the J4, they have surge efforts going on. There's now the Wartime Production Unit, which is all focused on surge. There's the Joint Production Accelerator Cell focused on surge,” said Segelstrom, CEO of defense contractor McNally Industries. “I think that degree of attention will only produce positive outcomes.”
And missiles aren’t the only stockpiles to consider: drones carry their own challenges.
“This conflict reinforces a few themes: quantity carries strategic weight, software and autonomy drive advantage, and industrial capacity is decisive,” said Brett Velicovich, a former special operator and intelligence analyst who helped launch Powerus, which produces autonomous systems and software for the military. “The side that can iterate faster and sustain inventory under pressure will shape the operational tempo.”
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China, subsea drones and the need for rapid testing. A Congressional review board gathered this week to talk about China’s threat undersea and the need for unmanned underwater vessels. What wasn’t discussed is how retrieving UUVs’ data quickly when coming back from sea trials can be a challenge.
An “analysis that used to take, after each test, around four hours to produce, we've gotten down to around 15 minutes,” Nominal CEO Cameron McCord told Defense One in an exclusive interview.
Nominal is teaming up with major military shipbuilder HII to make that timeline the norm for their fleet of unmanned underwater vessels, called Remus. UUVs can be used to launch drones and weapons, hunt mines, perform surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and map terrain.
McCord said the platform allows engineers to remotely track whether a system is hitting desired targets, and thus collecting the right data. The manual process often relies on assuming data collection was correct and usable, which can’t be verified until the system returns.
The metrics? HII expects to speed up its testing cycle by 75 percent, which could lead to faster system upgrades and deployments, said Eric Chewning, HII’s maritime systems and corporate strategy lead.
“If the testing time collapses, then we're able to generate a next-generation capability that much faster,” for example, he said of Remus.
The plan: Use Nominal’s software on the existing Remus fleet: 750 delivered and those under development, as well as on the still-under-development Romulus unmanned surface vessel. But there’s also potential to apply the software “outside of the unmanned business,” Chewning told Defense One.
Going deeper: The announcement comes as UUV production is expected to grow with a little help—about $1.3 billion—from last year’s budget reconciliation bill, and as concern grows around military competition underwater, particularly with respect to China.
“We are working on a family of systems, everything from what we call extra-large unmanned undersea vehicles—think like big payload trucks for things like mine warfare or other other payloads—as well as large diameter torpedo tube launch-and-recovery,” Vice Adm. Richard Seif, who leads Naval Submarine Forces, testified Monday before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “So the more we can invest and move out at scale, it will be critically important in the future.”