Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment

Abstract

Global supply chain disruptions have become more common, with recent events highlighting risks and vulnerabilities that undermine our national security. The February 24, 2022 report on Executive Order (E.O.) 14017, “America’s Supply Chains”, and the 2022 Industrial Base Capabilities (ICR) report each outline strategic focus areas and enabling capabilities, their associated vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations to strengthen the defense industrial base. The FY 2023 IBAS budget reflects the DoD’s commitment to ensuring our supply chains can provide our warfighters with decisive advantage. This budget includes investments to respond to E.O. 14017 and ICR findings and recommendations, emerging and modernization priorities and technologies, and other defense requirements. This is the result of significant coordination for each strategic focus area via cross-functional teams (CFT). These CFTs developed an integrated and prioritized investment strategy to address the most pressing needs for each focus area, to include mapping to investment authorities. The FY 2023 IBAS budget reflects the outcome of the CFT recommendations and has been coordinated to complement adjacent investments of related programs including the Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III, Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) program, and at the Military Service level. Accordingly, investments in the following strategic focus areas will establish, sustain, and expand domestic capabilities and capacities to build more sustainable and resilient supply chains. Workforce – the DoD relies on a skilled workforce to innovate, produce, and sustain our weapon systems. Decades of erosion across workforce development pipelines jeopardize and threaten our industrial base’s ability to remain competitive. Efforts will continue to focus on recruitment, training, and placing skilled workers in support of defense priority states and in support of priority defense programs. FY 2023's primary effort will be a major, multi-year, joint OSD-Navy endeavor focused on ensuring the health and capacity of the DoD’s submarine workforce. Critical Materials and Chemicals - critical materials and critical chemicals are used in a broad range of DoD weapon systems. Like other industrial sectors such as microelectronics, there is a critical materials market concentration in China which makes U.S. economic and national security vulnerable to disruption. To mitigate risks, the DoD will pursue four lines of effort: 1) Develop and foster new sustainability standards for strategic and critical material intensive industries; 2) Expand sustainable domestic production and processing capacity, including non-traditional mining and recycling; 3) Strengthen U.S. stockpiles; 4) Work with allies and partner nations promoting sharing of technology, capability, and resources. FY 2023 primary efforts will continue prior year initiatives related to scaling domestic processing of Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE). Kinetic Weapons – kinetic capabilities, including hypersonic weapons, are essential to deterring America’s adversaries, who continue their military buildups including their own hypersonics capability. Current supply chains are vulnerable to raw materials and chemicals shortages; fragile, foreign, and/or sole-source suppliers; and technical challenges of transitioning hypersonic capabilities into production. The DoD will launch efforts to: 1) Address supply chain vulnerabilities of the most critical chemicals; 2) Update material specifications, including production and quality testing requirements; and 3) Foster sub-tier suppliers and competition in the hypersonic industrial base to enable affordable production. FY 2023 primary focus efforts will improve and expand the hypersonics industrial base. Energy Storage and Batteries – Due to the small DoD market share and customized battery requirements the DoD is unable to fully leverage the large commercial investment in state of the art energy storage technology. The nearly 100% foreign battery supply chain limits the DoD’s ability to field battery enabled weapons/platforms free of adversary supply chain control. To mitigate these risks, DoD is investing to develop domestic assured access to batteries through three focus areas: 1) Initiate studies to define the aggregate demand for energy storage and batteries across the DoD; 2) Pivot to commercial standards and batteries to the maximum extent possible; and 3) Establish internal DoD safety testing capacity for energy storage and batteries for future weapons systems. FY 2023 primary efforts will initiate deep dive DoD demand analysis and identify commercial sourcing synergies. Castings and Forgings – machine tools and cast and forged parts are critical to the development, procurement, and sustainment of all major defense systems, and are found in 20 percent of the products representing the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Continuous industry consolidation and offshoring since the 1960’s have hollowed out domestic capability, reducing or eliminating competition and increasing our dependence on other nations, including China. To mitigate these risks, the DoD will: 1) Continue refinement of a cross-service casting and forging strategy to inform policy and investment decisions; 2) Conduct research activities to expand sub-tier supplier development and, to improve rapid designs and affordable and reliable production; and 3) Invest to modernize relevant organic industrial base capabilities. FY 2023 primary investments will initiate deep dive analysis to inform strategic investment strategies. Flexible Biomanufacturing – biotechnology has the potential to transform the future battlefield and address key global challenges, but DoD lacks the domestic sourcing and production capabilities to rapidly manufacture critical bioproducts at industrial scale for operational use. The DoD has already taken measures to address some key gaps in the biomanufacturing pipeline, including the standup up of BioMADE, the Manufacturing Innovation Institute dedicated to fostering technological innovation in synthetic biology-enabled manufacturing from design to the manufacturing of non-medical products. Key challenges remain in the scale-up of domestic manufacturing capacity and the market-driven rigidity of existing biomanufacturing processes. To overcome these challenges, the DoD created the Distributed Manufacturing Enabled by Modular Bioindustrial & Reusable Assets (MEMBR). MEMBR is a bioindustrial manufacturing infrastructure investment program to pilot and commercially scale DoD molecules. MEMBR has begun investments to: 1) Increase industrial capacity by converting and modernizing existing production facilities and creating new ones; 2) Adopt modular biomanufacturing capabilities that are able to rapidly use and evaluate the efficacy of new processes; 3) Provide education and workforce development opportunities; and 4) Identify and foster integration of commercial bioindustrial products and precursors into DoD acquisition pathways. FY 2023 primary efforts will initiate modernization and adaptation of three existing production facilities to accommodate DoD requirements. Microelectronics - components are the foundation of modern economy and military systems. Various vulnerabilities threaten the DoD’s ability to source microelectronics needed to sustain programs of record. In order to prepare the Department for increased global economic and strategic, the DoD must take action to ensure access to the microelectronic components needed to sustain our defense programs and systems effectively and affordably. The Department also needs a better strategy to transition leading edge technology developed by both government and industry to DoD programs of record, to ensure the Department maintains a competitive edge. To respond to the threat and establish a secure and assured domestic supply chain, the DoD will pursue multiple lines of microelectronics efforts. Efforts included in IBAS are 1) Establishing domestic advanced packaging capabilities; 2) Establishing data repository to manage obsolescence; and 3) Establishing workforce efforts needed to design and make microelectronic components domestically.

Document Details

• Document Type: Project
• Publication Date: Oct 01, 2023
• Source ID: 819_0607210D8Z_7_0400_PB_2023

Tags

Readers

• Defense Technology Research and Development.
• Economics
• Industrial Economics

Technology Areas

• Biotechnology
• Hypersonics
• Microelectronics