But I also think there’s a fip side to that wherein, given advances in technology, there is a proliferation, if you will, or democratization of advanced manufacturing capabilities in a way that we perhaps have not fully exploited. It might not be the large Ford factories that we envision when we think about manufacturing, but we now have the prolifera- tion of technology across neighborhoods where literally you can have an advanced manufacturing capability in your garage, making complex parts in a way that we have never done before. So that may be a diferent way to think about indus- trial capacity. Still further, go back and look at World War II models where the aggregation of parts manufactured across an ecosystem of smaller producers culminated in our ability to roll out however many B17s a day we were rolling out. Maybe that’s a way to think about things in a diferent way because of the expansion in the readily available advanced manufacturing capabilities that literally exist almost on every street corner. But the DoD does not really have a good understanding of how deeply those advanced manufacturing capabilities have permeated throughout the industry. I think we have a sense that, yes, there’s a lot of that out there. But, again, if you go back in history, even as far back as World War I, we had a national manufacturing registry, so the govern- ment had a pretty good idea of what manufacturing ca- pability was out there. And that’s perhaps something that we need to explore and could arguably develop. We could use artificial intelligence to scrape capital purchases across and get a better idea of what companies have digital CNC [computer numerical control] machines, what companies have advanced manufacturing capabilities, what compa- nies are purchasing the inputs to advanced manufacturing, and perhaps we could start to shape out a better under- standing of the depth of manufacturing capacity that might At Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center (MARMC) onboard Naval Station Nor- folk, Va., on Aug. 7. 2025. From left: Capt. Jay Young, commanding officer, MARMC; Rear Adm. William Greene, commander, Navy Regional Maintenance Center; Pat- rick Kelleher, deputy assistant secretary of defense for materiel readiness; and Rear Adm. Dianna Wolfson, director, fleet maintenance, Fleet Forces Command. Source: U.S. Navy photo by Harrison Cox
be somewhat below the radar right now because it’s not a Lockheed Martin or Boeing etc. Another aspect, and we may have heard some conver- sation about this, is carefully creating a national manufac- turing reserve capability along the lines of the civil reserve. So, if we understand through a registry what manufactur- ing capability exists, we can start to enter into agreements with diferent companies, either to share manufacturing capacity in a way that we don’t do now or to enter into agreements by which they would provide manufacturing capability when needed in the future along the lines of how the airlines provide aircraft. If we back up all the way to the beginning, we can think about all of those things. We must remember that the OIB is the DoD’s frst source for depth, resilience, and fexibility. And so, we are looking at investments to increase produc- tion capacity through OIB infrastructure so that we can start or continue to build on the Services’ plans to mod- ernize and maintain those organic industrial capabilities. Q Given your premise that some of the U.S. manufactur- ing capability can actually be done by much smaller frms, it appears probable that interoperability between the U.S. and a lot of other countries and their manufactur- ing sources could be a signifcant challenge in any type of major military operation. Does the department develop matrices to ensure transferability and interoperability between different national militaries? Or have we not yet approached that horizon where we can really be more in- teroperable in the way that equipment is moved around? A. I think that there’s really two parts to that. Yes, as we de- velop new weapon systems, a greater degree of interoper- ability is something we think more about than we did in the past. With that said, many of our current capability legacy platforms were not designed necessarily with that in mind, and so we must work and are working with partners and allies to be very deliberate about the partnerships, arrange- ments, and agreements that we would need to improve our ability. Even if it’s not platform interoperability, it could be maintenance repair and overhaul interoperability and understanding to what standards we operate. And those things are underway within the context of the regional sus- tainment framework [RSF], by which the department has endeavored over time to develop a forward capability for maintenance repair and overhaul and maintain readiness. A deliberate part of that is the agreement with partners and allies to improve our ability for co-sustainment across the family of weapon systems. One of the things in our favor is the broad reach of foreign military sales, with many of our partners and allies operating the same platforms that we do. So we do have that degree of interoperability even if our standards of repair or tooling or calibration specifcations are diferent. So those are the deliberate ap- proaches, the two agreements and arrangements that the RSF team is working on, and they are an important part of ensuring that we can operate side by side with our partners and allies because that will certainly be a requirement.
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