REAL CLEAR DEFENSE: The Defense Industrial Base Has a New Playbook. Now Let's Run It.
This op-ed originally appeared in Real Clear Defense and is co-authored by John Burer, the Founder and CEO of ACMI and Will Durant, the President and CEO of the Energetics Technology Center.
Not long ago, serious public conversation about America’s defense industrial base felt niche. But that time has come to an end. Today, these conversations are some of the most important in the halls of the Pentagon. This change matters, because the hard part was never identifying the problem, it was finding the will to do something about it. Progress demands more than cautious half-measures.
Since the end of the Cold War, the conventional wisdom in defense has been to layer more resources onto familiar structures: more contracts to established primes, more government-owned facilities, and more traditional procurement pathways. This created a circular dependency problem for new hardware companies trying to enter the market: no contracts without a factory, and no factory without contracts.
But while the United States struggled with this challenge, China was pushing through it. They built the necessary connective tissue for industrial production: coordinated infrastructure, supplier depth, and rapid iteration. Today, their production infrastructure allows them to acquire high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the U.S. — not because their technology is superior, but because their production infrastructure is.
The lesson for America isn't to blindly replicate China’s centralized model but, instead, to play to our natural strengths as a nation: competition, capitalism, and innovation. Doing so would lower the barriers to entry for new companies — supercharging competition and diversifying our defense industrial base.
The solution to unlock this potential at scale is the industrial campus: a geographically concentrated manufacturing ecosystem aligned to specific production needs. These campuses combine shared infrastructure, supply chains, technical expertise, workforce development, permitting competence, secure data environments, and proximity to government facilities or mission owners. Small initial public investment in projects like this can reduce early risk and attract massive amounts of private capital to help projects move at a speed and scale that would not be possible with government appropriations alone.
What makes the best versions of this model effective is not just real estate. It is the disciplined treatment of capital, qualification, and production risk. Defense investment has historically been thought of as a government proposition, with private capital largely absent from the equation.
That is starting to change. In Indiana, a 1,100-acre National Security Industrial Hub, adjacent to Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane and seeded by a $75 million Department of War award, is attracting the kind of company that the old model often struggled to support. Prometheus Energetics, which builds advanced solid rocket motors, is establishing its headquarters and main production facility on 600 acres of the campus. The project is expected to catalyze roughly $600 million in private investment, eight times the initial government commitment. Indiana also happens to be a state the FAA designated earlier this year as one of only two new national drone test sites in the country, anchored in part by Crane's counter-UAS capabilities. None of that is coincidental. It reflects a conclusion that place matters as much as policy.
The same logic is being applied in Maryland. The Maryland Energetics Innovation Hub, just outside Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division, began with a $50 million government award and is expected to draw in more than $200 million in additional private investment. Energetics Technology Center, one of the nation's foremost applied energetics organizations, has already committed to being an inaugural tenant and partner, with additional companies signing up to work across a variety of areas from drones and computing to energetics and propulsion systems.
Factoring in planned expansions, these two campuses represent well over $1 billion in investment in the defense industrial base designed from the blueprints up to provide swift innovation and dynamic production, at scale. Private capital, structured correctly, doesn't just stretch the government's dollar, it brings a different kind of discipline and speed to the table.
The NDAA markup underway in Congress is an opportunity to deepen this strategy, as lawmakers consider how to use existing authorities and investments to strengthen the industrial base. But legislation and appropriations are the means: the end must be durable production capacity, lower barriers for qualified entrants, resilient domestic supply chains, and innovation connected to operational demands. The goal is a defense industrial base that looks more like the American economy: dynamic, competitive, and capable of absorbing new ideas and new producers at the pace the mission requires.
America has done this before. The industrial mobilizations that defined our greatest moments worked because well-placed public investment activated a broad commercial system built for speed, depth, and dynamism. The model is proven. The question is how fast we are willing to scale it.