Speed to Field Starts Below the Prime

I have spent much of my career looking at the defense industrial base from different vantage points: as a warfighter, inside major defense companies, and now leading a company whose electronics sit deep within many of the systems our customers ultimately deliver. Those perspectives have reinforced a simple lesson: you cannot accelerate the top of the supply chain without understanding what is happening underneath it.

The Pentagon is rightly challenging industry to increase production and shorten delivery schedules for critical defense capabilities. At the same time, national security space architectures are becoming more proliferated, distributed and technologically dynamic. The urgency is real. Recent conflicts have demonstrated both the extraordinary capabilities of U.S. systems and the speed at which operational requirements can change.

But asking a prime contractor to deliver faster does not automatically mean every supplier underneath that program can move faster.

A spacecraft, radar, interceptor or electronic warfare system can contain thousands of specialized components and technologies produced across multiple tiers of the industrial base. Some require specialized manufacturing. Others have lengthy qualification cycles. Some depend on materials or suppliers with limited capacity. And electronics can become obsolete long before the platform they support reaches the end of its lifecycle.

If we want to move at the speed of the mission, we must address those constraints before they become bottlenecks.

Push the demand signal deeper

The first requirement is visibility. Critical suppliers cannot make significant investments in facilities, automation, equipment, workforce or supply-chain capacity based solely on the possibility that demand may materialize. Yet too often, meaningful demand signals weaken as they travel down the supply chain.

The prime may understand where a program is headed. A critical supplier several tiers below may see purchase orders rather than the longer-term production requirement those orders represent. That matters because industrial capacity cannot be turned on overnight.

That challenge becomes even more important as space programs move from producing a small number of exquisite spacecraft toward larger, proliferated architectures that require repeatability and supply continuity across multiple production tranches.

For national security space, that means the supply base must be able to scale with the architecture, not react after production demand has already arrived.

If government expects a program to increase production materially over the next several years, the suppliers responsible for critical technologies need enough visibility to determine where they should invest their own capital ahead of that demand. Greater transparency does not mean guaranteeing every forecast. It means treating critical suppliers as part of the production strategy earlier.

Build second sources before they are needed

The worst time to discover that a program needs a second source is after the first source has become a constraint. For specialized defense technologies, second sourcing isn’t simply a procurement exercise. Products may need to be redesigned, integrated, tested and qualified before they can enter production. That takes time.

Government and industry should identify critical single-source dependencies earlier, particularly where the same underlying technologies support multiple priority programs, and determine where qualifying an additional source would materially improve production resilience.

Second sourcing will not make sense everywhere. In some cases, the economics or technical complexity won’t support it. But where a component represents a meaningful risk to production, redundancy should be treated as an investment in readiness rather than a response to a shortage.

For space systems, that resilience also has to account for technology refresh as processing, RF and other critical electronics evolve faster than the missions they support.

Invest before the constraint appears

Increasing defense production will also require capital. New equipment, automation, facilities, tooling and workforce development require investment well before additional units begin moving through a production line.

Government has a role to play where constraints are strategically significant. Targeted investment can help accelerate capacity where the economics of a traditional annual procurement cycle would otherwise delay it. But industry has an obligation as well.

We cannot ask government to assume all the risk.

When the mission requirement is clear and the demand signal is credible, suppliers should be willing to put their own capital to work investing in automation, productivity, workforce, second-source capacity and the manufacturing infrastructure necessary to deliver.

The most effective model is not government investment or private investment. It is shared commitment around a clearly understood mission requirement.

Design for production and change

There is another lesson we should carry forward: production readiness begins during design. For decades, engineering organizations have understandably optimized systems around performance. Increasingly, we also need to ask how design decisions affect producibility, supply resilience and future technology insertion. Can a critical electronics component be replaced without redesigning an entire subsystem? Can new processing, RF or communications technology be inserted as threats and mission requirements evolve?

Can production increase without encountering a supplier or qualification constraint that could have been anticipated years earlier?

Open, modular and standards-based approaches will not solve every production challenge. But thoughtful architectures and stable interfaces can help contain change rather than allowing it to propagate throughout a system. The objective should be to design for performance, production and evolution at the same time.

Speed is a shared responsibility

The current focus on defense production presents an opportunity to rethink more than manufacturing rates. Government can provide clearer and earlier demand signals. Primes can bring critical suppliers into production planning sooner. The broader industrial base can invest ahead of demand, increase automation, build capacity and identify second-source opportunities. And engineering teams can make decisions today that make tomorrow’s systems easier to produce and evolve.

At Frontgrade, we are looking at these questions ourselves: where additional automation and capacity can accelerate critical electronics production, where second sourcing can strengthen resilience, where reusable and standards-based technologies can accelerate deployment, and where we should put our own capital behind national priorities.

Every company in the industrial base should be asking similar questions.

Ultimately, speed to field isn’t a production metric. It’s the outcome of thousands of decisions made across the industrial base long before final assembly begins.

If we want critical capability to reach orbit and the warfighter faster, we must build speed, adaptability and resilience into the entire system.

Author Bio
Dr. James Mitch Stevison is Chief Executive Officer of Frontgrade Technologies. He brings more than two decades of aerospace and defense leadership experience spanning industry and military service, including senior roles at Mercury Systems, Raytheon Missiles & Defense, Lockheed Martin and Miltec Systems. A U.S. Army veteran, he retired after a 20-year military career that included leadership roles with the Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command.

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