New CNAS Report Calls for Revitalizing the U.S. Defense Industrial Base for Future Great Power Conflict

Washington, April 3, 2025 – Today, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a new report, From Production Lines to Front Lines: Revitalizing the U.S. Defense Industrial Base for Future Great Power Conflict, by Becca Wasser and Philip Sheers. The report provides an assessment of the chronic challenges facing the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) and offers a roadmap for revitalization to ensure the United States can deter and, if necessary, prevail in a future great power conflict.

The report warns that the current capacity of the U.S. defense industrial base is insufficient to meet the demands of modern warfare, let alone the requirements of a large-scale conflict against an advanced adversary such as China. The authors argue that decades of underinvestment, slow production timelines, and unpredictable demand signals have left defense manufacturing struggling to deliver at the speed and scale required for 21st-century warfare. The report identifies how to reform the DIB to better support U.S. defense strategy by integrating four critical attributes: greater capacity, responsiveness, flexibility, and resilience.

The report highlights the United States’ need for a more dynamic defense industrial base capacity, one that can surge production in a crisis, adjust to changing military requirements, and withstand supply chain shocks. Without meaningful investment and structural changes, the United States risks falling behind in an era of intensifying great power competition.

“The U.S. defense industrial base is at an inflection point,” said Becca Wasser, senior fellow and deputy director of the CNAS Defense Program. “To ensure U.S. strategic interests, the United States must make serious investments in the DIB today to deter rising adversaries and maintain America’s competitive edge tomorrow.”

To address these vulnerabilities, the report offers a series of detailed policy recommendations to revitalize the U.S. defense industrial base, noting the Department of Defense and Congress should:

• Build production capacity and speed in the right areas by prioritizing investment in priority systems and capabilities essential for great power competition, ensuring the industrial base can scale production when needed;
• Generate consistent demand by growing their uses of multiyear procurement and block-buy contracting to support steadier demand over time and enable cost savings;
• Use flexible contracting and funding mechanisms to expedite rapid increases in production in response to emerging needs and changes in strategic environment;
• Invest in spare capacity by growing the DIB workforce, and investing in excess manufacturing facilities and flexible production lines to enable surge production;
• Build inventories and stockpiles of critical materials, components, and long-lead items, replenish diminished materials, and include new materials in the National Defense Stockpile;
• Embrace new paradigms of production by adopting new and alternative manufacturing approaches, including those from the commercial sector, to expand and surge production with greater efficiencies and cost saving;
• Encourage greater competition within the DIB and selectively encourage “dual-sourcing” acquisition to ensure capacity by all stakeholders, from prime contractors to new entrants to subtier suppliers; and
• Cooperate with allies and partners by incorporating them at the design stage of capability development to boost exportability while also seeking coproduction opportunities to expand DIB capacity and create resilient supply chains.

This report follows the launch of a new initiative by the CNAS Defense Program aimed at identifying concrete actions to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base to better support the U.S. military to fight and win future wars.

Read the full report below.