The Pentagon Needs to Rethink How It Buys Munitions
October 21, 2025
By: John Ferrari
American munitions today are optimized for performance—at the expense of time and scale. In preparing for a future conflict, the Department of Defense must ruthlessly correct course.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg did the right thing a few weeks ago. He hauled America’s major defense contractors into a room and demanded more munitions, yesterday. That attention from such a senior official within the Pentagon is remarkable. It is also necessary, but it is far from sufficient. If the Department of Defense thinks louder directives and bigger purchase orders will fix a production model built on bespoke engineering and single-source chokepoints, it is deluding itself. The Trump Administration cannot simply change the department’s name and expect different results. On a fundamental level, it must change what it buys.
The hard truth is blunt: some of the weapons the Pentagon still tries to buy are fundamentally unmanufacturable at scale. This could mean catastrophic defeat in the next war. It needs to make preventive, rather than reactive, changes by letting go of the artifacts of an earlier industrial era and by building a new, elastic munition ecosystem.
Too many of the United States’ weapons systems have been optimized for one metric—performance—at the expense of time and scale. The result are munitions that require months of hand-assembly, exotic materials, and airplane-like certification processes for components that should roll off of production lines like commodity parts. It’s no wonder the supply chain is not responsive. If we want surge capacity that endures, we must buy weapons that can be manufactured at scale, dump the systems that cannot, and bring new firms into the game to design and build scalable munitions.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/the-pentagon-needs-to-rethink-how-it-buys-munitions
