Big Ships and Little Tech: A Barbell Plan for Deterrence

A force that cannot see the battlefield cannot win on it. The battlefields of Ukraine have made this clear. Commercial sensors, cheap drones, resilient comms, and fast adaptation are imposing disproportionate costs on a larger foe. Both the Russian and Ukrainian sides are adapting their platforms and iterating their tactics and techniques faster than any other military in history. The implications for the Indo-Pacific are alarming. The lesson isn’t that “drones beat ships.” It’s that reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, and rapid replenishment decide campaigns.

In our forthcoming book The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices, we argue that America’s vulnerability is not a shortage of ideas. It’s a shortage of capacity and a tangle of institutions that prevent us from translating ideas into fielded capability at the speed required. Deterrence is a system: resilient C4ISR, credible long-range strike, hardened and supplied positions, and a robust allied defense industrial base. Deterrence means showing the ability to make that system work faster. It is about delivering a powerful opening punch—and sustaining the fight for as long as it takes.

To execute this relatively simple mission, we have created a procurement system that is maddeningly, wastefully complex. After the Cold War, we consolidated the DIB, leaving a handful of primes to manage decades-long mega-programs. Enormous, long-term contracts necessitated labyrinthine requirements and piles of red tape. Meanwhile, our shipyards aged, our energetics capacity shrank, and our munitions stockpiles thinned. Our industrial base lost its capacity, and more importantly its agility. China is not encumbered this way. That’s how it has quickly built the world’s largest navy, scaled production in missiles, drones, and air defense, and created redundancy for refit and repair in wartime. The industrial momentum today favors China. If Beijing concludes it can outproduce and outlast the United States in a war of attrition, deterrence weakens.

History suggests the way back for the United States and its allies. Shortly before World War II broke out, we made a national decision to suspend “business as usual” and take all necessary measures to expand our arsenal. In the 1970s and 80s, we made a similar decision, but to adapt the force for a new generation of new sensors, digital technologies, and space-based communications. The “Second Offset” worked because it integrated emerging technology into doctrine and operations. Today we need both: technological integration plus capacity, at speed.

That requires tearing out the parts of the acquisition system that are hostile to time.

First, change the default. Start with commercial. When a field-ready capability exists, DoD should buy it under commercial pathways rather than launch a bespoke program. The point is not ideology; it’s time. Every month shaved off procurement and fielding improves deterrence.

Second, change the process. Fund portfolios of competing prototypes, measure against effects and time-to-fielding, and scale the winners. Reform past-performance rules that entrench incumbency; they block the very competition that keeps timelines honest.

Third, change the culture and cost of entry. Non-traditional contractors face a compliance moat designed for yesterday’s programs. Lower it—especially for firms spending their own capital on dual-use R&D—without compromising security. We need more builders in the system, and we need to retain the talent.

That leads us to the fourth and most important piece: the need to change the incentives. Acquisition officials should be rewarded for delivering capability on operationally relevant timelines, not for process compliance. Align KPIs to speed, availability, and actual fielded effects. Congress and DoD must send clearer demand signals. If they want the defense tech startup ecosystem to keep thriving, they need to provide a pathway for companies to cross the valley of death.

Taken together, these reforms will enable a historic capacity build. But they will not solve deterrence on their own. A credible arsenal is not “little tech versus big ships.” It is both:

Heavy end (multi-year commitments): Expand energetics and munitions lines; clear yard backlogs; stabilize submarine production; harden and pre-position stocks forward. This is unglamorous, years-long work—but without it, magazines empty and ships wait for parts.

Agile end (high-tempo adoption): Flood the force with attritable UAS, autonomy for sensing and counter-targeting, resilient comms/mesh networks, and rapid counter-UAS—capabilities that iterate on commercial cycles but are integrated to military concept of operations.

Logistics binds the two. In the Pacific, lift, pre-positioning, repair, and re-arm at sea are the limiting reagents. Buying clever sensors that can’t be sustained, or exquisite platforms that can’t be re-armed, is theater, not deterrence. Rethinking logistics for an era of long-range strake is an enormous task. Smaller, nimble companies have an enormous role to play.

Allies must also be part of the story. Japan, South Korea, Australia, the UK, and European producers are increasing defense spend, but without harmonized production and joint orders, and facing restrictive export controls, we leave capacity on the table. The United States should lead joint production agreements and co-investment in key bottlenecks (energetics, seekers, solid-rocket motors, maritime repair). Even partial integration in the next five years would meaningfully raise the cost to Beijing of gambling on a long war. It would also provide a valuable demand signal to industry by combining American and allied needs. Reciprocity is key, because American defense tech companies will want to sell into these markets, too. ITAR and other red tape stand in the way.

Founders and engineers building dual-use tech can help bring about the change the system urgently needs. Here’s how:

Map to the kill chain, and stay historically informed. Be prepared to explain to DoD exactly how you fit into the overall deterrence system. Are you improving sensing, target custody, strike, or sustainment? How have these parts of the kill chain been disrupted by emerging tech in the past? Why is your product next?

Design for the portfolio world. Aim for an 80% solution fast under OTAs/DIU while engineering the path to program-of-record scale. Most likely, the system will be reformed piecemeal, not all at once. But you can’t be sure.

Engineer for attrition and repair. Assume contested EW, degraded GPS, and a repair loop forward. How can you adapt and iterate faster than your competitors?

The goal of defense tech should not be to “disrupt defense,” unleashing “creative destruction” along the way to a technological revolution. It should be to restore credible deterrence by helping the force see, shoot, move, and replenish faster than a peer adversary can adapt. Congress can help by making commercial the default, institutionalizing portfolio acquisition, lowering barriers to entry, and tying incentives to speed and availability. The Pentagon must, in parallel, place multi-year bets on the heavy industrial base while clearing the lanes for agile tech to flow.

At a moment like this, we need to build the broadest possible consensus about what needs to be done, and why. We should take inspiration from 1940, after France fell to the Nazis, when FDR finally realized that we needed a crash effort to defeat Germany and deter war with Japan. In his famous “arsenal of democracy” fireside chat, FDR told the American people: “We must discard the notion of business as usual.” The tragic irony of history is that Roosevelt was right, but he moved too late. Deterrence failed in 1941. We shouldn’t make the same mistake today.

Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem are the authors of The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices, forthcoming through Hoover Institution Press. They advise dual-use startups and investors on aligning technologies with deterrence strategy.