Time, not capital, is the constraint on the defense industrial base

The Pentagon’s industrial-base problem is no longer a shortage of capital. It is the time required to turn that capital into qualified suppliers, suppliers into parts, and parts into weapons in warfighters’ hands.

Three changes would shorten that timeline more than the next hundred billion dollars in appropriations. First, let defense suppliers that have earned a qualification for one program—that is, proven through testing and quality review that they meet its requirements—keep that qualification when seeking work in another program with similar requirements. Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. And third, increase multiyear acquisition to create the kind of demand that lower-tier suppliers can use to secure financing. None of these require new authority. None lowers a standard.

The Department began fiscal 2026 holding $382.4 billion in unexpired, unobligated appropriations, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added $152.3 billion more, and in June the administration asked for another $67.1 billion. Unfortunately, appropriations don’t shorten lead time. Boeing builds the active radar seeker for every PAC-3 MSE interceptor in Huntsville, and in April the Pentagon signed a seven-year framework to triple that output. A finished interceptor takes about two years to build, but qualifying a new component supplier takes even longer. Consequently, rounds bought this year are unlikely to reach the field before 2028. 

Capacity that cannot produce a qualified part for two or three years is not yet military capacity. It is potential capacity. The gap between the two is mobilization latency, and qualification has become one of its largest hidden components. Double demand for a critical munition tomorrow and Congress can appropriate the money within weeks, industry can buy equipment within months, but every new supplier then enters an 18- to 36-month qualification cycle. Appropriated capacity and combat capacity are not the same thing.

I should say plainly where I sit. Seurat makes metal parts under contract using our own high-speed additive process, dubbed Area Printing, and we sell the parts rather than the printers. We are one of 25 awardees under JAQS-SQ, a $10.5-million Pentagon-funded America Makes project call. We would benefit directly if the government spent more on supplier qualification. My industry spent two decades promising more than it delivered. Additive manufacturing was going to replace machining, then reinvent the supply chain, and mostly it printed prototypes and low-volume parts. A program office skeptical of claims from the additive industry is applying a lesson we taught it.

Program offices are where the first change happens. A supplier that passed an audit for one program generally starts from zero for the next. A program office is accountable for its own program, so accepting another office’s audit means taking on a risk judgment it did not make. Every program manager is behaving rationally, and the result is a system optimized to minimize program-level risk rather than mobilization time and qualification costs. The fix is a doctrine of qualify once, use many. Part qualification stays program-specific; what becomes portable is the evidence about the factory, so no office re-proves the shop before it begins proving the part. JAQS-SQ is building that framework now. What is missing is a decision by acquisition leaders to accept each others’ results.

Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. Inside industrial-base accounts, qualification competes against tooling and usually loses, because a machine tool can be bought and installed inside one budget cycle and a qualification package cannot. That line would cost about one percent of industrial base appropriations, or roughly $82 million against the $8.2 billion the Reconciliation Act routed through the Industrial Base Fund.

Third, give the supplier layer—that is, the companies that supply prime contractors—demand it can borrow against. The Department estimates it has lost more than 40 percent of its small-business suppliers over the past decade, and survivors are running at capacity. That sounds like health but is not, because a shop with no idle capacity must pull engineering hours from paying work to qualify a part that may never be ordered. The government does not need to finance every expansion; private capital will fund defense capacity when it can see durable demand. Multiyear procurement is one of the few instruments that turns stated intent into a contract a small shop can take to a lender. The ask is not more grants but enough contractual certainty that banks and investors do the financing.

The strongest argument against all of this is that qualification is rigorous for a reason. A motor case that fails in flight kills people, and additive processes deserve more scrutiny than conventional ones because a part’s microstructure depends on parameters that vary by machine. That argument is correct, and I am not advocating faster approvals or looser standards. Instead, the infrastructure for running that standard rigorously, meaning trained auditors, shared process control documents, and material databases, is funded like an afterthought.

There is a fourth change worth making, and it would cost us—that is, my company and others like it. There should be no additive-specific set-asides. Fund qualified production rather than technologies: define the outcome and the standard and let manufacturers compete to meet it. If a conventional manufacturer can hold the spec at the rate and schedule, it should win the work, and on many high-volume part numbers today, it will. 

None of this addresses what happens to a qualified supplier that waits two years without an order, a harder problem deserving its own argument. In a protracted conflict, the decisive industrial question will be how quickly the United States can turn manufacturing capacity into qualified production because deterrence rests on an adversary believing the United States can replace what it expends. The next phase of rebuilding the arsenal should be measured not in dollars obligated or factories expanded, but in something much harder to game: how many additional qualified suppliers can produce critical parts, and how quickly they can begin delivering them.

James DeMuth is CEO and co-founder of Seurat Technologies, a metal-parts contract manufacturer in Wilmington, Massachusetts