The Defense Production Act has entered the munitions chat even as concerns persist about weapons stockpiles spent in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran.
“It’s not a sudden shift, it’s taken us nine months to make this work,” Michael Cadenazzi, the Pentagon’s industrial base policy chief, said during an event Tuesday at the Center for a New American Security on Tuesday. “So that was one of my first chores when I came into the Pentagon back in September was to launch something called a ‘voluntary agreement,’” under the Defense Production Act.
Cadenazzi’s comments follow the White House’s quiet invocation of the Defense Production Act. The DPA is up for reauthorization and expires Sept. 30.
The Pentagon currently has two such arrangements: the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, where the government can call on commercial airlines and aerospace manufacturers for national needs; and the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement for maritime vessels, which allows U.S. merchant vessels to participate in exchange for priority access to Defense Department cargoes during peacetime.
“This tool and this designation allows us…to talk about different things like electronics, materials, ammonium perchlorate, rocket motors” and bring competing companies in to discuss needs and challenges without worrying about “antitrust rules,” Cadenazzi said.
“It’s a way for us to communicate and leverage industry using a specific set of authorities. In this particular case, our interest is using voluntary agreements as a way to bring industry in—in an antitrust environment—to go ahead and have conversations with them, for us to articulate problems to them around nasty issues in the supply chain or the industrial base that allow them to communicate and work together, essentially collude, for want of a better term.”
The DPA authority could also create a steady demand signal, Cadenazzi said, noting voluntary agreements could also be used to include a myriad of defense suppliers, such as tire makers.
“We want these to be set up as an enduring capability, so expect to see more of these. I want to bring the tires people in to have conversations about tires,” he said. “It’s just the gritty underbelly of the industrial base, but I think they deserve a lot more attention, and this is one of the tools we want to bring to bear.”
Welcome
You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and cold-plunge soundtrack recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!
My D1 Tech Summit takeaway: The Office of Naval Research is working on a strategy to bring new tech to the fleet faster. The plan, which is in its final production stages, will spell out what the service wants and highlight key areas of scientific interest, like having one human controlling a swarm of drones.
- “That is a lot harder than people realize because people think, oh, you have one joystick and 100 drones are moving. Well, in practice, that looks like little kids playing soccer…And that’s not good enough for our American warfighters,” Rachel Riley, head of naval research, said during Defense One’s annual Tech Summit event Tuesday.
- Other challenges with drone swarming include next-generation algorithms and command and control across platforms—which can include the air, sea and subsea.
- “Folks think that if you can fly a UAV, you can fly a UUV—kind of a different game,” Riley said. The Navy is also “thinking about how can we generate new sensors and effectors that are scalable, feasible at the edge with the right number of compute [that can] fit on a relatively small platform. These are all technical problems that are really gnarly and
stacking them on top of one another is not linear, it’s exponential.”
- Plus, the Navy is looking to nature for clues on how to control a massive number of robots.
- “We’re still doing some really interesting academic research that has to do with, for example, how insects swarm and how they coordinate,” Riley said, because that can inform a mathematical model that can be applied to maritime drones.
Making moves + other news
- INDOPACOM changed its name back to U.S. Pacific Command.
- Govini is now Air.
- The Army direct-commissioned three more tech executives. Oh, and they also bought thousands of IVAS headsets they don’t plan to use…
- Seaglider maker Regent’s defense division is celebrating its first anniversary as the company finishes up a 255,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.
- The Defense Innovation Unit awarded drone maker Mach Industries a contract for its Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike, or RIMES, program.
One last Tech Summit view. We had a stacked line up, with NATO’s top digital transformation official, Maj. Gen. Dominique Luzeaux, and the head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Rear Adm. Michael Baker. There were also a couple of great industrial base panels led by yours truly: one that tackled startup culture and special operations with Shield AI’s co-founder Brandon Tseng, Ondas’ chairman and CEO Eric Brock, Gregory Coleman of 5Side Strategy; and another on how private capital is influencing the defense sector with Red Cell Partners’ Veronica Daigle, CSIS’s Jerry McGinn, and DIU’s Kedar Pavgi. Visit DefenseOne.com for coverage of the event.
