The Gears of War: The State of the Aerospace Gear Industry and the Implications for Accelerating Acquisition

Abstract

Innovation is transformed into combat power through industrial capacity and production. Though much attention in Acquisition Reform centers on lowering barriers to entry for new entities and encouraging innovation and accountability for defense primes, these same primes are often paced by their sub-tier suppliers. This paper will explore how a subset of this supply base, namely aerospace gear and gear component manufacturers, illustrates the broader challenges of the defense acquisition enterprise. Chronic underinvestment from defense primes and national policymakers, coupled with recent inflationary trends, has created a supply base in this segment with flat or declining output and upward cost pressure. This paper will demonstrate, through exploration of United States Government Databases, that a buildup in the combat power required to defeat U.S. adversaries will be rate limited unless policy changes are made. Though the U.S. Government has tools to shore up supply chain capability, such as utilizing the Defense Production Act, these tools are often underutilized and/or too narrowly applied. Though the idiosyncrasies of the aerospace gear industry do not precisely generalize to the acquisition system as a whole, taking a finer, limited view of one aspect of the supply chain illustrates broader challenges and highlights the need to focused just as much on producibility as a catalyst for accelerating acquisitions.