Naval Strike Demands a Reinvigorated ‘Arsenal of Democracy’

“It’s a time for straight talk.”[1]

Admiral Sam Paparo, the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, has made clear that ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are eating into high-end capabilities and imposing costs on US readiness to respond to Chinese aggression. Magazine depth, and the US ability to sustain its forces in a protracted conflict are a consistent theme of concern for naval aviation’s most senior pilot and the admiral responsible for the defense of Taiwan. During confirmation testimony, Admiral Paparo bluntly told Senators our maritime forces are optimized for “efficiency” rather than “effectiveness under fire.”[2]

Despite the distractions of conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, strategic competition with China remains the central national security concern of the United States, with Taiwan the most acute potential flashpoint. War with China would mean a profound failure of deterrence. Whether credible deterrence can be sustained will be decided in American dry-docks, in semiconductor manufacturers’ fabrication facilities, and by a commercial industrial base that must be prepared to be a modern arsenal of democracy. That we now find ourselves uncertain about the ability to sustain combat forces is not without irony. The quixotic hopes of globalisation that fueled China’s spectacular economic growth also hollowed out the domestic productive forces underpinning US power. We now face a reckoning.

The tide is shifting for the carrier air wing, which must take it at the flood. Advances in manufacturing, autonomy, and computing are bringing about a transition from exquisite precision strike to proliferated precision mass.[3] The US Navy remains the bedrock of a credible Indo-Pacific deterrent, but the carrier air wing – the crown jewel of naval power projection and precision strike – must reorient, because in transition there is opportunity. US industry presently would be unable to sustain combat forces in a war with China. But a bold movement to reindustrialise and reinvigorate the arsenal of democracy is in progress, fueled by small and agile companies’ growing ability to complement large and experienced ones. The US Navy must take advantage of it.

An F/A-18E Super Hornet from Strike Fighter Squadron 81 launches from the flight deck of the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75). The need for carrier air wings remains significant, but the wings and aircraft are too few in number to operate without attritable precision mass alongside. US Navy

Shifting Tides

The carrier air wing as currently constituted represents the zenith of a mature precision-warfare regime. Its core competitive advantage is the combination of advanced reconnaissance capabilities and precision-guided munitions, all receiving timely command and control from an integrated battle network. The F/A-18 Super Hornet is a mature and battle-tested platform that can carry a variety of stand-off and stand-in precision munitions. The F-35C Lightning II and EA-18G Growler are key enablers, while the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye provides tactical command and control for battlespace awareness. Combined, the platforms afford tactical mobility and operational flexibility.[4] In principle, this combination allows smaller numbers of highly capable forces to produce outsized effects on numerically superior foes.

The triumph of precision, dramatically on display during the 1991 Gulf War, provoked a reaction, however; threat nations realised their probable impotence in the face of the US reconnaissance-strike complex. China has responded by working diligently to develop its own precision-warfare capabilities – and to weaken those of the United States.[5] Increasingly long-range air-to-air missiles designed to target high-value airborne assets exemplify China’s larger “systems destruction warfare” that seeks to degrade or eliminate US battle networks to prevent intervention in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.[6]

A sailor stands near the bomb farm on the flight deck of the USS Nimitz (CVN-68). The inventories of numerous systems, from Joint Direct Attack Munitions to SM-2 and SM-6 missiles, have declined precipitously because of conflicts in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Small, innovative companies could produce affordable complementary systems rapidly, preserving exquisite systems for missions for which they are best suited. US Navy (Hannah Kantner)

Even as China works to narrow the gap, emerging technology is making the US advantage inherently less valuable operationally. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Horowitz suggests that the United States’ generational lead in precision-strike lulled national security leaders into the idea that the US military could slim down but still triumph by prioritising efficiency and accuracy over numbers.[7] This choice has resulted in Air Force and Navy aircraft and ship fleets one-third their 1965 size, albeit with the striking power of each individual unit significantly larger. But a corollary is that the concentration of combat power in fewer units and platforms makes attrition disproportionately costly compared with the past. Horowitz argues the binary choice between precision and mass is collapsing. Advances in manufacturing, declining costs for guidance and sensor systems, and developments in autonomy are allowing militaries to realize the advantages of both.

Precision mass is manifesting across the cost-capability spectrum. At the low end, Ukrainian forces are using commercially available first-person view (FPV) drones to target Russian armored vehicles.[8] At the high end, the US Air Force is developing its first-ever uncrewed fighter as a part of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. The General Atomics YFQ-42A and Anduril Industries YFQ-44A embody a paradigmatic shift toward teams of manned and unmanned platforms working together in a system of systems.[9] The appeal of both ends is the ability to field large numbers of attritable systems at lower cost compared to legacy systems.

US naval forces operating in the Red Sea recently had to grapple with these dynamics. Naval Surface Forces Commander Vice Admiral Brendan Mclane has acknowledged that the Navy has expended at least 400 individual munitions (including 120 SM-2s and 80 SM-6s) in operations against the Houthis.[10] Finding more economical options will be critical to helping units “get after the cost curve,” argues Capt Mark Lawrence, commander of Destroyer Squadron Two.[11]

To counter unmanned aerial vehicles, the Navy will deploy the low-cost Anduril Roadrunner and Coyote systems with Carrier Strike Group 12.[12] Though scalable, in the Pacific such systems still will have to contend with the tyranny of distance and a contested electromagnetic spectrum, meaning the exquisite platforms of an air wing will remain essential. Economical and exquisite will complement each other, providing affordable scale, distributing lethality across more units, and allowing the United States to saturate the battlespace to create tactical dilemmas for China’s military.

Intact, a Nimitz-class carrier’s air wing is unparalleled in terms of sortie generation and consequent firepower. Yet a fight with China will require an aggressiveness that will likely result in significant losses. The present harsh reality is that, relative to a carrier, individual aircraft must be considered expendable, akin to ammunition.[13] However, the exquisite but expensive – not to mention manned – platforms that compose an air wing today are too few to permit this.

The world coming into view will advantage the Navy only so long as it can field the correct mix of low-end attritable and high-end exquisite systems. The Indo-Pacific contest will hinge on mass. A conflict with China that is not short and sharp will quickly devolve into a contest of industrial will and might. Victory will require hordes of attritable unmanned systems, deep magazines of standoff precision missiles, and hot production lines to replace the inevitable losses. Supplying and sustaining this precision mass for a credible deterrent means asking bluntly: Is the US industrial base prepared to be a modern ‘arsenal of democracy’? The movement to reindustrialize suggests it can be.

Mach Industries has been awarded a US Army contract to develop its vertical takeoff Viper cruise missile, which the company says will be mass producible at a cost of around $100,000 each. Mach Industries

Again, the Arsenal

With this strategic imperative in mind, the question becomes: “How do we produce hardware and munitions at the scale required to win?”

Our current domestic industrial base is a shell of what it once was. In 1971, the peak year for 155-mm artillery production, more than 780,000 casings – 65,000 per month – were made.[14] Just prior to the Ukraine war in 2021, US producers made around 14,400 shells per month. While domestically this increased to 20,000 by March 2023, Ukrainian officials reported expending 23,000 per day during the same period – and NATO intelligence estimates that the Russians are producing 250,000 shells per month.

This extends to the air domain as well. The Defense Innovation Unit’s Replicator Program intends to produce “multiple thousands” of attritable autonomous systems per year.[15] By contrast, Russia claims to be producing 4,000 drones every day.[16]

Off-shored, low-cost production of drone components has shifted to Chinese producers. Regulatory and environmental burdens have prevented the US domestic supply chain from flourishing while China uses state power to subsidise drone component manufacturers.[17] The requirements of the modern battlefield do not sync well with existing domestic capacities to create attritable overmatch. Yet, the tide can still be turned – a new ‘arsenal of democracy’ can emerge, accelerated by a combination of patriotism, capital, and inspired civilian entrepreneurs.

Across the United States, young people and investors are building manufacturing capacity to produce war-ready tools. This new defence innovation base augments the legacy prime contractors, providing additional capacity across critical capability gaps. Innovative start-ups are creating precision-manufacturing capacity that directly feeds the needs of companies such as Boeing and SpaceX. Maritime- and air-focused companies are employing automated manufacturing platforms to build hundreds of small and medium autonomous surface vessels and aircraft in Ohio, along the Texas Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Other companies are building deployable, modular manufacturing facilities that can be packed into shipping containers from which can emerge, for example, 3D-printed medium-range, one-way drones.[18]

Most important, not only capital is flowing into the segment, but also talent. Many young civilian engineers who previously went to work for software startups are now inspired to build for the United States and its defence. Some new defence tech companies are inundated with applications from eager builders who want to support the United States’ warfighters.[19] Exceptional civilian talent willing to build the tools of tomorrow creates a distinctively American advantage.

Many of the solutions these companies create are not the exquisite, gold-plated ones the existing defence industrial base builds. Instead, the capabilities are intended to be low-cost and producible at large scale. They may not solve for every edge case, but they should provide enough capacity that large numbers of munitions could make up for shortfalls in higher-capability ones. Just as the Liberty ships of the 1940s were built for quantity rather than quality, the modern defense innovation base must create capability via capacity.

A Ukrainian soldier prepares an explosives-equipped first-person-view drone for launch. The war in Ukraine has shown that weapons can be small, mass-produced, and cheap and still be effective in many circumstances – affording precision mass. AFP (Genya Savilov) 

From Supply Chains to Kill Chains

Sustaining and directing this reinvigorated arsenal will require tenacious leadership inside and outside the Department of Defense. Success will depend on the United States taking a fundamentally more expansive view of the profession of arms. We must attune to the supply chains of US power rather than myopically focusing on the kill chains they support, but the wars in Ukraine and Yemen have shown that even limited conflicts can strain supply chains. Industrial mass will be the predicate to – in the words of retired Navy Captain Wayne Hughes – attacking effectively first and then doing so again and again: relentless strike.

The effort to adapt to the coming era of precision mass will not be trivial. Many startups in the van of building proliferated mass operate fundamentally different business models than those of the cost-plus contractors that is the standard in defence procurement. Austin Gray, a former Navy officer and co-founder of Blue Water Autonomy, and Maggie Gray, a venture capital investor at Shield Capital, argue the “US Navy faces pervasive structural challenges that will always make it a tough customer for startups.”[20]

Publicly available contracting data shows that the Navy consistently invests less than the Air Force and Army in technology developed by smaller, nontraditional vendors. Frontier technology such as machine learning, advanced sensing, and low-cost manufacturing increasingly coming from the commercial sector, creates a risk the Navy will be left behind. The nation’s ability to generate extraordinary breakthroughs may diverge greatly from its ability to adopt and diffuse these technologies to realise strategic advantage.[21] The Navy cannot be slow to adopt innovative technologies, or it will risk losing the strategic initiative.

This should be familiar from history. Precisely this phenomenon of innovation diffusion played out at the dawn of carrier aviation. During the interwar period, the British Royal Navy became the global leader in carrier aviation with the commissioning of HMS Furious.[22] Despite the early British lead, it was the US and Imperial Japanese Navies that recognised the full potential of carrier aviation as a decisive force in naval combat.

A key driver in the success of the US Navy was the investment of organisational capital to reorient the force around carrier employment.[23] This restructuring followed Service-wide experimentation to validate operational concepts for naval aviation such as the 1929 Fleet Problem IX. Then–Rear Admiral Joseph Reeves, commanding the aircraft squadrons of the battle fleet, insisted the carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3) be detached from the main fleet and allowed to complete a surprise mock attack on the US-held Panama Canal. The success achieved in Fleet Problem IX laid the foundation for carriers and air groups (predecessors to today’s air wings) to act as independent fighting units. During World War II, Navy commanders such as Fleet Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey built on the hit-and-run model pioneered by Reeves to carry the day in the Pacific theater.[24]

Like the service of Reeves and Halsey’s day, the Navy is once again at a technological crossroads. Dogged leadership, innovative thinking, and a willingness to question shibboleths birthed the carrier Navy that won the Pacific war and backstopped US security for more than 80 years. Today’s aviators are the stewards of this awesome tradition and must look to those pioneering ‘brown shoe’ officers’ example to navigate the arriving era of precision mass. As tacticians we must daily sharpen our edge, but, as part of the larger Naval Service, we also must stoke the fires of the reinvigorated arsenal of democracy forging our weapons. The defining task is checking China’s hegemonic ambitions and assuring US interests in the Indo-Pacific. History will rightly judge us harshly if we fall short in this endeavor and leave the United States diminished while we have the watch.

It is indeed a time for straight talk.

This article originally appeared in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Copyright U.S. Naval Institute. Reprinted with permission. For more great content from the U.S. Naval Institute, visit www.usni.org.

References 

[1]  ‘A Conversation with Commander of US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo.’ Brookings, 19 November 2024, brookings.edu/events/a-conversation-with-commander-of-us-indo-pacific-command-admiral-samuel-paparo/, 9.

[2] To Consider the Nomination of: Admiral Samuel J. Paparo, Jr., USN for Reappointment to the Grade of Admiral and to Be Commander, United States Indo-Pacific Command, 1 February 2024. armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/transcript_24-02_____02-01-24.pdf, 59.

[3] Michael Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

[4] Adm Samuel J Paparo, USN, ‘Aircraft Carriers: Still Indispensable,’ U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 7 (July 2024).

[5] Andrew F Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 19.

[6] Douglas Barrie, “Air-to-Air Missiles Push the Performance, Payload Envelope”; Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory, 47.

[7] Michael C Horowitz, ‘Battles of Precise Mass,’ Foreign Affairs, 22 October 2024.

[8] Peter Dickinson, ‘FPV Drones in Ukraine Are Changing Modern Warfare,’ Atlantic Council, 20 June 2024.

[9] Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs, ‘Air Force Designates Two Mission Design Series for Collaborative Combat Aircraft,’ 3 March 2025.

[10] Geoff Ziezulewicz, ‘Navy Just Revealed Tally of Surface-to-Air Missiles Fired in Ongoing Red Sea Fight,’ The War Zone, 14 January 2025.

[11] Konstantin Toropin, ‘Navy’s Fight in Red Sea Used 220 Missiles, But Officials Say That’s Changing,’ Military.com, 15 January 2025; and Joseph Trevithick, ‘Coyote, Roadrunner Loitering Drone Interceptors to Arm U.S. Navy Destroyers,’ The War Zone, 28 March 2025.

[12] Trevithick, ‘Coyote, Roadrunner Loitering Drone Interceptors.’

[13] Lars Celander, How Carriers Fought: Carrier Operations in WWII (Havertown: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC, 2018), 84.

[14] Roxana Tiron and Billy House, ‘America’s War Machine Can’t Make Basic Artillery Fast Enough,’ Bloomberg, 7 June 2024.

[15] Noah Robertson, ‘Replicator: An Inside Look at the Pentagon’s Ambitious Drone Program,’ Defense News, 19 December 2023.

[16] Marc Santora et al., ‘A Thousand Snipers in the Sky: The New War in Ukraine,’ The New York Times, 3 March 2025.

[17] Michael R Bloomberg et al., Strategic Edge: A Blueprint for Breakthroughs in Defense Innovation (Washington, DC: Defense Innovation Board, 2025), 12.

[18] Anyer Tenorio Lara, ‘USAF Invests $100M in Firestorm Labs for 3D Printed UAS,’ 3D Printing Industry, 12 February 2025.

[19] Billy Thalheimer (@billythalheimer), post on X (formerly Twitter), 12 February 2025, x.com/billythalheimer/status/1890783022695239992.

[20] Austin Gray and Maggie Gray, ‘Startups & Sea Power,’ 29 November 2024. austinegray.substack.com/cp/161547775.

[21] Jeffrey Ding, Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), 25.

[22] Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power, 68.

[23] Horowitz, 73.

[24] Thomas Wildenberg, All the Factors of Victory: Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves and the Origins of Carrier Airpower, 1st ed. (Washington DC: Brassey’s, 2003), 10.