At the beginning of World War II, the U.S. Army Air Corps (USAAC) believed daytime, un-escorted bombing would deal Germany a weighty blow at little cost. Air Corps leaders argued that heavily armed bombers such as the B-17 could defend themselves against German interceptors as long as they flew in the proper formation. Then the losses started mounting. By 1943 the Air Corps began the search for a long-legged armed escort that could defend the bomber fleet from marauding German fighters. Thankfully, such a plane was available, having already gone from the drawing board to frontline service in under two years: the P-51 Mustang. The USAAC’s adoption of the Mustang as an escort fighter had profound effects on the war, helping the allies to drastically reduce bomber losses during raids into Germany as well as establish air superiority over Western Europe by April 1944.

Yet, what would the United States do in the future if it found itself urgently needing to fill a major capability shortfall in the middle of a high-intensity war against a peer or near-peer adversary? Could the Defense Department field a comparable battlefield savior – a 21st century P-51 but with millions of lines of code – in time to make a difference? Not likely. Consider the most recent GAO assessment of major Pentagon weapons programs, which found that the average delay in delivering initial capabilities from the original estimate has grown to 30 months.

To even approach Mustang-like wartime development speeds, government and defense contractors need to consider extraordinary measures in peacetime. In particular, they can learn from a crucial enabling factor identified by academics and commercial sector executives: the importance of knowledge clusters. Specifically, the Defense Department should consider experimenting with virtually replicating the cluster networks that the tech industry and other sectors benefit from and apply them to the weapons development process.

Finding strength in numbers – virtually

The speed advantages of clusters in the commercial world are well documented. As Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter put it in his influential Harvard Business Review article on clusters and economic competition, “Clusters do more than make opportunities for innovation more visible. They also provide the capacity and the flexibility to act rapidly. A company within a cluster often can source what it needs to implement innovations more quickly.” However, for political and historical reasons, the defense industrial base is not organized in a way that makes physical clusters viable.

To start, defense activity is scattered across the country rather than concentrated in a few key areas. Additionally, decades of consolidation have greatly reduced the number of contractors participating in major defense markets such as fighter jets and shipbuilding, leaving fewer and fewer firms to compete for talent, invest in R&D, and simply occupy space next to one another near key military installations. On top of this, lengthening platform lifecycles means that major design and procurement programs can be once-in-a-generation events, thereby limiting the opportunities for continuous and widespread learning. The result of these influences is a defense market defined by a geographically-dispersed but small number of major players chasing a limited pool of significant programs.

Moreover, recent Defense Department efforts to inject innovative commercial technologies and practices into the defense acquisition process have largely focused on ways to work around the main acquisition system. Examples include each service’s version of a rapid capabilities office, the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), and the much-heralded Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx). While their goals are laudable, these initiatives exacerbate the challenges of a dispersed defense industry by contributing to the proliferation of independent stakeholders working at cross-purposes or duplicating R&D and acquisition efforts.

A virtual “Silicon Valley” for the defense economy, where government and industry participants could coordinate, network, and collaborate with much-improved visibility, would help the industrial base combat the challenges of dispersion, consolidation, and stakeholder proliferation. Deeper and more regular interaction among private and public sector employees could reduce barriers to knowledge spillover and ensure that good ideas quickly attract the right resources and people.

While such a network would introduce commercial risks around intellectual property and security concerns about sharing sensitive information, the benefits may outweigh the costs. This is especially true regarding collaboration on military-grade software, whose importance continues to increase as platform lifespans lengthen and strategists emphasize autonomy, human-machine teaming, sensor fusion, and cyber and electronic warfare capabilities as future areas for investment. A virtual industry cluster would potentially simplify sharing breakthroughs easily in a variation on open-source software development.

While certain to be controversial due to competitive, legal, and security concerns, the rise of intra-organization collaborative tools such as Salesforce and Slack on the commercial side and Intellipedia on the classified government side show that easy-to-use tools exist and that entities across different segments of the economy are increasingly realizing the value of greater collaboration. An industry-wide virtual network that includes relevant private and public sector participants is simply the next, logical step in this evolution.

At the very least, a virtual defense industrial cluster should be part of the ongoing discussion about acquisition reform that is occurring within the Pentagon, Congress, and academia. If those efforts succeed, then future capability gaps will be plugged in months, not years, just like they were with the P-51.

Stephen Okin is an analyst with Avascent, a management and strategy consulting firm serving clients across the aerospace and defense sector.

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