Outsourcing has fundamentally impaired the ability of countries to secure and sustain their military industrial base.
Prime contractors sit on top of vast webs of interconnected and outsourced value chains. Neither the primes nor governments are equipped to see into these opaque global networks, let alone to secure and control them. This results in unforeseen capacity limitations, single points of failure, material dependencies, and — at worst — exposure to adversaries via the supply of critical components. Both the opacity of these value chain networks and the inability to connect and coordinate across them threatens the ability for the military industrial base to scale, sustain, and secure production. Our defense industrial value chains are not resilient.
Traditional “Supply Chain Risk Management” applications are counterintelligence risk investigation tools that aggregate and scan open source data to find potential risks for a small set of analyst users. They can flag potential risks, but they can’t and don’t provide the network connectivity or tooling to do anything about those risks across the enterprise. They cannot verify value chains, connect parties across value chains, or give you the ability to manage those value chains across a global, rules-based, trusted network.
True resilience can only be achieved through value chain management. Building resilient value chains is much harder for existing programs than new ones. While much needs to be done to illuminate, coordinate, and risk manage existing value chains, there is a tremendous opportunity to design resilient value chains at the outset, rather than inheriting them from prime contractors and trying to fix them after the fact. Resilience is not easily bolted on.
A multi-front geopolitical threat landscape creates an urgent need to scale and secure military industrial value chains.
The best time to build resilient defense value chains was twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Many defense stockpiles have been exhausted by wars in Europe and the Middle East. Containment in the Indo-Pacific requires further production surges. And the manufacturing of new hardware and munitions must be rapidly scaled to meet the evolving technology landscape — in particular with respect to autonomous systems at the core of modernization efforts.
In addition to modernizing and scaling up the industrial base, a number of government initiatives aim to align and scale military production across trusted allied nations. AUKUS, the Quad, and similar initiatives seek to more closely coordinate their value chains to optimize manufacturing and maintenance.
These rapid, generational changes present the opportunity and imperative to move beyond traditional defense procurement and Supply Chain Risk Management frameworks, and to instead design and manage resilient value chains for defense programs.
Altana, the world’s first Value Chain Management System, provides defense agencies and the military industrial base with a dynamic, networked, common operating picture to design, monitor, and maintain trusted value chains.
See across your extended supplier base to build an integrated picture of part-site visibility, capacity, inventory, and material flows across your value chain networks. Continuously monitor and dynamically update your value chain source of truth as global supply chains evolve.
Focus proactively and on only what matters, rather than chasing down risk scores and blinking lights. Tailored AI decision support helps to target nation state threats within and across value chains, coordinate supply and demand across value chains to smooth bullwhip effects and ensure surge production capacity, provide real-time event monitoring, and predict and simulate disruptions to improve resilience.
Act at the outset of new programs to design and engineer resilient value chains — from vendor screening and qualification, to upstream value chain design, documentation, simulation, and screening. For programs underway, manage value chains from an enterprise-wide, collaborative, common operating picture with prime contractors and upstream value chain partners.
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