Operation Arsenal Speed: Open Defense Production to Commercial Manufacturers

A Practitioner Recommendation for Mobilizing Private Capital
by Stan Crow

BENS brings practitioner perspectives from the business community to the nation’s most pressing security challenges. Through our Mobilizing Private Capital campaign, we’re translating that understanding into action.

As the threat environment grows increasingly complex and appropriations remain unpredictable, senior national security leaders are intensifying efforts to attract private investment and address this imbalance. The challenge now is helping the rest of the ecosystem keep pace—ensuring that capital markets, industry, and the broader bureaucracy understand this shift, build the necessary connections, and adapt their practices to accelerate it.

This campaign meets that challenge through a series of member-led recommendations, with this one developed by Stan Crow, who served in the US Air Force and in McKinsey & Company’s aerospace and defense practice in London and Los Angeles. Stan retired from Northrop Grumman as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Technology, Engineering, and Manufacturing for Northrop Grumman’s Defense Systems sector and was the Chief Executive for Northrop Grumman Japan. He now works with startups and private investors.  Having built international defense partnerships across Japan and allied nations while leading manufacturing operations, he has seen firsthand the barriers keeping capable manufacturers on the sidelines.

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Launch “Operation Arsenal Speed” to mobilize commercial manufacturing capacity for defense production by removing four critical barriers:

• Locked technical data that manufacturers cannot access despite government ownership rights
  
• Year-long certification processes that disincentivize commercial manufacturers
  
• Idle government facilities that capable manufacturers cannot utilize
  
• Fragmented allied demand that fails to justify capital investment

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The Opportunity

The moment is here for private capital and the advanced manufacturing capability of American and Allied nations to address critical shortfalls in defense material stocks and enhance deterrence.  Fresh headlines about the Secretary of the Army soliciting ideas from leading private equity firms and JPMorgan committing to allocating funds in defense initiatives are just a few recent examples of the energy that is ready to be unleashed.  Private capital can team with broad-based modern manufacturing resources to build the stocks we need at scale and speed.

From a purely technical standpoint, most high-volume defense needs—shell bodies, fuzes, guidance subassemblies, harnesses, housings, power units, avionics modules, chassis, cables—are within the capabilities of today’s commercial manufacturers across automotive, consumer electronics, contract manufacturing, and industrial goods. This represents enormous untapped capacity across the United States and allies.

The economics can work. Private capital will deploy when expected returns justify the risks, which requires clearer demand signals and mechanisms that reduce regulatory and market uncertainty. Government has successfully created such conditions before.

NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program opened space access by providing predictable contracts and shared technical resources to commercial providers like SpaceX, transforming what was once a government monopoly into a competitive marketplace. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled market competition by requiring incumbents to share infrastructure, sparking an explosion of new internet service providers. Operation Warp Speed mobilized pharmaceutical manufacturing at unprecedented scale through advance purchase commitments and shared development risk. The CHIPS and Science Act is now catalyzing domestic semiconductor production through targeted subsidies and coordinated federal investment.

Similar approaches can unlock defense manufacturing. The question is how.

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The Challenge

After years leading manufacturing improvement efforts and international partnerships at Northrop Grumman, McKinsey, and the Air Force I’ve watched capable manufacturers sit on the sidelines—not for lack of skill, but because the system prevents their participation. The constraint isn’t technical—it’s access. What appear to be isolated problems are, in fact, interlocking barriers that reinforce one another, symptoms of a defense-industrial base still operating as a closed ecosystem when it should function (with reasonable security and export safeguards) as an open production network.

The first barrier is data. New producers need to know what to build.  The government often holds technical data rights for systems developed with taxpayer funding and could release it to competitive, qualified manufacturers.  Yet those data remain locked in arcane IT systems, legacy formats, or under the de facto control of prime contractors—packaged without the manufacturing detail new entrants need. 

Full data access alone wouldn’t open competitive production. It would simply reveal the next bottleneck—certification. The process can drag on for more than a year, built around government testing, cost-accounting rules and liability frameworks meant for traditional defense contractors, not commercial manufacturers with limited tolerance for such specialized regulatory regimes.

These challenges multiply across production domains. Software integration, energetics handling, and cyber accreditation each involve distinct approval pathways but share the same underlying pattern: inaccessible data, slow qualification, and fragmented oversight that discourage participation rather than enable it.

And even when a manufacturer clears these hurdles, the economics rarely work. Allied nations across Europe and Asia often require identical components—shells, precision parts, electronics—but pursue separate procurement cycles and budgets. To an investor, that appears as a series of small, uncertain markets rather than a single, scalable opportunity.

Meanwhile, significant capacity already exists in underutilized government facilities, yet interested commercial manufacturers have no way to access them. The result is a systemic disconnect: producers with capability, investors with capital, and allies with demand—all present, but unable to connect.

And finally there is the challenge of seeing a path to a return on private investment.  As long as these barriers remain unaddressed, it is difficult to convince realistic capital allocators and commercial manufacturers that accelerated defense production makes sound business sense.

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The Path Forward

Congress and DoD can transform these barriers into opportunities through a coordinated initiative, “Operation Arsenal Speed,” built on four interconnected lines of effort:

• Make government-owned technical data accessible: Identify and make available technical data packages for items where government holds rights, prioritizing munitions, spares, and high-volume components. Develop secure systems for sharing with qualified producers and translate legacy data into manufacturing-ready formats.
  
• Streamline certification and testing: Create time-boxed approval pathways matched to actual risk levels. Fast-track lower-risk components using commercial quality standards already proven in automotive and aerospace. Establish separate, expedited pathways for specialized items like energetics with appropriate oversight.
  
• Enable access to existing defense facilities: Many government defense production facilities operate below full capacity. Where feasible and secure, create mechanisms for qualified manufacturers to utilize this infrastructure—subject to appropriate security controls and without disrupting ongoing programs.
  
• Coordinate allied demand: Establish an Allied Qualified Producers Group that pools requirements across trusted nations, creating the scale that justifies capital investment. This creates a true allied production network where qualified manufacturers in any member nation can produce for the collective security needs of the group. Coordinate multi-year procurement plans to provide investors and manufacturers the predictable demand visibility they need.

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Conclusion

These four efforts address distinct barriers, but their greater impact lies in how they connect. Pursued together, they begin to convert what is today a closed, defense-only ecosystem into a more open, adaptive production network.

The broader conversation around novel financing mechanisms for defense infrastructure is both timely and essential. But financial innovation alone won’t unlock capacity at scale—it also requires structural reform that clears the access barriers keeping capable manufacturers and patient capital on the sidelines.

Operation Arsenal Speed is offered in that spirit: not as a fully developed plan, but as a framework for the kind of systemic approach these challenges require. As government and industry explore new ways to finance the arsenal of democracy, success will depend on pairing capital models with the structural conditions that allow them to work. This recommendation outlines what those conditions might look like.

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Digital artwork created with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).