What You Choose Not to Build
In 2022, the Pentagon suspended all F-35 deliveries because a cobalt-samarium magnet inside a Honeywell turbomachine pump contained alloy from China. The most advanced fighter the world has ever seen couldn’t be delivered, all because of one magnet. That came from a subcontractor five layers below the prime, a company no one within Lockheed could probably name. It reads like a fluke. It isn’t. I have watched a single missing input stop a line. Lower stakes, shorter pause, same physics, no less astonishing to see it happen real-time. The Pentagon actually has a term for this risk in its acquisition strategy: Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages.
Why do these shortages happen? On a macro level, the explanation is simple: in the phrase, “defense industrial base”, the base is the shaky part. That same year as the F-35 debacle, the Pentagon released a report warning that the number of small businesses in the defense industrial base shrank by more than 40% over the preceding decade, and if not addressed, the DoD could lose an additional 15,000 suppliers over the next decade. The report’s one-word summary of the state of competition: poor.
Peel back the onion even more, and you get to July 21, 1993. In DoD lore, it is known as “the Last Supper”. Deputy SecDef William Perry told 25 defense contractors to consolidate or die. The logic was sound: we were in a peacetime setting, and we didn’t need the expansive military presence as we once did in the Cold War. The net effect, however, was that consolidation bred a defensive business posture. Innovation and agility waned within the contractors, and bureaucracy increased on the government side. Arthur Herman puts a number on the bill: a contract-to-aircraft timeline that ran five years during the Cold War now runs eighteen or nineteen. The decisions made were locally rational and collectively catastrophic.
Intelligence. Agriculture. Manufacturing. I’ve seen this dynamic play out in three different fields now. The moral of the story in all three: What you choose not to build, you will eventually choose to need.
In that same peacetime window, the intelligence community was taking a 23% budget cut. CIA’s workforce fell 16% and its budget fell 18% in real terms, and the intel community leaned harder on signals and electronic collection. By the mid-1990s, recruitment of new case officers and analysts had come to a virtual halt, and so did the information and intel coming out of it. Our decision-makers slowly went blind because they chose satellites over humans, and they didn’t realize that it takes 10-15 years to rebuild robust HUMINT capabilities. We could not buy in 2002 what we chose not to build in 1994.
Our country is running the same play in agriculture right now, compounded by the economic shutdown during COVID. While our production per acre is going up, due to technological and plant breeding advances, the number of independent farmers is going down, there’s no one to take their place, and thus there is a rapid consolidation of industrial farming. The end result will be the same: little innovation and agility to be nationally resilient during a geopolitical event that hits closer to home. Eden Green was my attempt to make an impact there, because I believed then what I believe now. Food security is national security.
And now we are watching it play out in the rapid depletion of our munitions, in the wars we did not plan to resupply, and in the long-term threat of China. Capacity is never lost in a decision. It is lost in a thousand reasonable non-decisions. Nobody voted to go blind inside al-Qaeda. Nobody voted to lose the ability to make missiles. We simply stopped buying them, one defensible year at a time, and the loss never showed up in a defense appropriations bill, because a non-decision has no section or line item. Atrophy is the effect of those choices we didn’t make, even in the obvious rise of foreign adversaries, over the past 10 years. We are just now seeing it because our industry is under duress.
This extends into my personal life, too. The relationships around me that I do not invest in are the ones I will undoubtedly need when life gets dark and stormy. I’ve got a regular list of men whom I let in, and lean on. That’s the muscle that I need to exercise, to flex, on a regular basis. The same is true with my mind, my intellectual muscle. When my mental margin gets unintentionally filled up with “good” conferences and “better” events, rather than actively choosing the “highest and best” use of my time and resources, my ability to lead at home and at work slowly suffers. If either of those areas atrophy, my life under pressure (which it usually is) cannot bear the load. And it takes longer to rebuild.