Facing global challenges, the Army is investing in technology and its industrial base to meet production and manufacturing capacity needs, the assistant Army secretary of acquisition, logistics and technology said.

“Just on 155 [mm howitzer rounds], for example, we’re $4 billion of investment into the industrialization buildup to get to our eventual production goals,” Douglas Bush said during a Defense News webcast on Sept. 18. “It’s a huge series of projects that have to come together. … A lot of work [is] going on down the supply chain to get all the parts you have to have on time [and] in the right place.”

Increasing production to meet global demands after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 has been challenging, Bush said. “The timelines needed to do this in what I would call a reactive way, after the conflict starts, versus doing some of this work before a conflict starts, [is a challenge],” he said. “The critical question … is, how much … surge capacity do we need to have ready before a conflict starts, not after.”

The Army is seeking out systems with “an open architecture” and upgrading with software, as opposed to hardware, Bush said.

“What it really means is … if something really good comes along, a new radar, a new sensor, a new type of warhead, we have a way to rapidly put it into a system we already have,” he said. “Those two things together, an open system and software updates … are how you get ahead of the time curve … to do things at the speed needed in combat.”

When production demand eventually declines, the U.S. will need to invest in its stockpiles to prepare for future demand surges, Bush said.

“There’s stockpiles of things we laid away in the 1990s [that] we are using now,” he said. “On machinery, we’re going to have to be willing to spend more to maintain excess capacity in some kind of layaway status than we have been in the past. That’s something we got away from in the 2000s. We just need to do it again.”