The Defense Department is establishing a Joint Production Accelerator Cell to help identify "optimal production strategies" and mitigate challenges facing the U.S. industrial base, according to a new memo from Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante.
The JPAC will be “charged with building enduring industrial production capacity, resilience, and surge capability for key defense weapon systems and supplies,” the memo states.
The team will be led by Erin Simpson, a senior DOD adviser for industrial base policy.
Additionally, the JPAC will “institutionalize and substantially restructure” DOD’s Munitions Industrial Deep Dive team “from a crisis-management, reactive team to one that proactively and continuously analyzes and identifies opportunities to optimize production capability, resilience, and surge ability,” the memo states. Further, the JPAC will work to expand its scope beyond munitions to other defense weapon systems.
The MIDD team, according to DOD spokesman Jeff Jurgensen, was established to identify “critical production constraints over the last several years,” especially those that have been highlighted by U.S. support to Ukraine against an ongoing Russian invasion.
Jurgensen told Inside Defense in a statement that the JPAC represents an effort to “proactively strengthen our industrial base.”
“As the effort moves forward, the JPAC will focus on building enduring advantages in the form of a more flexible and responsive defense industrial base and will serve as a key enabler of the National Defense Strategy,” he said. “We’ll provide further details regarding this important initiative in the coming days.”
LaPlante spoke about the JPAC yesterday during a speech at the Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base Summit, saying DOD wants to encourage a “paradigm shift” in the defense industry in which engineers innovate “back and forth” between development and manufacturing phases.
“We are rethinking the intersection of traditional design and manufacturing phases,” he said.
LaPlante said the JPAC would also consider other key industrial base questions.
“For example, can we use advanced manufacturing to produce metal casings at smaller batches when we need them?” he said. “Can we find a way to cheaply print ball bearings, which are a critical limiting factor for munitions? In other words, can we make the industrial base more flexible and agile, while bringing down fixed costs?”