The Defense Foundry Model: Scaling Defense Manufacturing

By Norine MacDonald and George Howell

Published on Karve on September 2, 2025

As industrialized warfare collides with rapid technological attrition, defense supremacy will not be determined by who builds the best drone, but by who can outproduce, out-iterate, and out-adapt the fastest. Static acquisitions and niche innovation are insufficient. What is needed are Defense Foundries: integrated production ecosystems that merge engineering, automation, and software to manufacture and evolve entire cohorts of uncrewed systems on demand. Unlike traditional factories built for repetition, foundries are designed for adaptability: engineered to retool quickly, integrate new technologies, and sustain output under pressure. This paper introduces the Defense Foundry Model as a strategic framework for national industrial resilience, proposing a shift in focus from platform procurement to agile production capabilities, aligning military needs, government policy, investor incentives, and industrial capacity under one unifying model.

We call these "defense foundries" to evoke specialized facilities that mold raw materials into foundational, adaptable components. This mirrors the required shift in defense, from making static end-products to investing in production ecosystems forging defense products on demand.

Industrial aspects of emerging conflict dynamics

The argument for the need for such adaptive foundries is based on recent discourse on defense innovation from thinkers such as Eric Schmidt, Eveline Buchatskiy, Mike Brown, Vitaliy Goncharuk, Will Roper, General Mike Minihan, and German Army Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, Martin Feldmann and Gene Kesselman.  

While perspectives differ on how to achieve dominance in future conflicts, there's broad consensus on what will define them: automated, robotics-led battlefields and a "war of factories" where scaling production becomes paramount. Efficiency, cost-effectiveness and adaptability in manufacturing are required together with scaling production. This dynamic extends to potential great-power clashes where industrial capacity and cheap, streamlined manufacturing will determine who can outproduce adversaries without economic exhaustion.

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