How can the government help the defense industry produce more missiles?

I wanted to drill down for a little bit on what government can do to be an excellent partner and work to make all these efforts a success

I wanted to start drilling down on the aspect of cultural change

It doesn't matter how you scale production of exquisite missiles. If you're using them to take out drones that are orders of magnitude cheaper, that's still not what they want

Um, so from, from whatever vantage point you have, um, what do you think it will start

uh, taking to turn that cultural ship and develop a greater comfort level with affordable

munitions, less overkill, maybe a different way of thinking about, um, how you use these

munitions and do you see evidence that that's beginning to happen? Wanted to start this one with Dr. Medese

Yeah, so regarding shot doctrine and thinking through air defense, the Ukrainians have had over four years of experience with this and also using Patriot missiles against Russian missiles and drones, which have primarily been like the Shahid drones they've been dealing with

And the fact that the Ukrainians sent advisors to the Middle East to help out with air defense the problem was from what they saw this was openly reported the fact that the Ukrainians were shocked to see some militaries

in the region shooting over a dozen Patriot missiles against one Shahid drone. And there's

also plenty of videos that came out online in Israel of over a dozen interceptors being used

against one missile. And so this cat and mouse game of how many missiles to commit, what type of

layered air defense you have, not to mention your adversary has a bug in terms of how they

use a missile, adding decoys, multiple warheads, how they maneuver, if they're hypersonic or not

It really is becoming a compounding problem. And so, you know, I know, again, today's about the

Patriot missile, but it's also about what other types of air defenses you can, you can layer in

Now, the nice thing is, uh, I did hear that the, the latest announcement is the fact that

we're still making the PAC three MSEs, but now we're going to be making PAC three ACEs

which are about half the cost. Uh, so I think PAC three MSEs is about 4.2 million

whereas the new PAC three ACE is going to be closer to $2 million. That is a great

step in that direction, not to mention the fact that there's going to be over the coming

months and years contracts going out that allow these missiles to be made elsewhere in the world So again that diversifies like the supply chain the baking of these missiles but also ensures you don have a bunch of different bottlenecks in the production of these not

to mention you just, again, increase the number of subcomponent suppliers. You can actually make these in scale so that you can, you know, use these as fast as you

make them in war. And that's the most important aspect I think right now is being able to produce munitions as fast as you use them in war

And at least that's my big takeaway for this panel, I think

I'm happy to jump in, but I'll use it. I'll go first. Okay, Jason Meredith and Jason Reynolds

Yeah, thank you, Hope. I think there's, you asked a number of questions in your one question there, so I'll try and hit a couple of them

But I think there's a couple of things. Number one, there is evidence that the U.S. government is looking at how they approach the processes of purchasing and qualifying and even how they source the missile systems that are out there today, partly to address some of the issues that Dr. Manasek addressed in his paper

of looking at longer term multi purchases You can see that in what been done with Lockheed and with other companies trying to provide additional stability for the companies to understand and forecast better

That helps from a staffing standpoint. It helps from a capitalization standpoint

not only for the OEMs, but as those OEMs flow down contracts to their suppliers, as I think

Jeff mentioned earlier, that's critical. And it's maybe even more critical the further you go down

in the tiers of the supply chain, where some of those suppliers may, you know, PAC-3 or other

missile systems may only be a small portion of their business, maybe even as low as 10 to 15%

And so having that understanding and being able to plan that into their factory forecasts

is very, very important. The other part of it that you see is that the government is recognizing

that having exquisite missile systems is not always the answer. And I think even what Lockheed is doing with looking at providing lower cost solutions

for PAC-3 as an indicator that industry is starting to respond to what the government

is saying, looking at what are innovative solutions to be able to provide maybe a capability

that doesn't have all of the, I'll call it bells and whistles for the time being, but

has capability to address the target sets that the military is dealing with

that those war fighters are seeing day to day in the field