Western defense companies need to have a rooting interest in the geopolitical competition between the U.S.-led democratic allies and authoritarian regimes, a top U.S. defense official warned.
“We want private-sector innovation to succeed; we need the private sector to feel the same way about democracy because neither can thrive unless the other survives, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told a defense industry conference on the sidelines of the NATO leaders summit in Washington, D.C. “And, we want both to continue to long endure.”
Russia’s launch of a full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022 spurred NATO allies to send a huge array of military equipment to the embattled Ukrainian forces, but the protracted struggle has exposed the inadequacies of defense companies that slashed production after the Cold War. And while many NATO governments have ramped up defense spending in recent years, the debate about whether and how to arm Ukraine has been marked by an undercurrent of doubt and frustration over the response of defense companies.
“We are standing at a moment where the industry needs to cooperate,” Radka Konderlova, who leads the Czech defense ministry’s industrial cooperation division, said during a panel discussion following Hicks’s appearance at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce event.
The interdependence of the allies and the companies was also a theme of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s appearance.
“We are totally dependent on you because you actually deliver and produce the capabilities we need — the weapons, ammunition, the systems we need — to have strong defense,” Stoltenberg said. “The good news is that you are also very dependent on us because we are your only customer. So the only way you get contracts and so on to buy your products is actually that governments decide to invest more in defense.”
Yet the process of turning defense spending into arms production has been hampered by uncertainty about which comes first.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg question, you know, do we need to show, first, the money and then the industry will ramp up, or [are] you waiting [until the] industry will ramp up and then you will show the money?” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur added during the discussion. “You need to have this long-term commitment, long-term contracts. … They need contracts. Without contracts, we will not get the production.”
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Hicks, for her part, concluded by reminding the industrial audience of President Harry Truman’s warning that allied democracies have “common traditions [and] face common problems” that they must address together.
“He said, ‘We must have a world in which we can exchange the products of our labor, not only among ourselves but with other nations,’” she recalled. “That is why NATO was born all those decades ago: to provide the security on which our shared peace and prosperity depend. And that is why NATO will continue to live on for many decades to come.”