This piece is part of Behind the Front, an FPRI project on the future of US and allied national defense. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own. 

A minor power outage in San Francisco offered a quiet preview of a strategic vulnerability hiding in plain sight. As traffic signals went dark, dozens of autonomous Waymo vehicles stalled, unable to read the roadway. With hazard lights blinking, they gridlocked intersections and slowed large parts of the city to a crawl until tow trucks arrived.

That episode is a stark warning for military logistics. The same cascading failure that paralyzed civilian mobility could halt the movement of forces from fort to port. Friction emerges not from a single event, but from interdependent systems degrading in unison. Yet, American policymakers assume the industrial base is resilient, when it is actually brittle, optimized for just-in-time supply chains and just-enough capacity. When shocks hit (e.g., pandemics, wars, political instability, cyber incidents, or weaponized supply chains), Washington responds with emergency authorities and surge funding, confusing endurance with readiness. A system that merely limps through disruption is optimized for continuity, not crisis.

Over the past decade, resilience has meant restoring services after a shock. While this approach may prevent catastrophe, it does not prepare a country to compete, deter, or fight. The US economy has been engineered for peacetime efficiency and consumption, not sustained production under pressure.

Recent crises make this gap impossible to ignore. The war in Ukraine exposed how rapidly munitions deplete and how slowly industry regenerates. Pandemic-era shortages of everything from medical supplies to semiconductors exposed fragile dependencies across sectors. Digital infrastructure is just as vulnerable, as disruptions to cloud services can cascade into breakdowns of logistics and military command and control. The problem is not a lack of innovation or capital; it is the decay of the industrial ecosystem, which is responsible for translating economic strength into strategic power. Until that changes, American resilience will remain conceptual, not operational; credible on paper, but brittle under pressure.

Resilience Without Industry Is Just Endurance

In many Washington and Pentagon circles, “resilience” has become a comforting abstraction. Slap some “resilience” initiatives on a PowerPoint or tout it in a speech, and the resilience fairies will solve it. Resilience also appears in national strategy documents, appropriations bills, and executive orders as a catch-all solution to uncertainty. Infrastructure must be resilient. Infrastructure must be resilient. But when applied so broadly to infrastructure, supply chains, and the economy, the concept becomes diffuse and unaccountable. This rhetorical sleight of hand results in a policy focused on managing disruption rather than building the capacity to surge and scale.

Most resilience initiatives rightly prioritize continuity to prevent systemic collapse after a shock. Such efforts do matter because emergency authorities, continuity planning, and redundancy can buy time when systems are stressed. But while America can endure disruption, it has minimal capacity to regenerate what was lost. Endurance is not resilience.

Strategic resilience is more than just systems staying online; it also means how quickly they regenerate capability at scale. Regeneration speed (not uptime) is the key variable determining deterrence, endurance, and wartime effectiveness. Systems designed only for functionality may seem stable in peacetime, yet they fail decisively once losses outpace replacement. This flaw is clear in how the United States treats industrial capacity, assuming production will materialize on demand. But this market-driven assumption breaks down under stress, when supply chains seize and specialized inputs cannot be sourced.

The same problem appears across critical infrastructure. A Department of Energy report warns that “blackouts could increase 100 times in 2030” due to unreliable power sources. Systems lacking modularity and surge capacity perform reliably in peacetime, only to prove brittle under stress. The resilience debate must therefore shift from keeping systems operating to ensuring they can regenerate and scale. Without industrial depth, resilience is nothing more than a defensive posture; useful for avoiding collapse, but insufficient for competition or conflict.

The Defense-Industrial Disconnect

The costs of this resilience gap are no longer theoretical. They are visible in the disconnect between US defense planning and the industrial capacity to sustain it. American strategy assumes access to advanced systems and ample munitions, but those assumptions crumble against an industrial base built on lean inventories, globalized inputs, and minimal surge capacity.

The war in Ukraine made this mismatch obvious. Allied artillery supply fell short not from a lack of political willpower or money, but because industrial systems optimized for peacetime proved incapable of scaling at wartime speed. Even with funding, expanding US artillery production has taken years, constrained by shortages of energetic materials, equipment, and trained labor. The binding constraint was time, not money.

This exposes a deeper planning failure. Defense strategy implicitly treats industrial capacity as elastic, something to be summoned with increased demand. In reality, capacity is path-dependent, built over decades of investment in workforces, supplier networks, and tooling. When these foundations are whittled, surge capacity becomes an aspiration, not a capability.

Modern defense systems rely on specialized components from narrow, often overseas, supplier bases. This concentrates risk deep in the supply chain, far below the prime contractors visible to Pentagon oversight. A Government Accountability Office report noted the Department of Defense has limited visibility into these lower-tier suppliers, where single points of failure hide.

Treating these supply chains as market artifacts (not strategic infrastructure) has predictable results: Vulnerabilities are found only after disruption, and recovery takes years. This creates a dangerous asymmetry. The United States has exquisite military capabilities but lacks the industrial depth to regenerate them in a prolonged conflict, turning a technical edge into a strategic liability.

How Efficiency Ate Resilience

During the post-Cold War era, the US industrial system was optimized for peacetime efficiency, not great-power competition. As geopolitical risk receded, economic policy rewarded globalization and cost minimization. The resulting industrial base was not dismantled by neglect; its efficient design was a natural peace dividend.

Over time, efficiency became synonymous with strength. “Just in time” replaced “just in case,” while redundancy and domestic overcapacity (once a strategic hedge), were treated as waste. These choices generated economic gains by externalizing risk. Markets performed as intended, allocating capital for cost and speed, not strategic sufficiency. Because supply chains were optimized for price, resilience became someone else’s future problem, and the slack required for surging was eliminated.

Washington’s policy responses reflect this misalignment. When fragility is exposed, the instinct is to compensate with stockpiles, emergency authorities, and targeted subsidies. These actions may blunt immediate shocks, but they cannot rebuild regenerative capacity. Stockpiles are static and subsidies episodic—neither creates an industrial system designed to surge.

A deeper erosion occurred in the economy’s least visible layers. For decades, industrial capacity thinned not just at the prime-contractor level, but in the “boring” foundations of production: machine tooling, foundries, and skilled trades. Such losses are difficult to reverse, reflecting cumulative decisions about workforce pipelines, supplier locales, and capital investment. In offshoring factories, the United States also offshored the very industrial ecosystem that enables production to surge and adapt. Emergency measures became a substitute for industrial design, leaving resilience a mere slogan.

The Missing Middle: Ecosystems, Not Stockpiles

Resilience policy fails when it treats the economy, infrastructure, and defense production as separate domains. The missing link is the industrial ecosystem: A web of suppliers, logistics, and labor that determines if production can surge under stress. This is where resilience and readiness converge. The ability to replace a transformer or scale munitions output depends less on emergency authorities, and more on mobilizing materials and skilled labor at the speed of relevance. Without this industrial ecosystem focus, resilience remains conceptual and readiness aspirational.

The Department of Defense also has a “missing middle” —only 6 percent of suppliers have complete visibility over their own supply chains. These opaque, lower-tier suppliers provide the materials and components essential for production. When these hidden nodes fail, production basically stops abruptly.

Such opacity creates a false sense of security. Resilience measured at the prime-contractor level masks the brittleness of the underlying ecosystem where disruption actually originates. The Waymo outage illustrates this logic of cascading failure in miniature. A simple power outage disrupted the vehicles’ sensors; this sensing disruption stalled their autonomous decision-making, translating digital caution into physical immobility. Crucially, no single component failed catastrophically. Instead, the whole system simply ceased to function. Scaled to the national level, a similar cascading failure would obstruct force flow, military mobilization and cripple US power projection in a crisis.

Achieving ecosystem resilience requires a new analytical posture. Planners must ask not if individual firms can survive, but if the system can regenerate capability faster than it degrades. This demands forward-looking industrial intelligence to map dependencies and identify chokepoints before they fail. Without this shift, resilience efforts remain purely rhetorical.

A Strategy That Produces: Forging Industrial Resilience

Treating supply chains as critical infrastructure is a necessary first step, but recognition alone produces no strategic effect. Governance reforms and mapping exercises are insufficient if resilience remains a matter of oversight, not productive capacity. Resilience that cannot generate output under pressure does not deter; it merely absorbs.

A durable US resilience strategy therefore requires alignment across three domains that remain institutionally and conceptually fragmented: national security planning, industrial policy, and infrastructure governance. Absent that alignment, the United States will continue to manage risk episodically rather than shape capability deliberately.

First, defense-relevant industrial capacity must be treated as strategic infrastructure, not as a peripheral economic concern. This does not imply nationalization or permanent subsidies. It requires identifying and prioritizing bottlenecks the way the federal government already does for ports, rail corridors, pipelines, and air traffic control. What matters most is assured access and scalability.

Second, resilience must be measured by surge capacity and regeneration time, not just continuity. Time, not funding, is the binding constraint. If it takes years to replace systems or rebuild critical components, then strategic resilience is a fiction, even if basic services remain online. For instance, much of the modern American economy and military is increasingly dependent on the physical infrastructure that underpins digital infrastructure (i.e., data servers), and yet the process of actually building a server farm can take three to six years due to the high demands for minerals, electricity, and specialized metals and chips.

Third, visibility must extend below prime contractors to the weakest links in the supply chain. Insights from supply chain risk analyses show that the system is only as resilient as its weakest supplier. Reverse engineering supply chains without holistic, real-time data does not solve this. There needs to be forward-looking industrial intelligence that identifies chokepoints before they fail. Techniques like reverse stress testing could be helpful in moving defense-industrial base solutions left-of-boom. What is required instead is forward-looking industrial intelligence that identifies chokepoints before disruption occurs.

Finally, stop pretending that emergency tools like the Defense Production Act are substitutes for industrial design. These can accelerate output at the margins, but they cannot conjure missing capacity, skilled labor, or supplier density on demand. Surge mechanisms work only when something exists to surge. Without a deliberately structured ecosystem beneath them, emergency powers become reactive stopgaps rather than strategic instruments.

The United States does not lack plans or ingenuity; it lacks production systems designed for sustained competition under stress. Until resilience policy is anchored in industrial ecosystems that can regenerate capability at scale and speed, Washington will continue to confuse continuity with readiness, improvisation with resilience, and emergency response with strategic power.

Image credit: Adobe Stock/FPRI