MITRE convened government, industry, and research leaders at "Beyond Barriers: Acquisition on a War Footing" in April 2026 to translate the Department of War's Acquisition Transformation Strategy's strategic direction into specific, actionable recommendations. This paper synthesizes the findings from that forum and an embedded workshop focused on improving how Allies and Partners collectively aggregate demand and link global supply chains.
International Cooperation to Expand the Industrial Base and Enable Burden Sharing
This paper argues that the United States must treat allies and partners as integral co‑investors, co‑producers, and co‑sustainers in the defense industrial base, and offers a concrete blueprint to do so. It synthesizes findings from MITRE’s April 2026 “Beyond Barriers: Acquisition on a War Footing” forum and an embedded workshop on aggregating allied demand and linking global supply chains for Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) and Counter‑Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C‑UAS) systems.
The authors frame IAMD and C‑UAS as the critical near‑term test case for allied industrial integration, highlighting fragmented multinational demand, extreme sub‑tier concentration in solid rocket motors and energetics, regulatory friction in International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), FMS, and MTCR regimes, and adversarial supply‑chain dependencies—especially on the People’s Republic of China for critical minerals and drone components.
In response, the paper organizes 27 recommendations under four lines of effort:
- Aggregate allied demand, coordinate multilateral procurement, and stand up the proposed Coordinated Orders and Munitions Partner Allied Capacity Taskforce (COMPACT).
- Strengthen industrial base capacity and supply‑chain resilience through multi‑nation warm‑base surge contracts, shared investment in critical minerals processing, and second‑source qualification.
- Optimize production, sustainment, intellectual property arrangements, and interoperability via government‑owned data rights, Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) standards, and wider proliferation of Integrated Battle Command System‑like open C2 architectures.
- Shift DSCA and Foreign Military Sales from a peacetime capacity‑building posture to a wartime sustainment footing supported by modernized, AI‑enabled IT systems and friction‑point monitoring.
Drawing on proven precedents such as SM‑3 Block IIA co‑production, the NATO Sea Sparrow Program Office, AUKUS Pillar II, and Ukraine’s mass C‑UAS production, the paper concludes that the binding constraints on allied industrial integration are institutional rather than technical, legal, or fiscal. It contends that implementing COMPACT, demand‑signal protocols, warm‑base contracts, MOSA standards, and reformed FMS processes—using authorities and mechanisms that already exist—can unlock scale, resilience, and burden sharing across U.S. and allied arsenals at lower cost and higher readiness.