The U.S. Department of Defense’s industrial base strategy aims to mitigate critical vulnerabilities in supply chains supporting military space operations. Supply constraints in the space sector struggle to keep up with the increasing demands of military satellite manufacturing. Reliance on single sources or “fragile” sources of supply of critical components is a significant weakness in the supply chain. The new National Defense Industrial Strategy Implementation Plan addresses this issue in its remediation strategy. Key measures include strengthening domestic manufacturing and leveraging the Defense Production Act to fortify supply chain resilience for national defense. The Pentagon is weary of supply risks as the Space Development Agency begins to develop and deploy a military LEO satellite constellation. The increasing demand on the sector is straining suppliers who face limited development capacity. The Office of Strategic Capital has begun offering loans to companies that aim to develop critical space technologies as a method of improving supply chain resilience and removing the risk of single and fragile sources. This plan will ideally boost both the commercial space economy and national security by encouraging more partners to invest in critical space technology.

The space sector is a highly specialized industry where manufactured goods are expensive and challenging to produce. Supply chains involving space and defense sectors often depend on series of contractors and subcontractors to allocate and acquire critical components needed in space systems. Given the sensitive and often bespoke nature of this supply chain, the risk of single sources of supply is significant. Compromising even a single supplier can result in cost and schedule overruns and even mission failure. It is possible for adversaries to target suppliers by interrupting production or even compromising the manufactured goods such that they directly harm the supplier’s customer, such as by introducing counterfeit components that threaten a mission or, if part of a digital system, potentially manipulate or exfiltrate data. By encouraging additional organizations to become involved in the supply chain, the DoD is reducing the risk of single and fragile sources simply by making them no longer be single sources. At the same time, they are also transferring the risk between suppliers, such that no one supplier will, ideally, be a particularly attractive target, while reducing risk to themselves by improving the risk of their supply chain.

Erwin, Sandra. “DOD Industrial Base Plan Targets Weak Links in Supply Chains.” SpaceNews, 29 Oct. 2024, https://spacenews.com/dod-industrial-base-plan-targets-weak-links-in-supply-chains/.