How the West Should Rearm

The coming defense buildup should prepare us for future conflicts, not past ones.

Courtesy Omar Havana/Getty Images

The United States is boosting defense spending. So are its allies. At a recent Manhattan Institute breakfast, Christian Brose, president of the military-technology company Anduril Industries, discussed how the future of modern warfare might shape this new spending. His remarks point to a set of questions that policymakers in Washington and allied capitals should be asking with greater urgency. As governments embark on the most significant defense buildup in decades, will they direct most of this new spending toward the systems and platforms that dominated past wars? Or will they invest in technologies likely to define future conflicts?

Under pressure from the Trump administration, NATO governments are raising military budgets to meet and eventually exceed the alliance’s benchmark of 5 percent of GDP. Canada, for instance, recently announced plans to expand defense spending by roughly 50 percent this year alone and nearly to double it over the next decade. These are major fiscal commitments. Their strategic value, however, will depend less on how much money is spent than on what that money buys.

For decades, Western militaries have relied on a procurement model built around a relatively small number of highly sophisticated platforms. These include aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, and other enormously capable but extraordinarily expensive systems. These platforms are technological marvels, but they are also products of a defense-acquisition system defined by long timelines, escalating costs, and limited production runs. Major programs often take years, if not decades, to design, test, and deploy.

That model increasingly appears out of step with the technological realities of modern warfare.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that relatively cheap drones, autonomous systems, and software-enabled weapons can deliver outsized battlefield effects. Ukraine used these technologies to offset Russia’s overwhelming advantages in manpower and conventional military assets. Russia, in turn, has rapidly adapted and expanded its own drone and electronic-warfare capabilities.

Aircraft carriers and advanced fighter aircraft still matter. But military advantage increasingly depends on the ability to produce large numbers of intelligent, adaptable, and relatively low-cost systems. Brose and others describe this shift as a move from “exquisite” platforms to “affordable mass” or “intelligent mass.” The challenge is that the technologies transforming warfare are emerging faster than the institutions responsible for acquiring them.

The economics of these two models are fundamentally different. Traditional defense procurement resembles artisanal manufacturing: small production runs, bespoke engineering, and high unit costs. Emerging defense technologies look more like modern software and advanced manufacturing, where rapid iteration, scale, and declining marginal costs are central to competitiveness.

Yet the Pentagon’s budgeting and procurement institutions remain heavily tilted toward the old model. The overwhelming majority of defense spending continues to flow to large, established programs and incumbent suppliers.

Washington’s dysfunctional budget process reinforces this tendency. The reliance on continuing resolutions favors existing contracts and makes it harder to launch new initiatives or scale emerging technologies. The result is a system that tends to fund what already exists rather than what may be needed next.

The challenge isn’t limited to the United States. As countries like Canada undertake significant new defense investments, the risk is that incremental resources reinforce legacy procurement patterns rather than accelerate the adoption of the technologies most likely to shape future conflicts.

Budgeting is policy. The procurement decisions governments make today will shape the military capabilities available to them for years, or even decades, to come. If those decisions fail to reflect the changing technological frontier, they will not only misallocate scarce resources but will also constrain future policy choices that leave the United States and its allies at a strategic disadvantage.

Governments are understandably wary of making large technological bets. In most policy areas, getting such bets wrong leads to waste and distortion. In defense, the stakes are considerably higher. If the United States and its allies spend hundreds of billions of dollars reinforcing outdated assumptions about how wars are fought, they may discover that they’ve invested heavily in weapons designed for yesterday’s wars.