US allies must band together in weapons development

Let’s assume, as prudence demands we assume, that the United States will not at any predictable time go back to being its old, reliable self. This means its allies must be prepared indefinitely to lean on it far less than they have.

They will have to lean on each other, and one of the most difficult areas for doing that will be weapons acquisitions, where the US has long been the main supplier of systems that use the most difficult technology.

An unwritten clause in the US’s alliances has been that Washington’s big spending included the development and mass procurement of big-ticket defence items that could then be exported, so foreign defence budgets helped employ US workers. Indeed, in many market segments, including combat aircraft, the most lucrative segment of all, the past 70 years has been a story of allies trying to resist the formation of a US monopoly.

Reversing that course may be hard, but it won’t be impossible. The democracies of Europe, North America and the Pacific together have money, national resources and human capital. They have competitive defence industries, and in some sectors (such as surface warships combatants and land vehicles) they clearly outperform the US.

The problem is not resources but making the best use of them. There was no need for the US to exercise divide-and-rule in the times before Donald Trump’s second presidency: US allies divided themselves. They still do, as Franco-German squabbles over the share of work and the technical leadership in their Future Combat Air System program show.

That’s not sustainable: military development and production in a world without a reliable US cannot be a pot-luck meal where everyone turns up with a casserole, two hot dogs, a brownie and a shrimp. Specialisation will be needed, and each country, while attending to its own specialties, will have to rely on those of others.

The leaders in a non-US world: British aircraft engines, largely French space launch, Franco-German and British-Italian rotorcraft, German and Finnish armoured vehicles, Swedish airborne early warning and electronic warfare, South Korean and Japanese warships.

Stop screaming in the back, please. I’m not advocating for a global defence acquisition agency, the sort of thing that Europeans see as another vast jobs program and trebles-all-round for the Belgian economy. What is needed is a set of rules and protocols that enable development of a new tech-defence web.

There are several factors, within defence and peripheral to it, that should make it possible to expand international cooperation by incentive instead of bureaucratic fiat.

Urgency is the biggest of those factors. Once it was clear that World War II was a serious issue, Britain’s aircraft industry—fragmented, conniving and thinking of itself as aristocratic—was willing to be run by the right-wing Canadian upstart Lord Beaverbrook and the far-left Stafford Cripps.

Next, change is easier in a growing business, and there is a lot of growth to be had if the US’s export customers take their business to each other.

There are many unknowns in defence technology, but there is broad agreement that cheap autonomy and affordable zero-miss-distance guidance, based on commercial hardware, will be important for a wide range of weapons. These run from battlefield drones to smallish cruise missiles that weigh under a ton and cost much less than today’s $1 million plus. Warships are changing radically to become crewless or have crew numbers in double, not triple, digits. A newly expanded defence industry can focus on such new concepts.

The same goes for manufacturing industry. Materials and processes designed for automation, repetition and high quality are very applicable to unmanned systems and advanced munitions because production lines can be set up with minimal staff and surged to high rate in a crisis. Anduril is developing this in the US, but the technology to do it is commercial and available elsewhere.

One overlooked aspect of the Global Combat Air Program (GCAP) is its achievement bringing Japan into cooperation with Britain and Italy. A generation ago, it was enough of a challenge to design the Eurofighter Typhoon in four European countries with languages that were at least related and used a common alphabet. Yet, GCAP appears to have incorporated Japan with little drama. Auto-translate exists today, as does video conferencing, and engineers across the world can work together on the same digital mockup.

Another connected link is emerging between Italy and Turkey, the latter emerging as a hub for unmanned systems. Italy’s Leonardo and Turkey’s Baykar announced a joint venture in early March and talked about the latter’s Kizilelma unmanned combat aircraft as a potential element of GCAP. That came a few months after Baykar agreed to acquire the Italian company Piaggio Aerospace, which had been on the market since 2018: Piaggio’s Avanti commercial aircraft has been a slow seller, but the maritime patrol variant, with Baykar’s mission systems, is an attractive option for coast guard users.

A US-free industry can, should and will avoid the US’s stifling bureaucracy, which includes an export-control system that can involve three government departments.

And could the new alliance gain from a brain drain, particularly to Canada but also to Australia and Britain as some in the US industry are repelled by the administration’s social policies? Acquiring talent from the US might not be too hard.

One good starting point would be to develop an open set of common governance principles for international programs, alongside a study of what the best potential pilot programs could be, and the potential for a multi-national accelerator for new technology.

Should we call it ‘Project Beaverbrook’?