Global demand for arms in an increasingly fractious world and an alarmingly depleted U.S. stockpile of long-range weapons are driving a dramatic surge in the American defense industry’s production of rockets and missiles.
Key manufacturers are pushing millions into new and revamped production lines to speed the resupply of a U.S. arsenal that has run low after major transfers to Israel, Ukraine and other global hotspots.
The ramped-up production in the U.S. comes as the Pentagon and Congress push companies to deliver finished products as soon as possible — even if that means building without final, signed government contracts.
Output capacity of the rocket supply chain is on track in 2026 to be nearly six times current production numbers for large solid rocket motors and at least triple for smaller tactical solid rocket motors.
Manufacturers like L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and others are making a combined investment of over $700 million into solid rocket motors.
“There have been a number of munitions utilized and therefore are needing to be replaced either for our allies or for our country as well,” said Ken Bedingfield, the chief financial officer at L3Harris Technologies, one of the defense firms making sizable investments at the center of the solid rocket motor production race.
“There is a demand signal that’s going to be enduring for some time to ensure that our country and our allies have sufficient stockpiles in order to project power and to help keep peace around the globe,” Mr. Bedingfield said in an exclusive interview during a recent visit by a Washington Times reporter to a newly-opened L3Harris advanced munitions plant in Arkansas.
Long-range targeting, especially in the age of autonomous drone warfare, has become a critical tool on the battlefield. Thousands of rockets have been used in Ukraine, both for attacking Russian forces and for intercepting missiles, glide bombs and drones.
The U.S. inventory, which has been tapped to support Ukraine’s war effort, has also been used to protect American service members and civilian craft in the Red Sea in recent years.
The result has been a backlog of orders that, coupled with the sudden need to restock the Israeli arsenal, has drastically increased demand for replenishment of U.S. stocks.
It’s a situation that has “pushed munitions production to the top of the priority list in the Department of Defense,” according to Wes Rumbaugh, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who focuses on missile defense.
Mr. Rumbaugh added that the prevalence of conflicts has “jump-started a lot of demand.”
Studies conducted by Congress, CSIS, students at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and several defense companies all point to what one industry source told The Washington Times: “The U.S. doesn’t have enough arrows in its quiver.”
The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the American defense industrial base has awakened to the reality that production was sorely lacking because the country has been “riding the peace dividend of the past 30 years.”
Traditionally, U.S. demand for missiles and solid-rocket motors, or SRMs, is cyclical. As conflicts arise and inventory is expended, the demand signal grows.
In peacetime, the signal drops, as arsenal inventory is stored away in munitions bunkers and launch sites.
“You’ll be in a conflict, you’ll chew through munitions, there’s a big demand,” Mr. Rumbaugh said. “But anytime there’s lean defense times, like the defense budget flattens out, or there are just other priorities, these munitions can hit various troughs. It all flows downhill from there.”
The NASA Space Shuttle program, which relied on solid-rocket fuel, historically kept the industry afloat.
But when the program, which used two large, reusable solid-fuel rockets, was shut down in 2011, it had a detrimental impact.
There have been very few commercial uses for solid rocket propellant during the years since, and many propellant manufacturers atrophied after the program was shuttered. It’s a factor that has contributed to the development of a deep and extensive supply chain problem.
However, investment is growing.
This summer, American Pacific Corporation — a critical material supplier for propellant — invested $100 million in its Cedar City, Utah, facility, saying the investment will increase capacity by 50% at the facility.
In August, Anduril invested $75 million in a new operational SRM manufacturing facility in McHenry, Mississippi. They intend to grow that facility to an annual production of 6,000 tactical-level SRMs by the end of 2026.
L3Harris, meanwhile, has invested more than $500 million across its facilities, the majority going into the ongoing construction of an advanced process and tech facility in Camden, Arkansas.
“There is a demand signal that’s going to be enduring for quite some time,” said Mr. Bedingfield, who has worked at L3Harris across their acquisition of the Camden facility. “We do see that there’s going to be a steady production for some time to come.”
Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and L3Harris are all participating in the heavy production line investment.
L3Harris supplies three military services with missile arsenals, as well as the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
The company also said that it is backfilling SRM inventory to replenish the more than 400 rounds of intercept missiles used in Israel over the past two years.
“We’re trying to focus on [building] an ecosystem that says, ‘We’ll keep the supplier hot, based on the demand that we know, we’ll take some risk, we’ll lean forward,’” Mr. Bedingfield said.
Those risks are no longer being calculated solely by the Department of Defense or driven by contract demands alone. In an attempt to stabilize the market and take advantage of a less-restrictive international sales environment, major manufacturers are doing more in-house analysis of conflicts around the world, watching and predicting what the expenditure of the ammunition they produce might be.
At the same time, the Pentagon’s shift toward more connected products and use of artificial intelligence to do predictive modeling for supply and logistics is also shifting the demand forward in the timeline.
The ebb and flow will be a challenge to the new procurement structure that the Pentagon is pushing.
L3Harris generates the majority of its revenue through a traditional contract method.
The remainder, slightly more than 20%, is starting to follow the process that both the Pentagon and now Congress are interested in seeing: delivering a finished product based on defense needs rather than waiting for a contract.
“The question is will the Department of Defense be able to send a long-term demand signal and marshal the resources to keep all those businesses afloat?” said Mr. Rumbaugh.
It won’t just be larger companies that feel that burden. Suppliers will as well.
“The problem is when you get to those lower levels, the production base atrophies a little bit. Then you start using them and you need to ramp that up really, really, quickly to replace all the munitions that you just fired,” Mr. Rumbaugh said.
Reports on key systems used in Ukraine, Israel and staged for the defense of Taiwan show backorders and critical shortages.
The widely used U.S. Patriot Missile Defense System and Javelin missile systems, as well as Israel’s Iron Dome Missile Defense System, have all been impacted.
“You’ve seen a lot of energy and momentum behind industrial base concerns, both at the end of the last Biden administration and now with this new one,” Mr. Rumbaugh said. “It’s certainly been a focus area of this administration and this Department of Defense, but you’re going to have to pay for resiliency.”
L3Harris is taking a more aggressive business stance, according to Mr. Bedingfield and others, taking on more of what he described as a “commercial model” to invest in not only their own facilities and manufacturing, but also those of their suppliers as well.
“We’re trying to lean forward a bit to have an ecosystem that produces this product faster,” said Mr. Bedingfield, who is in charge of many of those risk calculations for L3Harris.
Currently, the U.S. has half of the SRM producers it did at the height of the Cold War. Those three producers have all invested heavily in the suppliers below them.
L3Harris produces what’s known as the “primary cell” motor for most of the tactical weapons, missile defense systems, strategic deterrence and even hypersonic missiles used by the U.S.
Companies across the defense industry are trying to add resilience for supplies at the very tail end of the production process. That includes taking commercial companies that are able to supply more of the raw materials and pushing them through the qualification program helmed by the Defense Logistics Agency, a longer and slower process that many companies fall out of as demand falters.
“We know that these products are going to be needed by the U.S. government or our allies,” Mr. Bedingfield said. “But we want to make sure we build the right ones at the right times so that we get them in their hands.”
