Interview transcript
Terry Gerton Mr. Buzzett, let me start with you. Tell us a little bit about the National Armaments Consortium. What is it, how does it work with the Department of Defense?
Joe Buzzett Yeah, so the National Armaments Consortium is a group of engineers, designers, scientists and manufacturers from across the defense industry, really focused on the armaments part of the portfolio. We’re one of the oldest, I think the oldest [Other Transaction Authority (OTA)]. We were started in the early 2000s. We came out of what was called the [Warheads and Energetics Technology Center (WETC)]. It was really focused originally out of Picatinny Arsenal on warheads and energetics. And since that time, it’s really grown over the last 25 years to include now missile systems, broader energetics, rocket motors — across the whole industry. But we’re really the nation’s armaments consortium. We’re a CMF-based consortium, OTA, and we really have a broad range of large and small businesses.
Terry Gerton And one of the things that you all do is help DoD stay current with technology and innovation, right?
Joe Buzzett That’s exactly right. That’s exact right. And you know, over 75% of our members are small, non-traditional businesses. Of course we have a large traditional business, the Raytheons and General Dynamics and Lockheed Martins, but what really gives us the innovation is being able to have that collaboration that we bring through our consortium where we can get a lot of the startups, a lot of the non-traditional businesses and get that developed into the warfighter in a very quick manner.
Terry Gerton And Mr. Harris, Mr. Buzzett has just talked about the range of companies in the NAC, but you also have 1,100 … Member organizations. With that broad of a scope, could you give us your assessment of the defense industrial base, especially from the armaments perspective? How are we doing there?
Ben Harris We’re doing better than we were 10 years ago, but we have still a long way to go. Right before I retired from the army, we were working on a 15-year modernization plan just for the ammunition industrial base. So we started that in 2016 and we finally have support from throughout the department and Congress. And you see that pendulum now shifting everywhere because it’s not just building ammunition. You also have to be able to have all the depots to do the ship overhauls and repairs. You need the depots to rebuild your helicopters and paladins, so there’s a huge investment that this country is gonna have to make to really reset that industrial base.
Terry Gerton Well, certainly at current events, the war in Ukraine has shed a lot of light on the ammunition industrial base. How has that changed the focus or maybe increased the urgency of these modernization plans?
Ben Harris Well, the focus always seems to focus to ammunition when there’s at least more than one conflict happening, because we typically cut back on ammunition. And there’s a reason for that. If you order too much ammunition, 40 years later you’re going to have a huge demilitarization problem where you’re gonna have to pay to destroy it. So there’s delicate balance there. The good news is the weapons systems that this country has innovated on are proving to be very successful overseas. There are a lot of foreign customers now that are all looking to buy U.S. Weapons systems. So that’ll be good for the industrial base. So if the U. S. Has to cut back on its purchases, there should be foreign orders that can come in and keep the capacity running so that those plants are operational and able to surge.
Terry Gerton Mr. Buzzett, did you want to add on to that?
Joe Buzzett Yeah, I also wanted to add the aspect that, you know, we’ve been working on next generation capabilities specifically for the Pacific. So, you now, one of the highlights of the programs that we did was the Prism missile, you know a missile that goes out 500 plus kilometers that was started in 2018 under the OTA and has just been fielded. So there’s a lot of things, innovative things that we’ve been able to do through the use of OTAs and through the flexible contracting that we get with OTA’s to do things quick, get them out to the field, and get them tested and fielded.
Terry Gerton Mr. Harris?
Ben Harris I’ll just add that two other OTAs that went through the NAC [were] the new hypersonic weapon system, Dark Eagle, and the new radar upgrades for the Patriots, the LTAMs. Those both were OTA’s through the NAC.
Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Ben Harris. He’s the executive director of the National Armaments Consortium. Joe Buzzett is NAC’s executive committee chair. Mr. Harris, let me come back to you. You mentioned foreign demand for US armaments, as well as domestic. Talk to us about the biggest challenges that the industry is facing in terms of capacity, technology, innovation, supply chain.
Ben Harris Well, it’s time and money, first off. You know, they want it now. Factories don’t build themselves overnight. Everybody knows that. But … I see significant funding being added to increase that since 2022. There was a lot of congressional supplemental dollars that were added to expand our capacity. And now that we also see — we support the Navy at Indian Head. They actually now have funding where we see the beginnings of a rebuilding of the Indian Head facility there.
Terry Gerton So Mr. Buzett, let me come to you. You’ve just added five new industry veterans to your executive committee. Tell us about how their experience, their companies are going to shape NAC’s direction and really build better collaboration.
Joe Buzzett Sure. So our executive committee is made up of six large businesses and six smaller non-traditional businesses. And plus we have one university — Penn State University is representative. So we use this diversity to manage the board. We are all volunteers. We all have day jobs that are in this business, so we’re all very committed to this OTA model, to providing capability to the warfighter. So our new members are from Raytheon, Dan Zimmerman and Applied Research on the large business side. And then E-optic, which is an optics business. We have PER, Precision Energetics Research, and McCormick Stevenson. So we really have a diversity of large and small businesses that help us guide the NAC. We have goals and we have Ben Harris, who is our our lone employee, and Ben executes our vision for us. So he’s very hands-on, very experienced, and we go through and our vision is, we want speed. We want speed for the warfighter, and I think it lines up very well with with some of the new policy changes that are going on in the administration.
Terry Gerton Mr. Harris, let me come back to you to talk about some of those new policy changes. The Trump administration is really emphasizing speed, flexibility, OTAs, as both of you have already talked about. How are these changes affecting NAC, its objectives, and its members’ ability to deliver?
Ben Harris It’s all positive. Ever since the executive order came out on 9 April, we’ve really been able to share with everyone, hey, we’re here. We’ve always been here. And so what it’s enabled us to do is to focus on the time to award. We had kind of drifted away from being able to get OTAs awarded quickly. But now with all of the administration’s focus on trying to do as much as they can in the development sphere through OTAs … We’re able to now message, hey, let’s start focusing on not just where the dollars go, but how fast are those dollars are getting on contract, which is really what our members have been pushing for.
Terry Gerton And how are your members assessing their own capacity to respond to that faster delivery objective?
Ben Harris There’s no pushback from our members. We typically — we’re really looking forward to the Army’s announcement [about] the transformation that they’re doing. And then the memo that just came out this week from the Secretary on the transformation all focusing on speed. We’re still going to focus obviously on cost and performance, but this new emphasis of speed is what we need. It’s difficult for small businesses to write white papers one year, and it takes over a year to get it on contract. You’re counting on cash coming in and you spent dollars to actually write these white papers. So this is all going to be good news for our members.
Terry Gerton So, Mr. Buzzett, let me come back to you to kind of wrap this up. As you look to the future, 2026 and beyond, what are NAC’s critical priorities?
Joe Buzzett So as Ben mentioned, it’s doing things fast. It’s being able to answer to the department’s needs. Some of the needs that we’re really focusing on are counter-UAS. We see the proliferation of all these drones and how do you counter them. We’ve got active programs on proximity munitions and other ways to defeat these UASs. And then on the offensive side, the UAS weaponization piece. So as the army decides and the department decides how they were going to fight with drones as they watch what’s going on in Ukraine and how we use that as a force multiplier. So, you know, right now this isn’t our first rodeo, as they say. We have 550 active projects. We’ve been doing this a long time. We measure, every month how we’re doing on, from the time the Army or the [Department of] war says we want something to when we can get it under contract. That’s piece one. Piece two is actually delivering that prototype, and getting it to the hands of the warfighter quickly.
Terry Gerton Mr. Harris?
Ben Harris And I’ll just say we also continue to try to recruit new members to help expand the defense industrial base. So that is another one of our focuses going forward. So the more members we have, the better the competition is. And all our members are U.S. Based.
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