National Security Professionals Stress Need to Boost Innovation, Adopt Mass-Producible Weapons

Anduril president Chris Brose has urged the adoption of a new acquisition channel geared toward lower-cost and mass-producible military systems.

A soldier carries a Ghost-X helicopter surveillance drone during the Combined Resolve 25-1 military exercises at the Hohenfels Training Area in Bavaria, near Hohenfels, Germany, on Feb. 3, 2025. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

ASPEN, Colo.—Drawing on lessons from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, national security professionals at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado are calling for the U.S. military and defense industry to embrace a more innovative model for adopting new weapons and technologies.

Joining a panel discussion at the forum on July 16, Chris Brose, president and chief strategy officer of Anduril—an arms manufacturer that specializes in autonomous systems—said the U.S. military and other allied nations should break their weapons acquisition strategies into two general acquisition channels: one for sophisticated and complex weapons systems like long-range bombers and nuclear submarines, and a second specifically for developing and mass producing low-cost systems.

Brose said his approach to military acquisition is not about declaring more sophisticated weapons systems like bombers and submarines obsolete, but about building up that second acquisition channel for mass-produced, low-cost weapons.

“We just need an entirely alternative pathway in the Pentagon, in allied defense industries, for how we bring very large quantities of lower-cost, more intelligent military systems to bear in our formations,” Brose said.

Joe Felter, the director of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University, said much of the technology the United States needs to remain competitive in an era of emerging conflict with peer-like competitors is being developed in the commercial sector.

“Now we have to identify, and adopt, and deploy those commercial technologies at speed and scale,” Felter said.

The widespread adoption and weaponization of drones has been one notable trend from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. At an April House Armed Services Committee hearing, U.S. European Command commanding Gen. Christopher Cavoli assessed that these highly expendable drones already account for “well over half” of the casualties in the conflict, and their share of the carnage continues to grow.

On June 1, Ukrainian forces launched a surprise drone attack targeting Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Ukrainian officials said the operation, which relied on dozens of relatively cheap, commercially available drones, destroyed or damaged 41 Russian strategic aircraft, inflicting about $7 billion in damage.

In 2015, the Pentagon launched an office called the Defense Innovation Unit to boost innovation throughout the Department of Defense, including through the adoption of existing commercial technologies.

Anduril has partnered closely with the Defense Innovation Unit in recent years. In November, Anduril announced it would work with the Defense Innovation Unit to develop software to coordinate the actions of potentially thousands of unmanned systems operating across the military.

Additionally, Anduril has partnered with the Defense Department’s Replicator program, which aims to produce an expendable drone swarm. Such a swarm could prove critical to the U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific region against China.

Brose said the Ukraine conflict has demonstrated the importance of being able to produce weapons on a large scale. Still, he said the Pentagon has a ways to go before it’s ready to truly work at the scale he believes is necessary.

“I think we’re off by an order of magnitude, the number of military systems that we need to build,” Brose said.

Felter said the United States still has significant advantages in its ability to innovate, but China is ahead in certain technology sectors and closing the gap in many others.

“So they’re not ahead but they’re closing, and we need to have this wake-up call,” Felter said.