The post–Cold War international order had been slowly withering for decades, but it reached an undeniable inflection point on June 1, 2025. On that pivotal day, Ukraine deployed less than a million dollars’ worth of hobby-shop technology to successfully destroy Russian strategic bombers worth billions. Russia’s exquisite air defenses and vast geographic depth made no tactical difference. The stark images of burning strategic bombers finally settled a long-standing debate among military strategists: drones are not a mere tactical aberration, but rather a tectonic shift in geopolitical power.
Codenamed Operation Spider’s Web, the Ukrainian strike codified the ruthless rules of a new era. It demonstrated that bespoke, boutique military platforms are essentially luxury items, whereas "mass"—defined as the ability to employ more weapons faster and for a longer, continuous duration—has become an absolute operational necessity.
This radical transformation necessitates continued and sweeping reform within the United States defense ecosystem. As defense analysts have frequently noted, the rapid technological advances of private commercial firms are vastly outpacing those made by traditional defense industries. Furthermore, artificial intelligence is aggressively accelerating innovation, while the wide diffusion of technology is dangerously blurring the operational capabilities of state and nonstate actors alike.
What has been less appreciated, however, is how this new era is fundamentally altering the traditional currencies of international statecraft. By transforming the application of violence and expanding warfare from limited conflicts into immediate existential risks, this technological inflection point requires a completely new way of thinking about, constructing, and maintaining international alliances.
Since the end of World War II, the greatest deterrence factor for the United States has been unified alliances whose combined military might remains preeminent. However, allied might is only ever as dominant as the sum of its individual parts. As both the war in Ukraine and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East have painfully demonstrated, many large militaries are fundamentally unprepared for an era defined by mass-produced precision strikes and autonomous interceptions. Traditional defense industries remain stubbornly structured around expensive, exquisite, and proprietary military platforms.
Ultimately, the strength of the United States depends on robust alliances backed by a shared defense industrial base capable of aggregating capabilities for a modern era of warfare. To achieve this, Washington must actively encourage a free-market, international defense ecosystem defined by open architecture and seamless industrial, software, and hardware compatibility. The greatest deterrent for the United States, the foundational bedrock of its diplomatic clout, and the primary factor in its ability to win on the modern battlefield in the coming century will be its collective allied industrial capacity and military interoperability. If the nation fails to secure such a strategy of compatibility, hostile state and nonstate actors will be meaningfully more likely to take escalatory actions.
The Swivel Slowdown
Conceptually, the idea of interoperability and collective defense innovation is well-trodden territory. Yet practically, it has never truly come to fruition at scale. The global defense architecture remains stubbornly oriented toward a Cold War–era industrial model. This legacy model generally involves United States defense contractors creating small batches of exquisite equipment operated via proprietary, siloed software. Allies purchase this equipment and attempt to combine it with their own national military offerings wherever possible. Historically, most defense companies were heavily incentivized to create defensive moats around their products once sold to prevent agile competition from replacing them.
All of this unfolded during a period of relative global peace, which meant that special interest decision-making models amplified the entrenchment of these legacy companies, creating a fragmented mosaic of incompatible military platforms and systems. Although the United States and its allies recognized that the digital revolution of the past twenty years would require greater technical compatibility, they deferred instead to the comforting momentum of their established acquisition processes, choosing to tinker merely on the margins rather than embark on fundamental change.
This institutional complacency directly led to the profound level of unpreparedness inherited by U.S. President Donald Trump. While the U.S.-led defense architecture had successfully deterred large-scale conflict for decades, the U.S. Army in 2025 looked shockingly similar to the army of 1975. Because the prevailing institutional incentive was to maintain the comfortable status quo rather than actively steer the future of warfare, the domestic defense industry devolved into a rigid oligopoly. A handful of primary contractors developed exquisite platforms equipped with built-in digital firewalls and produced them in custom-built factories.
Meanwhile, decades of compounding government statutes, bureaucratic policies, and poor acquisition incentives optimized heavily for geographic job distribution over battlefield efficacy. This ultimately encouraged contractors to manufacture platforms that were exceptionally expensive and painfully slow to replace—in other words, the exact antithesis of affordable mass. Excessive overregulation simultaneously paralyzed foreign military sales, while steep procedural and financial barriers to entry effectively locked out small and medium-sized innovative companies.
With these exact same market dynamics at play in allied nations, U.S. partners suffered from their own isolated domestic oligopolies. Consequently, the broader allied industrial base—and Washington’s fundamental ability to fight cohesively as a coalition—atrophied significantly.
This dynamic stands in stark contrast to private technology companies, which exist in a state of perpetual war for their own survival. Over the same timeframe, these commercial firms have driven humanity forward by racing relentlessly toward minimally viable products, tighter innovation cycles, and ever-evolving, improving offerings. Crucially, they pursue open data architectures to ensure their products consistently meet industry standards for exchanging data across the internet. After all, a smartphone that cannot exchange data is simply an expensive paperweight.
The stark divide between closed systems and open architectures is something witnessed firsthand at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany, where allied and Ukrainian forces tested advanced counterdrone capabilities in a simulated combat scenario. The allied soldiers performed admirably in a scenario that mimicked previous conflicts characterized by limited air threats, but their systems were fundamentally unequipped to handle the massive drone swarms typical of modern combat. As complex air threats were layered into the exercise, an allied air defender was forced to swivel frantically from one screen to the next, manually transferring data from one proprietary system to another. The entire kill chain—the critical sequence of steps between identifying a target and successfully destroying it—moved only as fast and accurately as the operator’s manual keystrokes.
By contrast, Ukrainian soldiers monitoring the same threats were able to activate offensive and defensive capabilities from a single system, on a single screen, using just a few keystrokes. Faced with the immediate, existential risk of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian forces eagerly embraced open-source data standards and AI-enabled kill chains. The result is seamless data transfer fused directly onto a single user interface.
When domestic defense industries create bespoke, proprietary software, the inevitable result is inconsistent technical specifications. Systems physically cannot share data across platforms, and each nation’s exquisite capabilities resemble a walled garden—impressive when viewed independently, but completely useless to anyone standing on the other side of the wall. This severely degrades combat effectiveness, given that modern command and control requires split-second detection and rapid engagement. Countering future threats is well beyond human cognitive capacity alone; only artificial intelligence can successfully manage the speed and sheer volume of modern battlefield data, making compatibility the absolute linchpin of contemporary military strategy.
Mastery Plus Mass
When evaluating force structure, military planners frequently debate whether the U.S. military should prioritize high-volume, low-cost equipment or exquisite, high-end programs. Unfortunately, the correct answer is both. The United States and its allies still require exquisite aircraft, nuclear submarines, fifth-generation stealth fighters, and other advanced capabilities. However, these assets must be optimized strictly for specific, high-risk use cases, because they remain far too expensive to risk and far too slow to replace in protracted conflicts.
For instance, the U.S. military operation conducted in Venezuela was stunningly complex and carried immense risk, an undertaking that could never have been accomplished using cheap, mass-produced capabilities alone. Washington will always require such specialized platforms, particularly at the outset of a limited conflict. Yet they inevitably become less useful the longer a conflict endures. Until one party’s will or ability to fight is utterly broken, sprawling battle lines are typically held through sheer mass. Bespoke capabilities simply cannot win a major, existential conflict. Mass and synchronized combat power remain the greatest deterrents, as an adversary is far less likely to initiate a war it believes it cannot sustain and win.
Despite this reality, the current defense architecture of the United States and its allies overemphasizes exquisite capabilities, while adversaries such as China and Russia possess vast industrial capacity to scale military production. Furthermore, these adversaries, alongside North Korea and Iran, place a fundamentally lower value on human life. In this new era of warfare, protracted conflicts directly play to their core strengths: they can readily sustain staggering losses in both lives and treasure that democratic governments simply cannot tolerate.
To avoid this fate and ensure structural readiness for full-spectrum warfare, the entire Western defense ecosystem must be reformed from the ground up. This ecosystem consists of three distinct layers: a physical layer of critical precursors and infrastructure, a digital layer that enables the free flow of data, and an innovation layer designed to meet the demands of future warfare.
Regarding the physical layer, the United States and its allies have allowed their foundational infrastructure to erode over decades. The U.S. Army alone has accumulated over $150 billion in unmet infrastructure needs, with many soldiers living and working using dated equipment housed in crumbling facilities. Simultaneously, the nation has offshored the critical raw materials necessary to build its most powerful systems, allowing manufacturing supply chains to wither. The U.S. military cannot close this capability gap quickly or efficiently on its own, largely because federal budget processes are designed to be slow, with congressionally authorized projects generally taking years just to break ground.
Instead, Western militaries must think creatively to tap into latent resources and commercial expertise in order to close infrastructure gaps. For example, under the leadership of President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Army shifted away from acting solely as a consumer of goods and began operating as a market incubator. By employing enhanced-use leases, the army is trading land access to private industry in exchange for vital infrastructure investments. Mineral processing companies are currently building refinement centers directly on U.S. military bases to secure critical minerals and reshore supply chains. Similarly, the U.S. Department of Energy is introducing microreactors onto army bases for resilient, off-grid power supply, while hyperscalers build on-base data centers with organic power generation to safeguard the computing power necessary for AI-enabled command control. Typically, private partners finance, build, and maintain these facilities at no upfront taxpayer cost, freeing the army to focus its resources on modernization.
Jailbreaking and Failing Fast
Western militaries must similarly adopt commercial iteration and speed in the digital and innovation spheres. Over the past five years, the U.S. Army spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to connect hundreds of disparate systems, but the effort largely failed due to contractual vendor limitations and the massive volume of human hours required to rewire decades of poor design. Consequently, the army began "jailbreaking" these systems, effectively freeing data that was previously held hostage within proprietary platforms.
This bold move allowed data to flow smoothly to any repository or system beneficial to operations. The army successfully connected hundreds of enterprise business systems, enabling its first comprehensive personnel audit in over 50 years and saving an estimated $2 billion annually in redundant roles. Furthermore, the army hosted a massive hackathon where software developers successfully unlocked data transfer between more than 200 pieces of proprietary warfighting equipment, integrating previously incompatible systems into a common operating picture in a matter of days.
If Western militaries can freely share data, they can overlay agentic AI models across the entire warfighting enterprise to automate complex budgeting processes and create digital twins of government-owned manufacturing arsenals, maintenance depots, and ammunition plants. For future procurement, every military must enforce open-source standards to ensure instant communication across digital networks.
Securing physical materials and open digital networks remains useless, however, if capabilities are fielded at the slow speed of traditional bureaucracy. While militaries will always require bespoke assets like tanks and helicopters that take years to field, they should primarily purchase commercially available technologies and services to field capabilities in weeks rather than years.
To bridge the traditional "valley of death" between prototyping and scaling, the U.S. Army established FUZE, a $750 million internal venture capital mechanism designed to identify promising dual-use commercial technologies and fund their scaling. Rather than spending billions over years before discovering a platform’s flaws—as occurred with historical programs like the Comanche helicopter—the army now provides developers with rapid access to domestic and international testing ranges to work side-by-side with soldiers. This model transforms iterative failure and the principle of "failing fast" into a defining feature of modern military innovation.
The Marketplace Model
With these vital reforms in place, the global defense ecosystem ultimately requires a single, open marketplace where allied nations can transact as freely as any commercial market, without political barriers or bureaucratic friction. Domestic defense companies currently operate within a monopsony where their home government represents the vast majority of sales, shielding them from healthy market competition. Introducing genuine market forces to the Western defense ecosystem is the critical catalyst needed to prepare the United States and its allies for future conflicts.
The army recently launched marketplaces for Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Counter-UAS capabilities. What began as a solution for domestic counterdrone interagency coordination rapidly evolved into an optimal model for achieving international military compatibility. Within months, these marketplaces processed hundreds of millions of dollars in orders, with more than 25 allied countries signing on to the programs.
This marketplace functions like any consumer-facing platform where participants browse and purchase capabilities. By establishing a market mechanism where technical compatibility is the strict price of admission, traditional defense companies are forced to compete with agile startups, ultimately lowering unit costs and guaranteeing superior integration for the entire allied enterprise. All listed capabilities must natively plug into the established digital architecture, shifting the complex burden of integration away from the consumer and onto the producer.
Ultimately, connecting defense ecosystems from the ground up achieves for national security what the internet did for the global economy: it turns isolated, fragmented pieces into a dynamic network whose combined power dwarfs the sum of its parts, fostering a level of capability overmatch that adversaries simply cannot replicate.
