The Case for Scaling America's Defense Manufacturing Base Beyond Prototypes

Venture investors have funded defense-tech companies such as SpaceX, Anduril, and Castelion, but the article argues that production capacity in the supplier base is now the bottleneck.

Most of America's machine shops and manufacturers are small, with 83% of machine shops employing fewer than 20 people, and 61% of tier-two-and-below defense manufacturers cite tooling, automation, or production-line limits as top expansion barriers.