From Unicorns to Warhorses

a solution to a well-appreciated problem?

Those who are selling a short, fast, and successful war are selling a lie. It seems every generation thinks they have found a way to fix the problem. Over and over, from Europe in 1939 to Europe again in 2022, the quick and successful war that was briefed devolved into a consuming slog.

You can win a consuming slog, but you have to be able to mobilize and industrialize your way through it—and you need to start doing that years before the war starts.

The fleet that showed up in 1943 did not start in 1941—it began in 1936, 1938, and 1940.

A decade and a half after President Obama’s “Pacific Pivot”, we still talk a big game about being ready for the next Great Pacific War west of the International Date Line. We’ve had our slap fights through various copes like “Deterrence by Denial” v. “Deterrence by Punishment”, etc.

Even after four years of the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022, when we were warned again about the dangers of optimism filters, have we yet turned into the storm we have been running from? Are we ready for it?

No—we are not ready for it. We are still structured for the Cold War and the long peace of exquisitely made and very profitable weapons that work really well…but have nothing behind them in depth and scale.

We did not win the last world war that way—but the argument still has not been won to convince the national security complex that we need to remember how we did win that war, and will have to do so again to win the next world war. We are making progress, but we are not yet there.

Good arguments are being made to warn of this corner we’ve put ourselves into. Heritage Foundation’s TIDALWAVE report is one, and a recent Substack by Palantir’s Greg Little and Aaron Jaffe over at First Breakfast is another.

Let’s dive in there.

Designs that can tolerate variation and substitution proliferate. Designs that can’t are redesigned or abandoned. The lesson is simple and uncomfortable: the United States doesn’t scale by asking industry to stretch to meet perfect designs. It scales by aligning designs to industrial strength.

Here’s where this gets uncomfortable. If a modern weapon system depends on a bespoke material, a limited supply base, or a certification regime that freezes design for a decade, then it may be technologically impressive—but it is strategically brittle. In a contested industrial war, elegance is not resilience. A system that cannot tolerate supplier substitution, component swaps, or rapid redesign is not “high-end.” It is pre-failed the moment production is disrupted or losses exceed peacetime assumptions.

We often describe these bad outcomes as manufacturing problems or supply-chain shocks. And yes, we need investment to expand industrial capacity and deepen critical supply chains. But at root these are design decisions—made early, reinforced by incentives, and rarely revisited. And then we act surprised when scale never materializes.

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Too many in the Department of War still operate on the assumption that if we simply fix acquisition policy, streamline contracts, and empower program offices, the rest of the system will somehow align. It won’t, and Secretary Hegseth’s acquisition transformation recognizes this. Even if every acquisition reform memo is executed perfectly, the department is still missing something fundamental: a way to operate the war machine as a single, connected system.

Today, weapon design lives in one world. Manufacturing capacity lives in another. Supply chains live in spreadsheets. Sustainment data arrives late. Readiness has little connection to its industrial inputs. Learning happens—but slower than the fight evolves. This is a coordination problem.

We have a winning template. Heck, we invented it.

America’s rapid wartime evolution was spurred by a collaboration between government and manufacturers to maximize the use of their existing capabilities. At Willow Run, Ford—the automobile company—adapted aircraft designs to the logic of automotive assembly, using standardized parts, simplified subassemblies, and repeatable processes. By 1944, a B-24 bomber was rolling off the line nearly every hour. Ford optimized for throughput, not perfection—and throughput won the war.

This story was repeated across the American industrial base. At the Detroit Arsenal, Chrysler applied the same logic to tank engine production. The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor. It was designed to be built quickly in enormous quantities and to be easily repaired in the field. The result was a tank that could be produced and replaced faster than adversaries could destroy it.

This design-for-scale philosophy is not a complete relic of World War II—it’s re-emerging today where speed and volume matter most. Anduril’s Barracuda cruise missile is a modern example of this same logic. Rather than designing a missile optimized solely for performance and then struggling to manufacture it, Barracuda was designed from the outset to be compatible with high-volume production, using components, processes, and tolerances that allow it to be built on current automotive manufacturing capabilities. The result is a system explicitly designed for mass production, rapid replenishment, and iterative improvement.

Unlike WWII, we are facing as our competitor a nation that not only has a greater population than ours, by a factor of four, but has a larger manufacturing base. The script has been flipped. We need to put down the plate of lotuses, and pick up the trade school brochure.

We don’t just need to increase capacity in mass, we need to make what we have work faster. We can do this, we just need the will to do it.

As they describe later on, they believe ShipOS, which we discussed with Palantir’s Mike Gallagher and Matt Babin on the Midrats Podcast earlier this month, is one way to solve this coordination problem.

They end with some hard truth…something fully endorsed here.

…can this weapon be built, repaired, and replenished faster than it will be destroyed? If the answer is no, no amount of acquisition reform, contracting flexibility, or urgency memos will save it. In a fight defined by attrition, adaptation, and industrial endurance, the winning systems will not be the perfect ones on paper but the ones that can be produced, replaced, and improved the fastest.

America didn’t win past wars by hunting unicorns. We won by designing for scale—and then scaling relentlessly.

There’s your formula.

Now, we need action.