Member Perspective: The Future of Defense Supply Chains and NDTA
In my role as Chair of the Cybersecurity Best Practices Committee, NDTA asked for my best shot at predicting the role of defense supply chains and our association’s role 25 years from now on our 100th anniversary. I turned to my younger generation colleagues, Chiderah Okoye and Tom Fellows who actively support the committee. Together, we’re dedicated to NDTA’s mission and care about the organization’s future, but none of us are forecasters. We also know that anyone’s predictions will be off the mark given the broad time frame and topic. Despite those caveats, we would bet on four points looking back from 2044. Right or wrong, we hope the four points will provoke useful discussions along the way.
Redefining the Industrial Revolution.Customers in 2044 will still want the right products and services, at the right time, in the right place, in the right condition and quantity, and at the right total expense. What will change is the physical and cyber environment surrounding those needs. Our 2019 networks will seem painfully disconnected by comparison to 2044, and the next 25 years will change everything again and again through network collaboration. We can describe those changes as a fourth industrial revolution and beyond. In this perspective, steam engines drove the 1st industrial revolution, electricity drove the 2nd, computers drove the 3rd, and intelligent networks will drive a 4th. Connected global assets already disrupt today’s supply chain market leaders and military powers at a staggering pace. Those disruptions will intensify as the connections accelerate here on earth and increasingly in space. Free market economist, Joseph Schumpeter, referred to these disruptions as creative destruction. Applied effectively, the long run societal progress of those disruptions will be positive for the natural environment, individual employment, health and well-being, wealth distribution, and global cooperation.
Holding it together through creative destruction. Long run aside, plenty will get worse until safeguards come into place. High-tech exploitations will proliferate in new ways every day through connected global resources, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the anonymity of distributed transaction ledgers, smart contracts, and autonomous vehicles. Earlier industrial revolutions were plagued by mass production without the necessary protections for safety, standards, compensation, and the environment. The absence of cyber protections and responses in the fourth industrial revolution will spawn new misuses and weaponization of networked intelligence. Consequently, at all levels, resource-constrained organizations and governments will face existential threats. In particular, individual and state-sponsored bad actors will leverage networks to spread infrastructure attacks and shutdowns with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Likewise, tightly coupled networks make for winner-take-all systems that will overcome organizations and nations that fail to cope or compete.
Upskilling as a national priority for cybersecure growth. To reduce the negative fallout from the fourth industrial revolution, NDTA will be part of the mobilization to make adult upskilling a national and international priority for cybersecure growth. The U.S. will support applied learning and teaching that enables each of us to benefit more from artificial intelligence which augments our own intelligence. At the same time, we’ll evolve the protections and responses to better prepare and defend the U.S. and our allies. As we extend our sophistication of defense logistics, our moral and intellectual shortcomings as humans will become that much more apparent. However, we will discover how networks can help each of us more fully engage the power of our brains and our nature which will always possess capabilities that outpace the most powerful supercomputers. Those looking back from 2044 will be struck by how little of each person’s creative potential was understood, appreciated, and engaged back in 2019.
NDTA’s roots coming out of World War II will still be our strength. With our educational mission, NDTA in 2044 will be at the forefront of another new era in defense logistics. As the U.S. strives to become a more perfect union, our nation and our allies will increasingly depend on NDTA’s understanding to support our unique reliance on public-private collaboration in the defense supply chain. While names and terminology will certainly be different from 2019, one constant will make our organization more vital than ever in 2044: our ongoing commitment to looking ahead and incorporating the lessons we’ve experienced every year since 1944.
By Ted Rybeck, Chairman and CEO Benchmarking Partners, Inc.