Donald Trump's return to power and the high-tech global arms race

'Arsenal of democracy'

Mr Mulroy's words echo those spoken 83 years ago by Franklin Roosevelt, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. The assault killed 2,341 US personnel and brought the US into the Second World War.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” Mr Roosevelt famously said. A year before the Pearl Harbour attack, Mr Roosevelt had called for defence manufacturing to increase as Europe and Asia were torn apart by war.

“Guns, planes, ships and many other things have to be built in the factories and the arsenals of America," he said. "They have to be produced by workers and managers and engineers with the aid of machines, which, in turn, have to be built by hundreds of thousands of workers."

This was an imagined fusion of civilian companies and the military, to build a war economy. But the US military was tiny by the standards of the time. At the outbreak of war, it had 1,700 planes, about the same number Britain lost in a few months in 1940 while fighting against Germany, which attacked France with 3,500 aircraft.

Modern warfare was consuming men – and material – at a significant rate.

What happened next was remarkable, with experts saying it offers important lessons today. US civilian industry, most famously Ford and its “one bomber an hour” achievement, stepped up to build 300,000 aircraft during the war.

Most companies had never built military equipment, let alone bombers with nearly 500,000 components.

Ford’s B-24 Liberators had to be relatively easy to mass produce, a gargantuan challenge that meant designing production lines from scratch, leading to a rocky marriage between civilian companies and the military.

They needed to be put together quickly, but also be capable and have high endurance. The B-24 would be flown from Libya to bomb oil refineries in Romania.

Today, the US and Nato face a similar challenge. For decades, the US and its allies were embroiled in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while before then the focus was on peacekeeping in countries such as former Yugoslavia and Somalia, which did not require high military production.

There seemed to be little point. The Soviet Union – which once massed 20,000 tanks on western Europe’s borders – had collapsed.

US production remained modest in the Iraq War. In the six-week second battle of Fallujah in 2004, US Marines fired about 6,000 artillery rounds. For years, that was a high point in shell use.

The Ukraine war, which began in 2022, shocked the West. Within months, Russia showed its ability to fire up to 60,000 artillery rounds a day, three times what Ukraine could fire and more than four times the monthly artillery shell production of the US.

Today, the US and Europe have increased manufacturing, but production still falls well short of their requirements. China, meanwhile, is widely said to have carried out the fastest build up of arms since 1945. Its navy has increased from about 60 surface vessels in 1996 to more than 340 today. That is more than the US, although America leads in ship tonnage.

Amid this race to rearm, civilian technology is becoming increasingly important, as it was during the Second World War.

Take artillery barrels, which are critical in the Ukraine war. Rotary forge machines reduce the time it takes to make barrels from 270 minutes to 10 minutes, technology that can also make pipes.

Mavic 3T drones that operate in Ukraine have night vision originally designed for industrial use.

On larger drones such as the US Reaper, cameras that can generate about two gigapixel recordings of entire cities – the Gorgon Stare programme – involve several connected sensors.

The basic technology – a CMOS image sensor – is similar to that used in the civilian market and companies such as Canon are now in the drone sensor market. What is different is the requirement to process hours of data from the Wide Area Motion Imagery sensors that can track 1,000 moving targets. And at 40,000 feet in minus 50°C, the camera lenses expand and contract.

These are no ordinary cameras – drone optics expert Florian Gollier described in a paper last year how the distortions of extreme temperatures can misalign lenses, impairing their ability to track enemies kilometres away in gloomy conditions.

Lenses designed by civilian private companies, such as MKS Instruments, are subsequently designed to move with this expansion and contraction to maintain accuracy.

Printing submarines and satellites

The gains from 3D printing have come into view as the US Navy spends billions fielding new Virginia-class nuclear submarines, which are years behind schedule and $17 billion over budget.

Calum Stewart is an associate at Spee3d, a company that is working with the US, Australian, British and Japanese militaries on additive manufacturing. The company's “cold spray” technology shoots powdered metal at 3,700kph through a jet engine nozzle, fusing it together on impact, and is “manoeuvred by a six-axis robotic arm in geometric patterns layer by layer". This could help to boost component size by removing the need for complex and costly lasers.

“We work a lot with the US government and help them make metal for their submarines, particular specific copper alloys for them, for their submarine fleet,” says Mr Stewart. "Right now in America, they make 1.2 Virginia-class submarines a year. They need to get that up to 2.6 in the next couple of years. They have a fleet of 60 submarines that are all ageing and they need 120. We really need these new manufacturing techniques."

Spee3D has the ability to print spare components for weapon systems “in theatre”, or as close as safely possible to combat operations.

“When the British Army, one day, asks for a Challenger 4 tank, what they’ll say is, 12 per cent of it needs to be digitally and deployably manufactured and companies that start bidding for the project say, ‘We’ll make it 15 per cent. We’ll sell you the printers as well. And we'll sell you a support package all wrapped in.' That's value to us,” Mr Stewart says. "If we no longer have to store these spare parts, ship these spare parts, account for them. Or rather, we're going to install this manufacturing capability around the world. I'm just going to press print, giving us far more flexibility in response time when we need spare parts."

Additive manufacturing is not just revolutionising the land and sea domains of military power, but also the “ultimate high ground” of space.

Since 2017, Maxar Technologies, which makes Earth observation and communication satellites and was formed after the purchase of civilian space companies, has been using printed titanium components in some of its satellites - an increasingly common trend in the race to increase production for “constellations” of satellites.

The US military wants to ensure all of Earth can be surveilled in what it calls the “constant stare".

Now companies including SpaceX are increasing this after a US Defence Department plan, announced last year, to have 1,000 military satellites in the next decade. They are not just for spying, but will also be used for missile detection, tracking aircraft and ensuring soldiers, aircraft and drones can communicate in the most remote regions.

As in other defence domains, civilian technology leads the way.

“They're figuring out how to automate production, how to use robotics as much as they can, to speed things along instead of labour. And they're using 3D printing and very different designs for their satellites than we've seen in the past. All with the goal of making them more manufacturable,” says Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is focused on US defence budget spending and space.

“It's a new generation of companies that are figuring this out. It's not the legacy aerospace companies. They don't know how to build at scale. They've always built satellites kind of like you build a Ferrari. It's very customised. It's very labour intensive, and it's in very small quantities. It's companies like SpaceX and Amazon that are actually mass producing satellites. And they're able to build hundreds per month, multiple satellites per day.”

This crossover between private sector innovation through competition – win in the marketplace or go bust – and the military, is another echo of Second World War production.

According to Michael Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the US Department of Defence, the civilian private sector dominates 11 of the 14 critical technologies identified by the Pentagon, such as hypersonic flight, microelectronics, the “brains” of defence systems, quantum computing and advanced materials.

But getting the military to work with the private sector presents a bureaucratic challenge.

“The Space Development Agency is working on a new generation of satellites they call the 'proliferated warfighter space architecture [PWSA]'. They wanted to have communication links between a network of satellites," he says. "That's not a new thing. SpaceX’s thousands of satellites up there right now use 9,000 laser cross links. But the SDA, instead of using the existing commercial standard, came up with their own standard, and guess what? They've had supply chain problems. The companies that are supposed to build these lasers meeting the SDA’s government standard, can't find enough parts, and they're not able to produce these laser terminals fast enough.”

PWSA, if successful, will not only network communications but track enemy missiles, including hypersonic weapons.

The rise of the machines

The trend of more processing power for the military is accelerating thanks to artificial intelligence. Increasingly, drones are being designed with advanced object recognition, to find targets autonomously. At a larger scale, the US Air Force is working on drones to assist pilots in air combat, Project Skyborg, assisted by AI.

Small drones such as the Switchblade 600 – part of the Pentagon’s plan to mass produce thousands of one-way attack drones – have an autonomous guidance option.

Likewise, counter drone systems can use powerful processors that need cutting edge chips, to instantly track drones and shoot them down. FPV (first person view) drones used to devastate tanks and infantry in Ukraine can fly at up to 200kph, and are now being mass produced using 3D printing.

Suddenly, the world of leading iPhone chips and warfare has merged.

“We're getting to a point where the processing power is going to be a key limiting factor in the performance of the weapon system,” says Mr Harrison. "So it's not a threshold that it just has to be good enough. The defining characteristic of how good the system is, is how much it can process, which means we actually have to change the architecture of our weapon systems so that the processors can be swapped out during the life cycle of that weapon system."

Today, the most famous example of this “swap out” technology is the coming update to the F-35, the Block 4, which will have a new core processor 25 times more powerful than the current aircraft.

Civilian technology, such as ASML’s Twinscan, is needed to churn out tiny devices at a vast scale, well illustrated by the US Army's plan for augmented reality headsets, the Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems.

The troubled project involving a $22 billion contract with Microsoft could lead to thousands of soldiers being given the high-tech goggles.

Soldiers can navigate, share information on threats in real time, between themselves and different units, while the devices also double as thermal imagers and night vision. While much is classified, Microsoft’s Hololens2 AR goggles use 10 nanometre technology, suggesting the military version might use similar components.

The need for smaller processing power is already here, says Steven Simoni, chief executive of Allen Control Systems, which is on the verge of producing the US military's first completely autonomous weapon.

It is called the Bullfrog, “an autonomous system that detects, identifies and neutralises enemy UAVs". Mr Simoni, who worked as a submarine engineer in the navy and at tech start-ups, says the technology behind this system is only possible through software innovations by companies such as Nvidia.

Nvidia, originally a computer graphics company, now specialises in chips for AI. Its chips, like the TX-2 AI module, have been highly sought after.

“Bullfrog is an autonomous gun turret using a small arms gun. So an M240, which shoots a 7.62mm round. It does a full Kill Chain solution, from detecting and identifying the target using AI, it uses computer vision to detect and classify the drone, or the target in general, and then from there, it passes that off to another set of cameras, which are underneath the gun, which do the final tracking before the bullet shoots at the drone.

“There are six cameras on the system, some are for the detection and classification and some are for the tracking and the killing,” he says.

ACS trains its systems on thousands of images of different drones from different angles in different lighting, and other “common aerial objects” such as birds, against different backgrounds and weather. It can take down drones for several dollars a shot, obviating the need for missiles that cost millions of dollars, used against drones costing tens of thousands.

“We use an Nvidia Jetson, and we use multiple per turret to parallelise the processing of the images from the cameras. Looking at the Chips Act, like a lot of technology, a lot of the sub components on the Nvidia Jetson are now going to be made in the US. So it's important, whereas you would normally get a lot of that from Taiwan.

“From a national security perspective it's important to consider, if we lose Taiwan in the future, if it becomes part of China, we need a solution. Many politicians see it as a national security and defence act, more than for job creation. It's incredibly important, especially if we're going to rely on these GPUs to really power a lot of the new weapons.”

The GPUs made by Nvidia and similar devices are now blocked from export to China, sanctions that also stop their export to China from US allies Taiwan and South Korea.

Higher processing power presents yet another challenge, if not on the ground then in the air and space: sensitive microelectronics need to be “hardened” or “ruggedised” for space applications and extreme temperature changes. For context, laptops often cannot operate for long from below 10°C to 35°C.

A weapon travelling at hypersonic speed, five times the speed of sound or faster, will generate temperatures in excess of 1,800°C at the wing edges.

Any electronics could be fried, after enduring the very low temperatures as the system climbs to altitude. An F-35 jet’s core processor for example, is designed to operate at minus 40°C, the extreme temperature at 40,000ft.

Darpa is now working on the Hots project – High Operational Temperature Sensors – to develop chips to power cameras that can function at 800°C, expected temperatures created during hypersonic flight.

Temperature control of electronics is also in focus across all domains of war, as radars become smaller and more powerful, requiring higher voltages and higher heat tolerances, the modern Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars revolutionising air warfare.

They rely on Gallium Nitride, an artificially grown crystal with high heat tolerance that stands in for silicon chips. Defence companies, such as Raytheon, are working out ways to further amp up their power and heat tolerance for even more powerful radars, using lab-grown diamond.

Smaller and more powerful processors are also enabling the experimentation needed to create the missiles that reach hypersonic speeds, allowing far more accurate modelling for testing.

“Many of the most important developments relate to the weaponisation and operationalisation of hypersonic vehicles to hypersonic weapon systems,” says Iain Boyd, director at the Centre for National Security Initiatives and professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at University of Colorado Boulder.

“This has been made possible through R&D related to a significantly broader range of disciplines. Twenty years ago, pretty much all the hypersonics R&D was in the aerothermodynamics. Weaponisation involves the integrated consideration of materials, structures, controls, power, thermal management, warheads, propulsion, etc.

“And yes, hypersonics has benefited from faster computers, better algorithms, more compact components, new manufacturing approaches.

“But I would say the key thing has been the commitment of several nations to weaponise what 20 years ago were test vehicles.”