Active regional and nation-state conflict have shaken foundational paradigms about how wars are fought. Governments are acting, innovation is accelerating, and long-held assumptions about the conduct of warfare are breaking. Previously held models for sustainment are being shattered while Industrial AI and drone technology have proliferated across the battlefield. The defense industry is responding at blistering pace, from the front line to the factory to the federal ledger. Buckle up. 

Prediction 1: Expeditionary manufacturing: The factory follows the fight  

In his opening comments at a recent defense trade show, the US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll held up a fin for an external fuel tank used by the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. He commented that the Army’s team could manufacture it better than the vendor and said, “we 3D scanned the part, reverse engineered it, printed prototypes, and conducted structural validation in only 43 days…ours is 300% stronger and 78% cheaper, and we can ramp up supply in less than six days.”  

3D printing technology, enabled by advances in digital engineering, is pushing the production line closer to the front line. Already, as part of the U.S. Department of War’s (DoW) FY2026 budget, $3.3 billion has been allocated to additive manufacturing projects. By pushing the production of replacement parts closer to the point of use, military forces can reduce susceptibility to lengthy supply lines, repair equipment faster, and build resilience into global supply chains. This is especially critical for theaters of conflict burdened by a lack of transportation infrastructure or extreme distances.  

In another example, the U.S. Navy printed a replacement pump for one of its Arleigh Burke class destroyers, reducing the time to produce the part by 80%, a significant improvement over traditional casting processes. An additional point, it was printed in Spain, allowing the ship to continue its future deployment, rather than sitting at port waiting for a replacement. 

These early adopters of expeditionary printing have been the services themselves, but the defense industrial base (DIB) has taken notice of the speed, innovation, and resilience this move brings to military forces. Undoubtedly expeditionary manufacturing for repair and sustainment will become a staple of the global industrial base. 

One caveat to this prediction, none of this happens without the digital thread, crucial for the transfer of design files to remote 3D printing locations. The importance of digital engineering has already been recognized by the Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI) 5000.97, which mandates that all defense capabilities are set up for digital engineering. It is doubtful that military forces will want to build scaled capability to print on demand parts. Infantry soldiers have enough to carry on their backs today, a 3D printer should not be part of their kit. But the DIB will fill this gap as they shift from a document-centric approach to one based on digital models and data.  

Prediction 2: The Reindustrialization of Deterrence  

Defense

Ukraine’s artillery consumption outstripped NATO’s production capacity within months. For decades, military planners assumed that stockpiles and well-developed supply lines could sufficiently resupply military forces in conflict long enough for the industrial base to ramp up production for whatever was needed. Regional conflict in Eastern Europe proved this assumption to be breathtakingly wrong. It wasn’t just that the DIB was unable to respond to demand in the field, but any belief that stockpiles provided a modicum of deterrence vanished. 

Relying on larger stockpiles isn’t the answer. The kill chain must be extended from the front line all the way back to the factory. But the DIB can’t afford to simply maintain idle production lines in factories waiting for conflict. Instead in 2026, we will see increased reindustrialization of the manufacturing base, with defense manufacturers commercializing and commercial manufacturers adding defense manufacturing capabilities. This allows for defense capacity that can be rapidly scaled up in times of conflict. Commercial companies have noticed the opportunity – positioning themselves as viable options for defense contracts should the need arise. Afterall, this is nothing new. In World War II, Ford Motor Company produced B-24 Bombers; Singer Sewing Machine made bomber sights;, and Maytag made propellor assemblies. 

But it’s not as simple as flipping a switch and making jet engines. Defense manufacturing requires extremely diverse types of manufacturing. Mixed-mode capabilities allow manufacturers to produce both high-volume, standard components as well as custom, low-value items needed for defense applications within a single supply chain. Leveraging a business system that enables project, discrete, and process manufacturing in one environment is critical to build diversity and resilience into production. As the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves recently said about investment into the DIB, “This additional investment is not just about increasing our national security but increasing our economic security, too.” 

Prediction 3: The Emergence of Counter-Autonomy 

Defense

The last two years have seen an explosion of autonomous and first-person view (FVP) drones proliferating the battlefield. Relatively low-cost solutions have proven capable of delivering disproportionate effects, making this tech du jour a weapon of choice in Ukraine. The defense industry and governments alike have taken notice. The UK Ministry of Defence aims to deliver 100,000 drones to Ukraine by the end of 2025 and the U.S. Secretary of War stated that “Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation.” The booming drone gold rush is exacerbated by the concept that drones are “bullets, not planes,” meaning that small, cheap drone swarms have become a real threat to majestic weapons such as destroyers and bombers employed by advanced militaries.  

With the backdrop of the relative effectiveness of drone warfare, the attention of the defense industry and governments is turning to counter-autonomous drone tech. For fiscal year 2026, the US DoW budget requested over $3 billion just for counter-drone capabilities alone. These capabilities come in the form of small handheld systems such as the DroneGun Mk4, built for rapid response to neutralize individual targets, or large vehicle mounted Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapons currently in testing by the British military.  

As military forces experiment with multiple applications to respond to the emergence of autonomous drones, the defense industry is innovating alongside them to develop a capability that meets a diverse set of emerging requirements. The winners in this emerging field will need to scale quickly to field tech that was essentially non-existent a mere five years ago. 

Prediction 4: AI: Diffusion from the Frontline to the Flightline 

In his 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers argues that technology doesn’t spread in a straight line, but rather in waves. Early adoption of AI on modern battlefields due to an existential threat quickly validated the value. Target recognition, analysis of volumes of intelligence, and decision support schema have been employed successfully and, in many cases, at scale. In a devastating strike against the strategic Russian bomber fleet dubbed Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine employed AI to find, target, and strike 41 aircraft. Anyone who doubted the value of AI in defense quickly changed their tune. 

The second wave of AI in defense is upon us and will not take place at the front, it will take place in shipyards, hangars, and maintenance bays. As military commanders begin to trust AI as a technology, they will demand its application elsewhere, and there are few areas as rife for adoption as in maintenance and sustainment. Fleet and field commanders don’t want to spend their time thinking about whether their assets will be ready, they simply want them fully mission capable to employ at a time and place of their choosing.  

While some programs have leveraged AI behind the scenes for years, such as the US Air Force’s Conditions Based Maintenance Plus Program Office, battlefield successes will accelerate the second wave. For decades, large assets such as ships and aircraft have been placed on complex schedules to be taken out of service to inspect time interval dependent components, or to replace parts to stave off unplanned downtime. AI completely upends this system by employing predictive algorithms that will predict failure, recommend maintenance, and optimize downtime, rather than the current system of hoping for the best, or fixing it when it breaks. Victory will still depend on the frontline, but readiness will be won on the flightline. 

Industry at the Speed of Conflict 

The last year gave the world a front-row seat to conflict that has served as a catalyst for industry innovation, government investment, and a world increasingly disrupted by the emergence of a myriad of artificial intelligence applications. Reindustrialization and expeditionary manufacturing aim to alter the model of supply lines that end at the stockpiles. The emergence of autonomy and drone warfare in the last several years will find its equilibrium as industry develops its foil. And AI – What Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce calls, “the most important technology of any lifetime” – will diffuse at scale to become the cornerstone of operational readiness.