UnFiltered
I wrote an op-ed for Microwave Product Digest in September. It covers a fair amount of ground, and the paragraph that took the longest to write ended up being four sentences.
An earlier draft of it contained this line: nobody is simply buying more of what they already have.
I took it out, because it is not true. It is also the sort of thing you hear at every industry event at the moment, which is probably how it got into a draft in the first place.
Why it is wrong
A large share of what is being funded right now is replenishment. Inventories drew down and they are being rebuilt, against designs that already exist and are already qualified. Nobody is redesigning those. They want more of them, and they want them faster.
The reason the tidy version survives is that the other half of the story is more interesting to talk about. New platforms, new threats, lessons coming out of conflicts that are running right now, requirements that move while a program is already underway. That is the part that gets the airtime, and it has earned it. But it is not the whole demand picture, and a supplier who plans around only that half is going to get caught out.
The part that really matters
Both are happening at the same time, and they ask opposite things of a supplier.
Replenishment asks for rate and schedule discipline against a frozen design. Change nothing. Hold the configuration, hold the qualification, hold the date, and do it at a volume you were not running three years ago.
The new-program side asks for the reverse. Take a requirement that is still moving, respond quickly, redesign when the threat assessment changes, and accept that the specification you quoted against in March may not be the specification in September.
Those are not the same company.
I mean that fairly literally. The discipline that lets an organization hold a rate, which is configuration control, process stability and a willingness to say no to changes, is the same discipline that makes it slow to respond. The responsiveness that lets an organization redesign in the middle of a program is the thing that makes rate production difficult. Different people are good at each. They are measured on different things. Left to themselves they will argue with each other, and they should, because the argument is real.
John Muller wrote here, in unFiltered, a few weeks ago that our own teams run on both clocks, and that often it is the same team. He is right, and it is not a contradiction of anything above. It is the reason the choice I am about to describe has to be made on purpose. If you do not make it, that argument gets settled differently on every program, and nobody can tell a customer which company they are really dealing with.
"The failure mode is a company that has never decided, tells every customer it does both, and discovers which one it really is during a ramp."
Where we landed, and why it is a bet
In the op-ed I said delivering is the one I would put first. That is the priority. The sequence went the other way. We built around the second stream first, and then we worked really hard at the first one. We released six times as many new products in 2025 as in 2022, which is what building around a moving requirement looks like from the outside. The reasoning was that the adapt problem is harder to retrofit than the deliver problem. You can buy equipment and hire against a rate, and we have. An organization that has never had to respond to a moving requirement does not learn it quickly.
That is a judgement, not a law. I would not tell another company it is the only sensible way to structure itself, and there are good suppliers in this industry who have made the opposite choice deliberately and are better at rate than we are.
What I would say is that the choice has to be made on purpose. The failure mode is a company that has never decided, tells every customer it does both, and discovers which one it really is during a ramp. Going forward, with the volume of rate commitments this industry is about to make, that discovery is going to happen to a lot of suppliers at the same time.
The two halves of the op-ed are one argument
This is why the piece spends as much time on manufacturing capacity as it does on integration. Those are not two separate points that happened to fit in the same article.
One of them is about what you are willing to take on. The other is about whether you can keep the promise you just made. A supplier who is strong on the first and weak on the second is not a partner going forward. It is a risk that has not surfaced yet.
Read the full piece: What Defense Primes Are Really Buying, Microwave Product Digest, September 2026.