If you haven’t yet read Automotive World’s recent coverage of the Pentagon approaching GM, Ford, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh about redirecting production capacity toward weapons and military supplies, it’s worth your time. The piece — drawing on a Wall Street Journal report — lays out what many of us have been hearing through our own networks: government is turning to commercial manufacturers to fill the gap left by the A&D industry’s backlog.
It’s a significant moment. And it raises a question that isn’t getting enough attention.
The physical capacity to build at scale clearly exists in the automotive sector. But the digital infrastructure required to do it to defense standards — that’s a different problem entirely, and it’s the one that will determine whether this industrial pivot actually works.
The gap nobody talks about enough
Automotive manufacturing is extraordinarily good at what it does — high volume, tight iteration cycles, deep supply chains, lean discipline baked into every process. It’s a genuinely impressive machine.
But defense manufacturing operates under a completely different set of rules. Configuration control. Serialized traceability on every component. Regulatory frameworks like ITAR and AS9100 that don’t have equivalents in the commercial world. And perhaps most importantly, these systems need to be sustained and maintained for decades, not swapped out on a model-year cycle.
As the Automotive World piece notes, the Pentagon framed this outreach as a matter of national security and asked executives to identify barriers to taking on defense work — everything from contracting requirements to bidding processes. Those barriers are real, but they’re only the visible ones. Beneath them sits a deeper challenge: the execution systems that govern how things get built, tracked, verified, and maintained over their entire lifecycle.
You can’t just retool an assembly line and call it done.
Two worlds are converging, but they’re not identical
To be fair, both industries are moving in similar directions technologically. Automotive has become deeply digitized — data-driven production, AI-assisted quality checks, digital twins on the factory floor. Defense is heading the same way, with the Model-Based Enterprise and integrated production environments gaining real traction.
So there’s overlap. But overlap isn’t equivalence.
Automotive optimizes for throughput. Defense optimizes for control. When you need both at the same time — which is exactly what this moment demands — you run into a systems problem that no amount of factory capacity alone can solve.
Why general-purpose software falls short
This is where I think a lot of these conversion efforts will stumble. The instinct is to lean on whatever ERP or shop floor system is already in place, maybe bolt on some compliance modules, and hope for the best. I’ve seen this play out, and it usually results in fragmented data, brittle workflows that break the moment something changes, and a lot of what the industry politely calls “paper on glass” — digitized processes that are really just PDFs on a screen. That might be tolerable when you’re ramping slowly. It’s not tolerable when a government is asking you to scale weapons production on a compressed timeline.
Purpose-built execution systems for aerospace and defense (A&D) — platforms like Solumina — exist precisely because this space is specific enough to demand specialized tools. They’re designed from the ground up around the things that make A&D manufacturing different: digital work instructions tied to configuration control, real-time execution visibility, serialized genealogy, embedded quality workflows, and the ability to connect what engineering intended with what actually got built.
The part most people overlook: sustainment
Here’s the other thing that gets lost in the “scale-up production” conversation. In defense, building the thing is only the beginning. These systems need to be maintained, repaired, overhauled, and kept mission-ready for years or decades after they roll off the line.
Readiness rates and turnaround times matter as much as production rates. If your manufacturing system doesn’t talk to your Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul system — if there’s no continuity between how something was built and how it gets maintained — you’ve created a long-term problem while solving a short-term one.
This is where having an integrated platform pays off. Manufacturing data flows into sustainment. Operational feedback flows back into production. The digital thread isn’t a buzzword — it’s the connective tissue that makes the whole thing work over time.
What actually matters right now
The reporting from Automotive World and the WSJ makes clear that this conversation between the Pentagon and commercial manufacturers is real, it’s accelerating, and it’s driven by genuine urgency. Munitions stockpiles are strained, demand is outpacing what traditional defense contractors can deliver, and the administration is backing it with historic levels of defense spending.
Capacity without control isn’t a solution, but it certainly is a liability.
The manufacturers who will succeed in this new environment won’t just be the ones with the most floor space or the fastest cycle times. They’ll be the ones who pair that physical capability with execution systems built for the complexity of the mission — systems that treat compliance, traceability, and sustainment as core features rather than afterthoughts.
That’s the bet behind Solumina, and given where the industry is heading, it’s a bet that’s looking increasingly well-placed.
