www.ndu.edu/inss DH No. 82 1
P
rior to America’s entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roo-
sevelt coined the term Arsenal of Democracy to refer to U.S. industrial
activity supporting the Allied war eort.
1
President Dwight D. Eisen-
hower subsequently named the collection of private rms, universities, and
Federally funded research and development centers that emerged during the
World War II the military-industrial complex. e industry component of the
military-industrial complex, or what is now commonly known as the Defense
Industrial Base (DIB), has grown to become one of the largest sectors of the U.S.
economy, accounting for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product—a substan-
tially greater percentage if the impact of military-derived technology such as the
Internet is included in the calculation.
2
e modern DIB reached its apex in the Cold War. During this period,
massive weapon systems development programs led the Department of Defense
(DOD) to evolve a complex, heavily managed, deliberate approach to new prod-
uct development (NPD). Confronted with an adversary in the Soviet Union
that mirrored a centralized, planning-centric NPD model, the DIB successfully
built sophisticated military products that had a decisive role in determining the
outcome of the Cold War.
Today, however, the national security environment is characterized by in-
creasingly diverse, reactive threats that can evolve at the pace of Moore’s Law,
a concept that refers to the doubling of transistors in a dense integrated circuit
every 2 years.
3
One example of the reactive threat phenomenon is improvised
explosive devices (IEDs). Constructed from commercially derived components,
IEDs began appearing on the battleelds of Iraq and Afghanistan as early as
The Pentagon’s Pivot: How
Lead Users Are Transforming
Defense Product Development
by Adam Jay Harrison
DEFENSE HORIZONS
National Defense University
CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY
About the Author
Adam Jay Harrison is the Director of
the MD5 National Security Technology
Accelerator and a National Security
Research Fellow at New York
University.
Key Points
Historically, the Department of De-
fense (DOD) has relied on strategic
forecasting to determine specica-
tions for new military products.
These specications are codied in
formal product requirements that
drive new product development
(NPD).
The rapid rate of technology
change combined with increasing
uncertainty in the global security
environment challenges the abil-
ity of DOD to make accurate long-
term predictions about future
military product needs.
To improve the efcacy of capa-
bility development, many DOD
agencies and the Defense In-
dustrial Base are exploring NPD
strategies based on the insights
of lead users with direct exposure
to emerging military-technology
problems.
This paper details emerging ap-
proaches to military NPD that
incorporate lead users; that is,
practitioners who experience and
proactively solve needs ahead of
the market.
August 2017
