Beyond the Buzzword: The Real Stakes of the “Production Ramp-Up”

Current armed conflicts serve as a stark reminder of the critical importance of maintaining substantial stockpiles of weapons, personnel, and ammunition. This presents a major challenge for European defense manufacturers, who have traditionally focused on producing complex, high-tech weapon systems in small quantities.

How can the industry make the leap to mass industrialization?
What short-term solutions can be implemented to scale up production of existing equipment?
And how can the product lifecycle be reimagined to better integrate manufacturing and ramp-up considerations?

Accelerating Production: A Long-Term Endeavor

Industrial ramp-up is not a new challenge for defense stakeholders, particularly in the aerospace and space sectors. For years, production management has been a central concern. However, recent conflicts—most notably the war in Ukraine—have reignited the urgency, highlighting the reality of high-intensity warfare and the critical need for mass production.

This demand now confronts European manufacturers historically focused on high-end, small-series technological equipment, primarily for export. The production apparatus must now adapt to a new strategic landscape, while contending with significant constraints: production lines designed for precision rather than volume, and legacy designs from the 1980s and 1990s that are often incompatible with modern digital tools and manufacturing methods.

Meeting this imperative requires a profound transformation of industrial models—from design processes to manufacturing capabilities.

“The defense sector must transition from a kind of small-batch high-tech craftsmanship to full-scale industrialization. If I were to use an analogy, I would say it’s like moving from luxury watchmaking to premium mass market”, Andreas Conradi, Head of Defense Europe.

Many manufacturers operating in both civilian and military markets have historically concentrated their efforts on the civilian segments, driven by strong growth dynamics in sectors such as naval, aerospace, and space. This focus has led to a pronounced separation between civilian and military activities—reinforced by defense secrecy requirements and cultural factors—limiting the transfer of experience and industrial synergies between the two domains.

In this context, meeting the current surge in demand requires reactivating production lines and increasing throughput—a lengthy and difficult process that cannot easily be accelerated. Timelines are further strained by the loss of critical skills (due to retirements, outsourcing, and post-COVID effects) in a sector with high technical demands, where the time required to build expertise is significant. Recruitment challenges are also exacerbated by mandatory security clearance procedures—which can take up to a year—and by the sector’s limited appeal to certain talent profiles.

Finally, the ecosystem remains highly fragmented, with a dense network of SMEs with limited investment capacity. This hampers the ramp-up of the supply chain, especially since digital continuity between stakeholders remains weak, making it difficult for major contractors to monitor progress effectively.
Finally, the ecosystem remains highly fragmented, with a dense network of SMEs According to Matthieu Ritter, Head of Aerospace & Defense France, “We are seeing a consolidation movement in the sector, which should accelerate around major manufacturers and the arrival of dedicated investment funds. But all of this takes time.”

Between Lean and Digital Pragmatism

According to Andreas Conradi, “Production ramp-up is probably the most complex issue for the defense sector, because you have to change everything: how you define needs, manage spare parts, design systems, produce them, organize the supply chain, and so on.”

To tackle this major challenge, three levers can be activated in the short and medium term:

  1. Capacity Increase and Productivity Gains
    This involves boosting capacity and improving productivity per assembly line through the reintroduction of lean practices. Many ramp-up projects have already been launched, such as adding extra teams to enable 24/7 operations. However, Elodie Régis notes: “This lever has already been activated in most organizations, with limited results due to recruitment difficulties and because the entire production ecosystem must be mobilized—logistics, quality assurance, maintenance, methods teams, etc.”
  2. Expanding Existing Lines
    This consists in duplicating certain stations identified as bottlenecks. “However, this already involves higher level of work on buildings and infrastructure, and presents complexity in execution while maintaining ongoing production”, adds Elodie Régis.
  3. Optimizing Overall Production Organization
    Complementary to the first two levers, this includes shortening the critical path with suppliers, consolidating the supply chain, and integrating elements of digital transformation when they can quickly deliver productivity gains without compromising capacity. For example, we are seeing the implementation of “single source of truth” architectures, consolidating all ramp-up stakeholders into a single, secure, and shared data lake. This approach optimizes the use of available data, facilitates planning and tracking of parts, tools, skills, and operations, identifies breakpoints and risk areas in the supply chain, enables “supplier recovery” initiatives, and secures valuable productivity gains.

“Ultimately, building new factories or production lines is such a long-term endeavor that it cannot be the sole answer to the defense sector’s immediate ramp-up needs”, concludes Elodie Régis.

Learning from Today to Better Prepare for Tomorrow

Defense industrial programs must meet exceptionally high technological, technical, and security requirements, which have not always accounted for industrial constraints. One of the key challenges for future programs will be to reconcile and more closely align the worlds of engineering and manufacturing in order to simplify and standardize designs. This includes, for example, integrating best practices from the civilian sector, using model-based systems engineering (MBSE), leveraging simulation and collaborative tools, and harnessing recent digital innovations—such as generative artificial intelligence and cloud computing—with digital continuity at the core of the process.

The defense sector must also anticipate and incorporate new constraints into its roadmap to successfully scale up production, including:

  • The growing role of low-cost or “disposable” systems (e.g., drones), which challenge traditional mindsets,
  • Circular economy principles, to address future tensions over strategic resources (steel, titanium, aluminum, etc.) between civilian and military sectors,
  • The rationalization of long and vulnerable supply chains, with significant sovereignty implications.

This transformation requires a fundamental shift in collaboration methods, particularly among industrial players, as well as a renewed focus on the human dimension: reinforcing the sense of purpose in missions, evolving mindsets in a world of highly specialized engineers, and developing employee skills to enhance agility. This evolution is essential to more effectively respond to military needs and to adapt to a constantly evolving geopolitical context.