By Chris Gaffney, Managing Director of the Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute and a former Vice President of Global Strategic Supply Chain at The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Eidenire, former operations and transformation leader at The Coca-Cola Company and UPS.

A few weeks ago I sat down with a friend who works in the defense industry. His role gives him current visibility into the contractors now being asked to rapidly scale production of munitions and interceptors after a season of heavy use. I knew from his hands-on background he would have a point of view that would validate or challenge my perceptions. What I got instead was a conversation any plant manager would recognize and was quite familiar with my food and beverage experience. In sophisticated and automated operations, it still comes down to having qualified people who are engaged in a process-disciplined culture.

He described operations that depend on specific people more than solely on documented processes. Sequencing steps marked with tape on the tooling. Machine settings carried on a folded sheet of paper in an operator's back pocket. Tools modified by hand over the years, with the changes never finding their way back into the work instructions. He walked through the standard surge playbook familiar to me, adding a third or fourth shift and moving the most experienced operators to nights to anchor it. Then he smiled and said that third shift is where the magic happens. He meant it with affection and a wince at the same time.

None of this was foreign to me. I spent my early career in plant and distribution operations at Frito-Lay and then 25 years in the Coca-Cola system, and I have seen every one of these patterns. So I tested the conversation with several people in my network, most of them Coca-Cola alumni, plant managers and continuous improvement leaders, and one with a deep project management background. They all landed in the same place. The complexity is real. The people dealing with it deserve empathy rather than criticism, because they are being asked to do something genuinely hard: rebuild years of inventory in months, with supply chains built for a different era, often without the contracts that would let them invest.

How We Got Here, Honestly

The defense industrial base did not get fragile through negligence. It got fragile through rational decisions, made year after year, that optimized for a demand pattern that had been reduced across a long timeframe.

Consider the Tomahawk cruise missile. CSIS reports that orders averaged 86 missiles a year over the past decade, so recent production ran under 200 a year even though the manufacturer's capacity goal exceeds 1,000. Nobody sized that production schedule and capacity plan incorrectly. It was sized to the order book. The same logic explains the single sourcing that is common in the defense industry. Peacetime volumes could not sustain two qualified suppliers of anything specialized, so awarding the work to one kept one alive. Lean and just-in-time practices, imported from those of us in commercial industry, minimized carrying costs exactly as designed.

CSIS estimates it will take three or more years to restore inventories of the interceptors and missiles most heavily used in recent operations. When the National Defense Industrial Association surveyed its members about barriers to surging capacity, the top answer was not machines or floor space. Fifty-six percent said they had no contract vehicle to justify expansion, and 41 percent pointed to the technical workforce. Suppliers have been burned before, and the deeper tiers reach into global sources, including China, for materials and components most of us would assume were made here.

Some of the gaps are genuinely surprising. The United States has not produced its own TNT since 1986. The primary explosive fill for artillery shells has come entirely from overseas for nearly four decades. A new plant is finally under construction in Kentucky, fully funded and politically championed, and its estimated completion is early 2029, roughly four and a half years after the contract was signed. Meanwhile, seven of the most heavily consumed missiles trace back to two prime contractors and essentially one solid rocket motor industrial base, with several programs drawing on the same small labor markets in places like Camden, Arkansas.

Reasons for Optimism, and Lessons from Other Ramps

This is a challenging situation, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Since January the Pentagon has signed multiyear framework agreements intended to lift Patriot PAC-3 production from roughly 600 to 2,000 interceptors a year over seven years, THAAD from 96 to 400, and Tomahawk toward more than 1,000. Congress carved out dedicated funding for the solid rocket motor base. And the Army's 155mm artillery ramp, while short of its goal, has proven something useful: spreading production across several smaller facilities has delivered, with new propellant plants opening ahead of schedule, while the single large facility built on untested equipment has struggled. Spreading the wealth to additional producers has started to build resilience.

My friends pushed the conversation toward a question I think holds the real value: where have other industries ramped capacity under pressure, and what did they learn? Three cases stand out to me, and together they carry one message.

You can't build sustainable capacity without committed demand.

The largest domestic surgical mask maker offered in January 2020 to reactivate four mothballed N95 lines, and the federal government showed little interest. They were able to ramp up production a few months later when the Texas National Guard helped staff them to 24-hour operation. Rational suppliers do not build capacity against urgency alone. Operation Warp Speed proved the other side of the same coin: advance purchase agreements signed before vaccine trials even finished, priority ratings on materials, government staff embedded at manufacturing sites, and regulatory steps run in parallel rather than in sequence.

Then there is UPS, a story from our own industry. After the 2013 peak season failure left an estimated two million packages undelivered on Christmas Eve, UPS spent half a billion dollars on trucks, sorting capacity, and people. Delivery performance recovered, and earnings cratered when forecast volumes failed to appear. The lasting fix took years: disciplined demand shaping with retailers, collaborative forecasting, and automated capacity that was still coming online in 2018.

Efficiency won't get you there.

Surge capacity is a different investment from efficient operations, and even a company with money, urgency, and full control of its own network bought it in years, not quarters.

That is the common denominator across every case, and it was the project manager in the group who put a fine point on it. The schedule is set by the slowest constraint, whether that is a chemical plant, a qualification test, a hiring funnel, or a training curve. The solutions that actually work are the ones that buy time back: demand certainty that starts the clock sooner, doing in parallel what tradition does in sequence, and managing demand honestly while capacity catches up.

What We Would Do: It Still Comes Down to People

Underneath the contracts and the chemistry, the constraint I keep coming back to is the one my friend led with that matched our experience at Coca-Cola. These are person-centric operations, and the surge playbook puts them at risk at the worst possible moment. We learned at Coca-Cola that around-the-clock operations do not add capacity in a straight line, especially in less automated environments. The research agrees, showing night shifts running measurably behind days in manual work while highly automated lines show little difference. Moving your best operators to third shift while handing first shift to trainees stretches your thinnest asset, which is experienced judgment, exactly when quality margins are tightest.

So before adding a shift, I would count the operations that only one person can run to spec. Most plants I worked with never thought to do this math. I would treat the ramp itself as the opportunity because your best people are demonstrating everything they know every day while they train others. Put cameras on the setups and build the digital work instructions now, not after the veterans retire. I would open a no-fault “library book amnesty” window for operators to bring the taped sequences and pocket settings into the documented process, because those informal practices are the real process, and punishing their discovery only keeps them hidden.

And I would hold one line firmly: no single person should ever be the sole verifier of safety-critical test results. I have seen what happens when one person's “read” of a gauge becomes the only record that a batch was in spec. The mistake does not surface until the product is already in the market, and by then it is not a documentation problem anymore.

Finally, we as supply chain professionals should give contractors some flexibility. Defense suppliers are heavily audited, and their quality image is deserved, but specs for specs' sake are a genuine bottleneck. The pharmaceutical industry figured this out: classify which parameters actually carry the product's reliability and protect those absolutely, then flex what is merely habit. Do that classification with the senior operators in the room, because they know which settings matter and which ones are folklore.

Requirements that carry reliability are sacred. Requirements that carry only tradition are negotiable, and a surge is the right time to know the difference. That classification should produce something durable, not a conversation everyone forgets by the next shift: a change-controlled, plant-floor document, owned by the senior operators who built it, that travels with the work instructions and gets revisited every time the line changes hands.

The people inside these plants are not the problem. They are the asset, and in many cases they are the process. If we respect that, preserve what they know, and give them the certainty and the flexibility to do their jobs, a rapid ramp-up can succeed.

A final question: Do you understand your process dependencies on key players and single operators? If you aren't comfortable with a single-source supplier, why would you be comfortable with your business continuity hinging on a single individual?