The arsenal of democracy needs a faster door

According to Fox News, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has announced that defense companies can now book military test ranges within 30 days through a new online portal offering what the Army calls 'concierge access.' The aim is to collapse the bureaucratic delay between a firm's prototype and a live test — between invention and readiness.

I spent years arguing that manufactures are not a luxury but a sinew of national power. My Report on the Subject of Manufactures made the case at length: a nation that depends on others for the instruments of its own defense is a nation at the mercy of others. The same logic applies to weapons as it did to cloth and iron. If a firm has built something that might serve the republic's defense, every week lost in scheduling paperwork is a week the adversary does not lose.

The deeper principle here is one I would call the productive partnership between energetic government and private ingenuity. I am no enemy of private enterprise — far from it. I founded a bank; I understood that commerce is the engine. But I also understood that government must be the active partner that sets the conditions for commercial vigor to serve the national interest. A public test range made available swiftly and systematically to qualified firms is precisely that partnership. The infrastructure is public; the innovation is private; the benefit is national.

I will mark the following as inference, since the Fox News report does not supply the full detail: the critical question is whether access to these ranges comes with appropriate oversight, security protocols, and fair competition rules — so that the program does not simply reward the largest incumbents at the expense of smaller, more innovative firms. Concentrated private power in the defense industrial base is its own form of danger. A 'concierge' must not become a concierge only for those already at the head of the table.

There is also a public credit dimension that the report does not raise but that I cannot ignore. Defense readiness is ultimately a fiscal matter. A nation that can test and field weapons quickly spends less on emergency catch-up procurement later. Efficiency in the development pipeline is, in the long run, a form of fiscal discipline — it converts the same appropriated dollar into more capability. I would commend that argument to any skeptic in the Congress who views this program merely as a favor to contractors.

My recommendation is plain: support the program, accelerate it, and build into it a transparent set of access rules that favor speed for all qualified firms — not merely the well-connected. Publish the queue. Publish the wait times. Let competition do its work, with the public interest as the fixed star by which the whole enterprise is steered.