When the sovereign opens the armory to the merchant

Fox News reports that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has unveiled a scheme by which private defense companies may book military test ranges within thirty days through a new online portal — a service described, with some relish, as 'concierge access.' The declared purpose is speed: to move weapons from laboratory to battlefield more quickly, and to keep American arms competitive. I have no quarrel with the desire for a capable national defense. In The Wealth of Nations I ranked defense as the first duty of the sovereign, the one public expenditure that cannot be left to private provision alone. On that ground, the Army Secretary and I are agreed.

But let us be precise about what is being offered here. Military test ranges are public infrastructure — built by public revenue, maintained by public labor, secured by public law. When the sovereign makes such infrastructure available to a particular class of merchant on preferential terms, the arrangement requires scrutiny. The question is not whether defense firms should have access to these ranges; of course they should, where the public purpose is genuinely served. The question is whether 'concierge access' — a phrase that belongs to a luxury hotel, not a republic — signals that a narrow producer interest is being served at the public's expense.

I spent considerable energy in my writings on the tendency of merchants and manufacturers to use their proximity to government to obtain privileges that the public never consciously granted. The chartered monopolies of my own century — the East India Company chief among them — were the most conspicuous examples. But the mechanism is universal: those who supply the sovereign with necessary goods are well-placed to extract, alongside a fair price, a set of institutional advantages that compound their position over time. 'Concierge access' to sovereign infrastructure is precisely the sort of advantage that, once granted, becomes an expectation, then a right, and finally a barrier against any competitor who might otherwise discipline the incumbent's pricing.

I should mark clearly what I cannot know from the lead alone. Whether this portal is genuinely open to any qualified firm, or whether 'concierge' is a courtesy word for a queue that the large incumbents — Lockheed, Raytheon, and their peers — will inevitably dominate, I cannot say; that is inference, not recollection. If the access is genuinely competitive, the arrangement may be no more than a sensible reduction in bureaucratic friction, and I would applaud it. Friction in procurement is a real cost borne ultimately by the public purse. But if the portal becomes, in practice, a privilege for firms already embedded in the defense establishment, then the sovereign has become the instrument of a mercantile interest, not its master.

The institutional question, as always, is the decisive one. Who sets the terms of access? Who audits whether the public receives fair value for the use of its ranges? Is there a mechanism by which a new entrant — a smaller firm with a genuinely superior technology — can compete on equal footing with a firm that has spent decades cultivating its relationship with the Army? These are not hostile questions; they are the questions any honest steward of public resources must answer. The market for defense procurement is, by its nature, thin and concentrated. There is no invisible hand operating here. What operates instead is institutional design, and the quality of that design determines whether the public is served or merely billed.