At the Farnborough International Airshow this week, the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry is showcasing the latest innovations and technical capabilities. But right now, one factor may matter even more to market share: the ability to deliver key defense equipment at scale with quality and certainty, and to sustain the capability under pressure.

With the demand for defense equipment rising faster than the supply can support, throughput—the volume of units processed, produced, and transported—is taking on a new urgency. In the US alone, the three largest defense primes together hold a combined backlog of US$557 billion, according to public filings. And the European defense industry filled an average of only 30% of their backlog in 2024. These backlogs are not just a production problem.

While focused solutions like automation, advanced AI, digital engineering, and smart operations, can help meet demand, the wide-ranging ecosystem that is the A&D industry may mean companies need to take a more expansive approach. Working across that ecosystem will most likely be key to clearing those backlogs, yielding improved throughput, strengthening readiness, and, ultimately, competitive advantage.

What’s the hold-up?

In high-intensity, contested environments, demand doesn’t ramp—it spikes. Many defense systems are high-unit-cost, long-lead-time items constrained by specialized components, energetics capacity, and a limited pool of qualified tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers. So, while demand for munitions can surge rapidly, procurement typically can’t always follow suit—with lead times often spanning two to four years.

Those long lead times are due primarily to the fact that weapons production depends on several core workstreams. And the challenge with meeting increased demand is that at any one of these stages, hold-ups can occur:

• Design: If a design is not engineered for repeatability or built for scale from the start, production can become a series of one-off fixes.
• Qualification: If testing capacity and certification pipelines don’t keep pace with production plans, they can become a constraint.
• Quality control: Quality controls that work at low volumes can break at scale—meaning delays, rework, and cost overruns.
• Sub-tier suppliers: Tier one capacity doesn’t matter if deeper-tier suppliers can’t meet demand.
• Compliance: Regulatory requirements, especially cybersecurity, can restrict who can participate and how quickly the supply base can expand.

With the potential for bottlenecks to occur at any point in this wide ecosystem, the challenge can become one of coordination. And any efforts at scaling may need to include aligning across that ecosystem—and not just optimizing at any one part of it.

This is why the challenge should be viewed as a defense industrial base challenge, not only a manufacturing challenge. Defense readiness can depend on the performance of a broader network: primes, sub-tier suppliers, engineering organizations, technology providers, logistics partners, sustainment providers, and public-sector stakeholders. Improving readiness therefore may require improving the resilience, visibility, and responsiveness of the full industrial ecosystem.

An ecosystem approach

Developing an ecosystem operating model that coordinates among the various workstreams can help address the bottlenecks that stall throughput. An ecosystem design that focuses on producibility, qualification throughput, quality maturity, and multi-tier readiness can help drive competitive advantage. It can create repeatable mechanisms that connect innovators, primes, sub-tier suppliers, and demand signals into a production system that scales with rate, quality, and delivery certainty.

Sharing governance and incentives along with data and configuration baselines as well as repeatable qualifications are key mechanisms that can help enable an ecosystem approach. So is a sales, inventory, and operations planning cadence that continuously reconciles demand, inventory, capacity, and constraints across tiers. Interoperability is also important. Shared standards, trusted data environments, common configuration baselines, and connected digital threads can help reduce friction across tiers and improve the speed at which capabilities move from design to production, certification, deployment, and sustainment.

A&D companies can also turn to a graduated set of ecosystem strategies to help address bottlenecks and scale production. For example, rather than treating suppliers or emerging companies as transactional vendors, some primes are building deeper industrial relationships designed to help accelerate production readiness. These collaborations can begin with pilot programs or capability integration efforts that validate interoperability and manufacturability. As production requirements grow, they can evolve into shared production lines, joint ventures, or coordinated investments in capacity.

Companies may also pursue investments that secure access to constrained capabilities without requiring full ownership. Minority investments, long-term supply agreements, or capacity reservations can help stabilize key important sub-tier production while allowing suppliers to retain operational independence.

But sometimes removing a production bottleneck requires direct ownership. Here, acquisitions can become a strategic tool, not primarily for consolidation, but to resolve specific industrial constraints such as limited production capacity, specialized certifications, sustainment capabilities, or fragile sub-tier supply chains. The strategic question is no longer simply whether to make, buy, or partner. It is how to design an industrial ecosystem that can scale with demand, absorb shocks, and regenerate capacity when readiness may require it.

Beyond prototypes

The A&D industry’s scaling gap reflects a coordination challenge. By aligning innovators, primes, sub-tiers, and demand signals into a repeatable production system A&D companies can start to meet that challenge. Ecosystem players should function as force multipliers so that speed can translate into certified, scalable output, not just faster prototypes. Because in an era where time to replenish is a strategic metric, technical advantage matters only when it can be produced, certified, delivered, sustained, and regenerated at the rate readiness demands. The future of defense may not be defined by innovation alone, but by the ability of industrial ecosystems to help turn innovation into readiness.

Deloitte Global will be available to discuss the future of defense at this week’s Farnborough International Airshow. For more on the A&D industry and throughput, see the Deloitte Insights report, Throughput, not just innovation, may define the future of US defense manufacturing and industrial scale or visit the Global Energy, Resources & Industrials practice page on Deloitte.com.