Years ago, when Mizzen+Main was still a young brand trying to prove that performance fabric had a place in the dress shirt category, I made an argument that nobody wanted to hear: keep the manufacturing in America. Not because of patriotism in the greeting-card sense, but because of what domestic production would have enabled over time. Mizzen+Main had something unusual for a direct-to-consumer brand at that stage of its life. The product had coastal cues, the kind of clean technical construction that reads well on a dock and equally well in a briefing room. It had military adjacency in its aesthetic DNA without ever having claimed it explicitly. The fabrics performed under stress. The fit was disciplined. There was a customer profile hiding inside that brand that went well beyond the weekend golfer and the startup founder who wanted to look put-together on a Zoom call.
The argument I was making, even if I wasn’t articulating it in these terms at the time, was that Mizzen+Main had the early profile of a dual-use textile company. Not a contractor; not a uniform supplier. Something more interesting than either of those things: a civilian brand with the product credibility to serve both markets without compromising the identity that made it matter to consumers in the first place. The manufacturing stayed offshore. The brand grew, was acquired, and became a solid mid-market performance apparel business. The other version of the story, the one where domestic production and defense-adjacent positioning compound over a decade into something that looks more like a platform than a brand, never happened. I don’t think anyone regrets the decision they made. I do think the window they missed is worth understanding.
What the Chart Actually Shows
Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart published Mobilize this month, and the Palantir CTO’s argument is not subtle. The book is a call to resurrect the American industrial base before the structural consequences of its decay become irreversible. The chart that anchors the book’s diagnosis shows the Major Weapons Systems Acquisition Budget broken down by industrial base category from 1977 to 2025, and what it reveals is one of the most consequential and least discussed shifts in American economic history.
In 1977, commercial companies, companies serving defense and many other markets simultaneously, represented the largest single category of weapons systems acquisition spending. These were companies like Chrysler, which built tanks. General Mills, which built naval fire control systems. Ford, which built aircraft engines. The industrial base that won World War II and the Cold War was not a specialized defense economy. It was the American commercial economy, partially redirected. The capacity that defeated the Axis powers was the same capacity that built automobiles and refrigerators and breakfast cereal. The defense budget flowed through companies that also competed in consumer markets, which meant their manufacturing processes, their supply chains, and their engineering talent were being continuously sharpened by commercial competition.
Then the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, and the procurement world made a decision that seemed rational in the moment and has proven disastrous in hindsight. Defense spending consolidated into a smaller number of specialized contractors; I lived that too. As the Cold War came to a halt with the fall of the USSR, my father left Texas Instruments’ missile defense practice for greener pastures at Time Warner Communications. TI sold its practice to Raytheon, four years later, for $2.9 billion in cash. For an ex-military officer turned defense contractor, he segued pretty well for the time. Commercial companies exited the defense market because the margins didn’t justify the compliance costs and the procurement timelines didn’t suit commercial operating rhythms. By the 2000s, the commercial company share of the acquisition budget had fallen to a fraction of what it had been, replaced almost entirely by defense specialists and aerospace and defense companies whose entire business model was organized around government contracting. The industrial base that had once been synonymous with American economic vitality became a separate and increasingly fragile ecosystem.
Sankar and Hart’s argument is that this separation is the source of nearly every current American defense capability problem. The Pentagon now buys from companies that have no commercial discipline, no competitive pressure, and no incentive to innovate faster than the contract requires. The companies that might bring speed and manufacturing competence to defense problems have largely opted out because the procurement system was designed to exclude them. The result is the chart: a graph whose shape tells the story of American industrial decline more clearly than any policy paper or congressional hearing.
The Dual-Use Premise
he concept that Sankar and Hart are trying to recover is not new. It is, in fact, the original operating model of American industrial power. What made the United States capable of outproducing every adversary in the twentieth century was not a defense industry in the modern sense of that term. It was a manufacturing economy that could be mobilized because its capabilities were genuinely general-purpose. A factory that makes automobiles can, with the right conversion effort, make tanks. A company that supplies textile mills can, with the right contracts and specifications, supply the military. A logistics network built to move consumer goods can, under pressure, move war materiel. The dual-use company is not a strategic novelty. It is what American industry looked like when America was winning.
What has changed is that the procurement system spent thirty years actively discouraging commercial companies from participating in defense markets, through compliance requirements, contracting structures, and classification barriers that made the cost of entry prohibitive for any company that had a viable alternative. The companies that might have stayed in the market left. The companies that entered the market after that period were purpose-built for government contracting, which meant they were optimized for compliance rather than performance and for contract retention rather than innovation. The defense industrial base became a walled garden, and the plants went quiet, and China spent those thirty years building the manufacturing capacity that the United States was methodically dismantling.
Anatar and What Domestic Manufacturing Looks Like Now
Anatar is an American apparel manufacturing company building automated domestic production capacity through its Loom OS platform, an AI-orchestrated system that manages production planning, dynamic line routing, and downstream demand sensing from a single integrated software layer. The company’s Georgia manufacturing facility will be among the first domestic apparel plants built around autonomous production at commercial scale.
What makes Anatar worth discussing in the context of Mobilize is not the ecommerce angle. It is the defense relationship that has been there from the beginning without being the headline. Anatar is an approved member of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, a Manufacturing Innovation Institute funded directly by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It is also a member of the Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles Consortium, another Department of Defense Manufacturing Innovation Institute. These are not marketing relationships. They are structural integrations into the defense manufacturing innovation ecosystem, which means Anatar’s technology is being developed in the same environment, against the same standards, and in conversation with the same institutional stakeholders as the military textile supply chain.
his is what a dual-use company looks like in 2026. It is not a defense contractor that makes civilian products on the side. It is a commercial manufacturing company that has built its technical infrastructure inside the defense innovation ecosystem from the beginning, which means that when the procurement system eventually opens up to the kind of agile domestic manufacturers that Sankar and Hart are arguing for, Anatar will already be there. The capability is commercial. The relationships are governmental. The manufacturing platform serves both markets without being compromised by either.
The version of Mizzen+Main that I was imagining in those early conversations was something in this direction, even if the path from performance dress shirts to defense textile supplier requires a longer argument than most brand founders are willing to make. The aesthetic profile was right. The product performance was right. The only missing element was the domestic manufacturing decision that would have created the infrastructure for the rest of it to follow.
Ten That Could Thrive as Dual Use Brands
This list is not a provocation. Rather, it is a reading of the chart. These are brands whose manufacturing discipline, supply chain architecture, product performance, or domestic production posture already positions them for dual-use relevance, if the procurement barriers are removed and the right conversations happen.
New Balance manufactures shoes in Flimby, Maine and Lawrence, Massachusetts, making it the only major athletic footwear brand with meaningful domestic production. Those factories are already operating at standards that government procurement recognizes, and the brand’s selective distribution model demonstrates the kind of commercial discipline that defense contracts reward.
Carhartt has been outfitting people who cannot afford for their gear to fail for over 130 years. The brand’s core customer works in conditions that military logistics planners understand well. The fabric durability standards, the fit for layering, and the domestic manufacturing heritage make Carhartt a credible textile supplier for programs that need performance without the premium of purpose-built defense apparel.
YETI built an audience by applying industrial engineering standards to products that consumers actually buy. A cooler that holds ice for ten days in a Texas summer is also a cooler that holds medical supplies at temperature in a forward operating environment. The thermal management engineering behind YETI’s product line has direct applications in cold chain logistics, field medicine, and austere environment operations.
Goruck was founded by a Special Forces veteran who designed rucks for people who had already spent careers in the actual environment his products needed to survive. The brand’s commercial success is built on a customer who understands the difference between gear that performs and gear that merely claims to. The manufacturing and design standards are already calibrated for the requirements that defense programs would impose.
Filson has been making gear for people operating in genuinely harsh environments since 1897. The waxed canvas, the construction standards, and the American manufacturing base represent an existing capability that defense logistics programs have historically sourced from exactly this category of company. The brand has simply never been asked to scale that capability toward government procurement, partly because the procurement system has not made it worth asking.
Benchmade is the knife equivalent of New Balance. An American blade manufacturer operating in Oregon City with domestic production, law enforcement relationships already in place, and a customer base that includes exactly the people who carry government-issued equipment. Benchmade is not a consumer brand that could serve defense customers. It is a consumer brand that already does, at the edges, without a framework that formalizes the relationship.
American Giant built its brand on a single thesis: domestic manufacturing produces better clothing and American consumers will pay for it if the product is honest. The brand’s supply chain is fully domestic, which means it already operates inside the cost structure and accountability standards that defense textile contracts require. The barrier to entry is procurement relationship, not production capability.
Arc’teryx has operated a LEAF program, Law Enforcement and Armed Forces, for years, making it the closest thing to a proven model of what dual-use consumer apparel looks like at the premium end of the market. The LEAF program did not compromise Arc’teryx’s civilian brand. It deepened it, because the credibility of making gear for special operations units is exactly the signal that the brand’s premium consumer is paying for.
Ridge started as a wallet company and has built into a broader everyday carry ecosystem around the premise that precision manufacturing and thoughtful design make objects that people trust with genuinely important things. The manufacturing standards that Ridge applies to aluminum and titanium consumer products translate directly to the tolerance requirements of government procurement.
Mizzen+Main is on this list because it should have been here a decade ago, and because including it is more honest than pretending the argument was always obvious. The brand has the product credibility, the professional positioning, and the performance fabric heritage that dual-use textile programs require. The domestic manufacturing decision was not made. It could still be made. The window is narrower than it was, but the underlying case has not changed.
A Direct Address
I have been covering the intersection of consumer commerce and defense technology at 2PM long enough to watch the conversation move from the margins to the center. I see which centers consume the data and insights, from the Pentagon to the main lands of our adversaries. I often write with this in mind. Both the good guys and the bad guys have access to the same analyses and opinions in the modern day, and the ideas in this essay will travel accordingly.
For those in positions to act on the reform agenda that Mobilize describes, the commercial brand world is a more capable and more willing partner than the current procurement structure has allowed it to be. The brands on the list above are not waiting for a government relationship to validate their product quality. They have already proven it in commercial markets that are harder to fool than government procurement, because commercial customers can leave and defense customers historically have not been able to. What these brands need is not subsidy or preference. They need procurement barriers removed, compliance costs reduced to something proportionate to a commercial company’s operating model, and contracting timelines that do not require a company to wait three years to find out whether the relationship was worth pursuing.
Sankar and Hart end Mobilize with a call for people and ideas before hardware, which is the correct sequencing. The people building dual-use companies today, the Kaia Rhodes building Anatar inside DoD manufacturing institutes, the founders choosing domestic production when offshore would be cheaper, the brand operators applying military-grade performance standards to civilian products, are the industrial base that the reform agenda needs. The question is whether the procurement system can move fast enough to meet them before they conclude that the commercial market alone is a sufficient reason to exist.
The forges went dark because the system made it rational to let them. The system is being reformed. What happens next depends on whether the reform is fast enough to matter and ambitious enough to actually reintegrate the commercial and defense economies that the twentieth century proved were stronger together. The brands are ready. The manufacturing talent is available. The technical infrastructure is being built, in Georgia, in Oregon, in Maine and Massachusetts, by people who did not wait for a procurement officer to tell them it was worth doing.
Research and Writing by Web Smith
Web Smith is the founder of 2PM and the Chief Revenue Officer at MTN Haus, a Shopify Premier Partner agency specializing in complex eCommerce builds. The 2PM NATSEC briefing series covers the intersection of defense technology and commercial brand strategy.