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
The 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.
This 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 I was imagining in those early conversations was something along these lines, even if the path from performance dress shirts to a 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 Already Building the Dual-Use Industrial Base
The list I want to make is not about brand aesthetics or defense-adjacent positioning. It is about companies sitting inside the Ohio-Indiana-Michigan-Pennsylvania manufacturing corridor that are already producing the kind of output, or already developing the kind of platform, that a reformed procurement system should be routing contracts through. These are not aspirational candidates. Most of them are already there in some form. What they need is not encouragement. They need the procurement barrier removed.
Rogue Fitness consumed 26 million pounds of steel in a single year at its 800,000-square-foot factory on East Fifth Avenue in Columbus, along with 14 million feet of welding wire. The company already sells equipment to military units, collegiate programs, and the professional sports teams whose athletes feed into the services. The manufacturing process that produces a barbell to tolerance is the same process that produces precision steel components for any program that needs them. Rogue is not a defense company. It is an Ohio steel fabricator with a consumer brand attached, and that distinction is the entire point.
Path Robotics is a Columbus startup that has trained its Obsidian AI model on tens of millions of welded inches and deployed autonomous welding cells into fabrication shops across the country. In February 2026, Path signed an MOU with HII, the nation’s largest military shipbuilder, to bring autonomous welding to naval shipyards, and separately announced a deployment with Saronic, the autonomous vessel builder, in Louisiana. The intelligence behind those systems, the vision models, the machine learning architecture, the software stack, is an Ohio product built in Columbus. Path is not aspiring to defense relevance. It is already there, and the procurement system has barely noticed.
Vertiv, headquartered in Westerville and manufacturing in Delaware and Ironton, Ohio, announced in late March 2026 a $50 million expansion of its Ohio facilities adding up to 730 new jobs through 2029. The company builds the power management, thermal management, and critical digital infrastructure that keeps data centers running without interruption. That is also what keeps a command and control facility operational under pressure, what keeps a forward operating base’s communications infrastructure alive, what keeps any mission-critical computing environment running when the grid is contested. Vertiv became a Fortune 500 company in 2026 and its technology is already embedded in defense-adjacent infrastructure worldwide. The formal relationship to the procurement system is the only thing missing.
French Oil Mill Machinery has been building hydraulic presses in Piqua, Ohio, since 1900. The company already lists aerospace, military, and defense as a primary market on its website. Its custom hydraulic presses are used in composite manufacturing, rubber molding, and lamination processes that appear throughout the defense supply chain, from aircraft components to armor systems. French Oil is the company on this list that most clearly illustrates what the chart is measuring: a commercial manufacturer with over a century of domestic production that has always served both markets, quietly, without the procurement system building the kind of formal relationship that would make that capability visible and scalable.
Lincoln Electric, headquartered in Cleveland, is the world’s largest manufacturer of welding products and a company whose equipment is already in every serious fabrication shop in the country, including the ones building defense hardware. The dual-use argument for Lincoln Electric is straightforward: the company that makes the machines that weld the components is upstream of every manufacturing program in the defense supply chain. Lincoln Electric’s commercial relationships with fabricators and its technology development roadmap, including automation and AI-assisted welding, position it as a platform company for the industrial mobilization that Sankar and Hart are describing.
Cummins, based in Columbus, Indiana, manufactures diesel and alternative fuel engines that power commercial vehicles, construction equipment, and generators worldwide. They also power military vehicles, generators in forward operating bases, and the logistics infrastructure that keeps any sustained operation functional. Cummins already has defense relationships through its commercial engine business. The question the procurement reform agenda should be asking is not whether Cummins can serve defense programs. It is why those relationships are not more formal, more durable, and more strategically structured.
Parker Hannifin, headquartered in Cleveland, makes the motion and control technologies that appear in aircraft, satellites, defense systems, and the industrial equipment that builds all of the above. Parker’s commercial business is already deeply integrated with aerospace and defense through its product portfolio, and the company has formal defense programs. It belongs on this list not as an aspirational candidate but as a demonstration of what a mature dual-use industrial company looks like, and as a standard against which the others here should be measured.
Kennametal, based outside Pittsburgh, makes cutting tools, tooling systems, and engineered components from tungsten carbide and other advanced materials. Its products are used in machining operations that produce defense hardware, aerospace components, and precision manufactured parts across the industrial base. Kennametal is the kind of company that the chart is mourning the loss of: a materials science company with deep manufacturing expertise whose commercial and defense customers require the same underlying capability.
Dana Incorporated, headquartered in Maumee, Ohio, makes drivetrain and sealing products for commercial vehicles, off-highway equipment, and industrial applications. The same components that Dana engineers for heavy commercial trucks also appear in military vehicle programs, because the underlying engineering problem is identical: transmitting power reliably under load, in harsh conditions, without failure. Dana already has defense programs. The barrier to deeper integration is not capability. It is the procurement structure that treats commercial and defense supply chains as separate systems when the twentieth century proved they function best as one.
Whirlpool, based in Benton Harbor, Michigan, is the largest appliance manufacturer in the country, with domestic production and a supply chain built for volume. The dual-use case for Whirlpool is not about appliances. It is about the fact that a company capable of producing millions of precision-engineered units per year from domestic factories has the manufacturing management systems, the quality control infrastructure, and the workforce scale that a mobilization scenario requires. General Mills did not win World War II by making cereal for the Army. It won by demonstrating that its production capacity and manufacturing discipline could be redirected. Whirlpool is the closest contemporary equivalent in the consumer goods space.
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.
韦伯-史密斯的研究与写作
Web Smith is an outside consultant, the founder of 2PM, and the Chief Revenue Officer at MTN Haus, a Shopify Premier Partner agency specializing in complex commerce systems. The 2PM NATSEC briefing series covers the intersection of defense technology and commercial brand strategy.
