Building Better Defense – Industrial Cooperation
What are the best ways to strengthen an alliance? The most immediate, and most discussed, method is to establish the visible and permanent presence of a security guarantor like the United States on allied territory. But there’s another, often overlooked, option: shared defense manufacturing. When allies produce weapons platforms together, they tend to stick together once war starts.
In CEPA’s latest Intelligence Brief—No. 4: Enduring Allies—Senior Fellow Jakub Grygiel assess how technological integration, joint defense manufacturing and other layers of defense-industrial cooperation strengthen the credibility of a great power commitment to frontline states. The report concludes that allies with close defense-industrial links are better able to deter a neighboring rival and more likely to remain allies in the event of a military crisis.
