Ford Motor Company once formed a pillar in the arsenal of democracy. It has not been one for nearly three generations but that is beginning to change.
In April 2026, the Pentagon opened discussions with Ford, General Motors, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh about taking on defense production. In June, Ford cut their first contract with the Pentagon in a generation when the Army selected Ford to build three prototypes of its Infantry Squad Vehicle Heavy (ISV-H), on the F-Series Super Duty. The requirement is troop transport plus as much as 60 kW of exportable power for command posts, drones, and sensors. At a potential contract size of 600 vehicles, this is not a repeat of the Willow Run B-24 facility, but we are also not facing an existential threat like World War II. While the contract may be a modified Super Duty truck, this is Ford’s most significant defense vehicle work since the Cold War, and after a generation on the sidelines, a meaningful return.
For the last 30 years, staying in the sidelines was a deliberate and correct choice. Ford’s defense arm, Ford Aerospace, was a credible mid-tier prime during the Cold War that built the Chaparral surface-to-air system, Sidewinder components, and Intelsat spacecraft. Ford read the post-Cold War military drawdown trend early and sold the business to Loral in 1990, which then sold it to Lockheed in 1996. Rightfully so, Ford’s rightful place in American life was freedom of movement, not munitions. Choosing not to retain a subscale, non-core asset in a market whose customer was actively shrinking was sound business decision making. Given the information available, it was the sane thing to do.
Ford does not build ships but its products are crucial to maritime combat power
Today, Ford does not build ships, missiles and naval combat systems. Its portfolio looks irrelevant to the maritime fight, and a reasonable CMS reader would ask what a truck company has to offer the Navy.
The answer is that the maritime fight has expanded beyond the waves ashore and into the electromagnetic spectrum, where Ford can make a difference. Strike ranges now run well beyond a thousand miles, which means land base fires can hold entire maritime regions, like the East China Sea at risk from inland batteries. The formations built to project that lethality are enabled by ground vehicles: the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force, firing SM-6 and Tomahawk from its Mid-Range Capability battery, and the Marine Littoral Regiment, carrying anti-ship missiles into the island chains. These are mobile land frigates that roll on wheels. Supporting these munitions sit a kill chain that finds, tracks, and targets ships across thousands of miles, and that kill chain is ravenous for electrical power. Distributed sensors, communications relays, and electronic warfare nodes are power hungry and increasingly dispersed. Sensing at the edge and conducting EW forward requires generation and storage forward. Vehicles, power, batteries, and ground autonomy at scale is growing to be part of the foundation of naval combat power, and these are Ford’s core competency.
The first gap between Ford and the Pentagon: scale
Two enormous gaps sit between Ford and the Pentagon, and the first is scale.
The Department is racing to multiply production of THAAD, Tomahawk, AMRAAM, Patriot, SM-6, and other interceptors, moving from hundreds of units a year toward the low thousands. For the current defense industrial base, that is a generational expansion but For Ford, those production demand signals are more than 10x beneath the threshold of what the company would recognize as manufacturing. A few thousand units a year is far too small to industrialize, and it is at industrialization that every advantage the Pentagon wants from Ford actually lives.
Volume
What it represents
~2,000 to 5,000 units/year
Pentagon replenishment need per major munitions and vehicle programs, even under the current expansion
~50,000 units/year
Practical floor for a dedicated Ford line: single shift at a small plant, e.g. Mustang
200,000 to 300,000 units/year
The efficient band, where the line purrs: 2-3 shifts at a sizable plant, e.g. Bronco, F-150, Super Duty
A Ford line becomes viable, not efficient at volume. Asking Ford to build ten to twenty times below its floor asks a company optimized for a quarter million units to operate where none of its cost curves, or supplier pricing, advantages apply. At that band Ford is a mediocre and expensive supplier, and it would earn that reputation. Even as a proud Navy veteran and understanding the importance of rebuilding our defense industrial base, I would not advise Ford Motor Company to enter into a contract building a bespoke vehicle or platform at 5,000 units per year. That would inevitably be a lose-lose situation for all parties involved.
The second gap: consent
At a recent all-hands, an employee challenged Jim Farley on why Ford would help build weapons used in the Middle East. The exchange was tense.
The overwhelming majority of Ford’s 170,000-plus employees did not sign up to build munitions. They took jobs at a company whose stated purpose is freedom of movement. At a defense prime like Raytheon, that consent is implicit at hiring as everyone at Raytheon knows what Raytheon does. The Pentagon cannot assume this level of consent for a place like Ford.
Ford is a fundamentally American company, and we know that American success is inseparable from Ford’s own success. However, in my opinion, the United States government has not yet provided enough strategic clarity and imperative to Ford for us divert a significant part of our technical and financial resources to defense production.
Again in my opinion Ford’s main objectives today are to provide mobility and compelling vehicles to our American and world-wide customers. We also have much to catch up to compete pound for pound against advanced Chinese EVs on both capability, manufacturability and especially cost. I believe that winning this contest will have even greater overarching consequence to American industrial might and overall prosperity than specific munition programs. However, I also understand that geostrategic threats can quickly evolve and it is totally possible that the United States as a country faces a grave military situation where defense production must take precedence as it did in 1942.
The Pentagon, and especially its acquisition and force modernization functions have rightfully declared wartime footing. It can also be simultaneously true that the country has not arrived at wartime footing. The moral imperative that made Willow Run possible came from an attack on the United States as a country and a threat to its survival, and absent that condition, corporate willingness that outruns workforce consent will produce attrition, recruiting damage, and friction on the very lines the Pentagon needs.
Another potential friction point is labor. The UAW was allegedly not part of the initial discussions. A union is a critical arm of productive capacity, not a recipient of decisions made above it, and the government should consult the UAW directly and separately rather than through corporations. Defense work is high wage, domestic content mandated, and countercyclical, which makes it one of the most favorable union industrial jobs available. I believe the unions are eager to help, but would rightfully appreciate deals being struck over their heads.
What Ford should do today: build surge capability, not the line
Both gaps point away from low-rate munitions production. I believe Ford could build the factory design, tooling, and hold them in reserve. Call it a break the glass capability.
The Pentagon and Ford should jointly select a critical maritime strike weapon, like the LRASM, and hand Ford’s manufacturing engineers the design. Their task would be to optimize its assembly for automotive plants and supply chains: stamped structures in place of machined ones, auto-derivative electronics, part counts and tolerances that Ford’s tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers already meet at volume. Design for manufacture is the highest leverage work that Ford can do for the Pentagon in the short term.
Then Ford should tool up and test for viability. Ford would design, fabricate, and validate the dies, fixtures, and test equipment under Defense Production Act authority, and runs a low rate lot to prove the process meets necessary quality metrics. Following the GM supply chain resiliency model, Ford would build up both the tooling and a reserve of critical components, and then holds them. Those elements could then sit secured in reserve at the Army’s Detroit Arsenal, ready to be switched on when a military national emergency arrives.
This strategy needs strategic agreement in advance. Ford and the government must set, in writing and before any crisis, the national emergency standard that triggers conversion: the authorities invoked, the compensation and indemnification, and the disposition of commercial obligations. My own view is that the threshold should not an expeditionary campaign, however serious, but something closer to a kinetic peer conflict threatening allied survival. The three scenarios I have in mind is an 1) physical attack to the homeland, 2) physical attack to our Western Pacific treaty allies, and 3) physical invasion of NATO territory. It is critical that these strategic lines are drawn in daylight with the UAW in the room, rather than improvised under fire.
What Ford should do continuously: build the logistical and energy backbone
Ford should not hesitate to build the joint force’s logistical, transportation, and energy backbone now, at commercial volumes.
Ford’s decisive contribution in 1942 was never the bomber. It was the truck, jeep, and the tank engine which enabled American forces to move faster than the enemy could react and keep it supplied once it arrived. The modern version of that requirement is electrical, and it maps directly onto Ford’s core technologies. Ford Energy’s organic battery production gives distributed formations storage they can carry and disperse. EREV platforms can anchor mobile microgrids that generate onboard from available fuel, harvest opportunistically. This electric backbone can store, distribute, and recharge a variety of platforms including command posts, communications, EW nodes, and air/ground drones. The ISV-H prototypes being tested around in Fort Bragg was thrown together in weeks, and imagine what continued collaboration could deliver.
On the software side, BlueCruise and Ford’s autonomy stack can take the driver out of the logistical train. In Ukraine, resupply driving has become one of the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield, with convoys hunted by loitering drones. An autonomous or optionally crewed logistics fleet removes the human from the most lethal and unglamorous task in modern war. These requirements like tactical and support vehicles, expeditionary power, and ground robotics, are measured in the tens of thousands of units. This is the scale where Ford’s manufacturing prowess can actually become a warfighting advantage rather than a compromise.
Conclusion
Ford’s participation in the ISV-Heavy competition is a meaningful return to an industry that Ford vacated for more than a generation. I believe there are both engineering and strategic limitations to taking on low-rate (in Ford’s standards) munitions production until national or allied national survival is at stake. However, Ford can shape the maritime fight today by building the vehicles, grids and autonomy that forms the backbone of the kill chain rather than the warhead at the end of it. If we can build that backbone continuously, hold the arsenal in reserve with its trigger defined in advance, then Ford becomes a national industrial asset that both delivers much needed capability at scale, and becomes a deterrence factor against our adversaries.
LT Gary Kim is a Manager at the Ford Motor Company, and serves on USNI’s editorial board and board of directors. He is also a reservist with the Seabees of 7th Naval Construction Regiment, and a graduate of the Wharton School.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy, Ford or other institutions listed. He writes as a Ford employee with close ties to the Navy in a personal capacity.
By LT Gary Kim, USNR
Ford Motor Company once formed a pillar in the arsenal of democracy. It has not been one for nearly three generations but that is beginning to change.
In April 2026, the Pentagon opened discussions with Ford, General Motors, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh about taking on defense production. In June, Ford cut their first contract with the Pentagon in a generation when the Army selected Ford to build three prototypes of its Infantry Squad Vehicle Heavy (ISV-H), on the F-Series Super Duty. The requirement is troop transport plus as much as 60 kW of exportable power for command posts, drones, and sensors. At a potential contract size of 600 vehicles, this is not a repeat of the Willow Run B-24 facility, but we are also not facing an existential threat like World War II. While the contract may be a modified Super Duty truck, this is Ford’s most significant defense vehicle work since the Cold War, and after a generation on the sidelines, a meaningful return.
For the last 30 years, staying in the sidelines was a deliberate and correct choice. Ford’s defense arm, Ford Aerospace, was a credible mid-tier prime during the Cold War that built the Chaparral surface-to-air system, Sidewinder components, and Intelsat spacecraft. Ford read the post-Cold War military drawdown trend early and sold the business to Loral in 1990, which then sold it to Lockheed in 1996. Rightfully so, Ford’s rightful place in American life was freedom of movement, not munitions. Choosing not to retain a subscale, non-core asset in a market whose customer was actively shrinking was sound business decision making. Given the information available, it was the sane thing to do.
Ford does not build ships but its products are crucial to maritime combat power
Today, Ford does not build ships, missiles and naval combat systems. Its portfolio looks irrelevant to the maritime fight, and a reasonable CMS reader would ask what a truck company has to offer the Navy.
The answer is that the maritime fight has expanded beyond the waves ashore and into the electromagnetic spectrum, where Ford can make a difference. Strike ranges now run well beyond a thousand miles, which means land base fires can hold entire maritime regions, like the East China Sea at risk from inland batteries. The formations built to project that lethality are enabled by ground vehicles: the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force, firing SM-6 and Tomahawk from its Mid-Range Capability battery, and the Marine Littoral Regiment, carrying anti-ship missiles into the island chains. These are mobile land frigates that roll on wheels. Supporting these munitions sit a kill chain that finds, tracks, and targets ships across thousands of miles, and that kill chain is ravenous for electrical power. Distributed sensors, communications relays, and electronic warfare nodes are power hungry and increasingly dispersed. Sensing at the edge and conducting EW forward requires generation and storage forward. Vehicles, power, batteries, and ground autonomy at scale is growing to be part of the foundation of naval combat power, and these are Ford’s core competency.
The first gap between Ford and the Pentagon: scale
Two enormous gaps sit between Ford and the Pentagon, and the first is scale.
The Department is racing to multiply production of THAAD, Tomahawk, AMRAAM, Patriot, SM-6, and other interceptors, moving from hundreds of units a year toward the low thousands. For the current defense industrial base, that is a generational expansion but For Ford, those production demand signals are more than 10x beneath the threshold of what the company would recognize as manufacturing. A few thousand units a year is far too small to industrialize, and it is at industrialization that every advantage the Pentagon wants from Ford actually lives.
A Ford line becomes viable, not efficient at volume. Asking Ford to build ten to twenty times below its floor asks a company optimized for a quarter million units to operate where none of its cost curves, or supplier pricing, advantages apply. At that band Ford is a mediocre and expensive supplier, and it would earn that reputation. Even as a proud Navy veteran and understanding the importance of rebuilding our defense industrial base, I would not advise Ford Motor Company to enter into a contract building a bespoke vehicle or platform at 5,000 units per year. That would inevitably be a lose-lose situation for all parties involved.
The second gap: consent
At a recent all-hands, an employee challenged Jim Farley on why Ford would help build weapons used in the Middle East. The exchange was tense.
The overwhelming majority of Ford’s 170,000-plus employees did not sign up to build munitions. They took jobs at a company whose stated purpose is freedom of movement. At a defense prime like Raytheon, that consent is implicit at hiring as everyone at Raytheon knows what Raytheon does. The Pentagon cannot assume this level of consent for a place like Ford.
Ford is a fundamentally American company, and we know that American success is inseparable from Ford’s own success. However, in my opinion, the United States government has not yet provided enough strategic clarity and imperative to Ford for us divert a significant part of our technical and financial resources to defense production.
Again in my opinion Ford’s main objectives today are to provide mobility and compelling vehicles to our American and world-wide customers. We also have much to catch up to compete pound for pound against advanced Chinese EVs on both capability, manufacturability and especially cost. I believe that winning this contest will have even greater overarching consequence to American industrial might and overall prosperity than specific munition programs. However, I also understand that geostrategic threats can quickly evolve and it is totally possible that the United States as a country faces a grave military situation where defense production must take precedence as it did in 1942.
The Pentagon, and especially its acquisition and force modernization functions have rightfully declared wartime footing. It can also be simultaneously true that the country has not arrived at wartime footing. The moral imperative that made Willow Run possible came from an attack on the United States as a country and a threat to its survival, and absent that condition, corporate willingness that outruns workforce consent will produce attrition, recruiting damage, and friction on the very lines the Pentagon needs.
Another potential friction point is labor. The UAW was allegedly not part of the initial discussions. A union is a critical arm of productive capacity, not a recipient of decisions made above it, and the government should consult the UAW directly and separately rather than through corporations. Defense work is high wage, domestic content mandated, and countercyclical, which makes it one of the most favorable union industrial jobs available. I believe the unions are eager to help, but would rightfully appreciate deals being struck over their heads.
What Ford should do today: build surge capability, not the line
Both gaps point away from low-rate munitions production. I believe Ford could build the factory design, tooling, and hold them in reserve. Call it a break the glass capability.
The Pentagon and Ford should jointly select a critical maritime strike weapon, like the LRASM, and hand Ford’s manufacturing engineers the design. Their task would be to optimize its assembly for automotive plants and supply chains: stamped structures in place of machined ones, auto-derivative electronics, part counts and tolerances that Ford’s tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers already meet at volume. Design for manufacture is the highest leverage work that Ford can do for the Pentagon in the short term.
Then Ford should tool up and test for viability. Ford would design, fabricate, and validate the dies, fixtures, and test equipment under Defense Production Act authority, and runs a low rate lot to prove the process meets necessary quality metrics. Following the GM supply chain resiliency model, Ford would build up both the tooling and a reserve of critical components, and then holds them. Those elements could then sit secured in reserve at the Army’s Detroit Arsenal, ready to be switched on when a military national emergency arrives.
This strategy needs strategic agreement in advance. Ford and the government must set, in writing and before any crisis, the national emergency standard that triggers conversion: the authorities invoked, the compensation and indemnification, and the disposition of commercial obligations. My own view is that the threshold should not an expeditionary campaign, however serious, but something closer to a kinetic peer conflict threatening allied survival. The three scenarios I have in mind is an 1) physical attack to the homeland, 2) physical attack to our Western Pacific treaty allies, and 3) physical invasion of NATO territory. It is critical that these strategic lines are drawn in daylight with the UAW in the room, rather than improvised under fire.
What Ford should do continuously: build the logistical and energy backbone
Ford should not hesitate to build the joint force’s logistical, transportation, and energy backbone now, at commercial volumes.
Ford’s decisive contribution in 1942 was never the bomber. It was the truck, jeep, and the tank engine which enabled American forces to move faster than the enemy could react and keep it supplied once it arrived. The modern version of that requirement is electrical, and it maps directly onto Ford’s core technologies. Ford Energy’s organic battery production gives distributed formations storage they can carry and disperse. EREV platforms can anchor mobile microgrids that generate onboard from available fuel, harvest opportunistically. This electric backbone can store, distribute, and recharge a variety of platforms including command posts, communications, EW nodes, and air/ground drones. The ISV-H prototypes being tested around in Fort Bragg was thrown together in weeks, and imagine what continued collaboration could deliver.
On the software side, BlueCruise and Ford’s autonomy stack can take the driver out of the logistical train. In Ukraine, resupply driving has become one of the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield, with convoys hunted by loitering drones. An autonomous or optionally crewed logistics fleet removes the human from the most lethal and unglamorous task in modern war. These requirements like tactical and support vehicles, expeditionary power, and ground robotics, are measured in the tens of thousands of units. This is the scale where Ford’s manufacturing prowess can actually become a warfighting advantage rather than a compromise.
Conclusion
Ford’s participation in the ISV-Heavy competition is a meaningful return to an industry that Ford vacated for more than a generation. I believe there are both engineering and strategic limitations to taking on low-rate (in Ford’s standards) munitions production until national or allied national survival is at stake. However, Ford can shape the maritime fight today by building the vehicles, grids and autonomy that forms the backbone of the kill chain rather than the warhead at the end of it. If we can build that backbone continuously, hold the arsenal in reserve with its trigger defined in advance, then Ford becomes a national industrial asset that both delivers much needed capability at scale, and becomes a deterrence factor against our adversaries.
LT Gary Kim is a Manager at the Ford Motor Company, and serves on USNI’s editorial board and board of directors. He is also a reservist with the Seabees of 7th Naval Construction Regiment, and a graduate of the Wharton School.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy, Ford or other institutions listed. He writes as a Ford employee with close ties to the Navy in a personal capacity.