Thank you.
The situation in Ukraine has been enlightening for the defence department, in terms of how it manages its relationships with industry in particular.
If we look at the example of munitions and the munitions industrial base, what we're seeing today is that much of the materiel we are utilizing and providing to Ukraine—such as 155-millimetre rounds of artillery—are things we don't buy consistently or spend a lot of money on, compared with the rest of the materiel we purchase throughout the Department of Defense.
The consequence of that is an inconsistent demand signal to the defence industry. Without purchase orders and money coming in on contract, companies will not usually invest their capital in facilities to have the production capacity for something the Department of Defense is not buying regularly. As such, they optimize their production lines. With the goal of efficiency and value, they ensure they optimize and reduce these lines. The effect is that, when we ask them to suddenly produce more—in this example, 155-millimetre shells—they are not able to immediately start producing more. It takes time to have that throughput go through the industrial base.
In this case, the ramp-up was several months. At the beginning of the response to Ukraine, it was well cited in news articles that some munitions were taking upwards of two years for their estimated arrival time. The Department of Defense was concerned with that and looked very closely at why that is.
As I said, there is often a symbiotic relationship between the defence-industrial base and the customer—in this case, the Department of Defense.