Analyzing the Defense Industrial Base
Data updated on 2024-10-07
Executive Summary
The figures below analyze changes in the defense industrial base since 2008. The key findings are:
- The total size of the Department of Defense (DoD) supplier base has been declining year after year.
- The number of new suppliers entering the defense market has also been declining year after year.
- Many new suppliers are not innovative companies. For example, new vendors often supply:
- "Maintenance, Repair, Rebuild - Equip" (4.7%)
- "Housekeeping Services" (4.6%)
- "Travel, Lodging, and Recruitment Services" (4.1%)
- "Education and Training Services" (2.7%)
- "Maintenance, Alteration, Repair - Buildings" (2.1%)
- "Furniture" (1.6%)
On the next page, we look into new suppliers sourced by defense innovation initiatives, specifically the Air Force’s innovation team (AFWERX) initiatives within the framework of the Air Force Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program.
Figures
If you would like to explore what products/services new DoD vendors are supplying, choose a year using the slider below. The treemap will update with the count of vendors that (primarily) supply different types of products/services.
Data Definitions
- A DoD supplier is defined using the Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) for the ultimate parent of the awardee. A UEI is a unique alphanumeric code used to identify a specific commercial, nonprofit, or business entity.
- A DoD award is categorized with CGAC agency code 97. The CGAC agency code is set based on the department of the Government that provided the preponderance of the funds for an award and/or individual transactions related to an award.
- The award data used goes back to 2008, so a new supplier is a supplier that first appears in the data after 2008.
- The Produce or Service Code (PSC) for a new supplier is based on the first 2 characters of the PSC code with the highest amount of obligations (in dollars) for the award transactions to a supplier in their first year. The product and service code manual can be found at https://www.acquisition.gov/psc-manual. This site uses the manual from April 2024. Note that many PSC codes were revised in 2020, so old transactions are re-classified using the most recent version of the code.
References
This page is inspired by The Effect of Defense-Sponsored Innovation Programs on the Military's Industrial Base (2020) by Amanda Bresler and Alex Bresler. The goal is to reproduce and update some of the figures in that paper.
Note that on April 4, 2022, the unique entity identifier used across the federal government changed from the Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) Number to the Unique Entity ID. This change will lead to some small discrepancies relative to the figures in that paper.