Defense manufacturers across Michigan are under pressure, squeezed between a shrinking skilled labor pool, fragile supply chains, and the constant demand to keep up with new production technology. A new partnership aims to give them more room to breathe.
SME has watched Michigan's defense manufacturers deal with these challenges. To help tackle them, the organization has teamed up with the National Defense Industrial Association's (NDIA) Michigan chapter, pairing its background in manufacturing know-how and workforce training with the chapter's reach across industry, government, and academic circles.
Their shared goal is to shore up worker readiness, speed up the uptake of new technology, and build out solutions that serve the state's defense-manufacturing base. Jeannine Kunz, SME's executive director and CEO, points out that a competitive, responsive defense industrial base hinges on giving manufacturers real access to technology, skilled people, and collaborative networks — and that combining their resources opens the door to spotting problems and building practical fixes together.
The two groups kicked things off at the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium, where members of both organizations ran a roundtable and workshop with manufacturers from across the state's defense supply base. That session surfaced recurring concerns — the labor shortage, tight production capacity, quality demands, and gaps in advanced manufacturing tech — and those findings will now shape the outreach and training they roll out going forward.
Down the road, they're planning more workshops, training programs, and research sessions aimed at congressional and Department of Defense stakeholders, all meant to help manufacturers grow their capacity while supporting Michigan's defense sector. As Jennifer Tisdale of NDIA Michigan put it, linking defense strategy with manufacturing muscle isn't just an industry goal anymore — it's become essential to national security, and this collaboration is meant to make sure defense technologies can get built and scaled domestically.
For a state whose manufacturing base has long anchored national defense production, this kind of coordinated push toward workforce training and technology adoption could prove to be a meaningful shift — not just for the companies directly involved, but for the broader resilience of the defense supply chain they support.