As the Potomac Institute celebrates its 30th year, we are revitalizing our brand to meet the challenges of a contested global order. Central to this transformation is the "People Power" that has defined us for three decades, led by our Board of Regents. Welcome to our latest interview series: Regents in Conversation, a masterclass in the bold, unconventional thinking that gives our clients, and our nation, what it needs, not just what it wants.

In this series, CEO Jennifer Buss sits down with a few esteemed members of PIPS’ Board of Regents to discuss their respective work and careers, their experience with The Potomac Institute, and their thoughts on current and future policy topics.

In this episode of Regents in Conversation, Jen Buss speaks with Ashley (AJ) Johnson, former Technical Director of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head Division, and a Potomac Institute luminary and subject matter expert. Johnson spent 38 years in naval energetics, leading the Navy’s energetics, ordnance, and explosive ordnance disposal enterprise as Technical Director from 2014 to 2025 and championing the modernization of infrastructure that is, in places, nearly a century old. He received the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 2024.

The conversation looks at the part of national power few people notice until it runs out: the arsenal. Johnson examines how the munitions industrial base, government and commercial, fell behind during two decades of other priorities while competitors kept investing, why government arsenals cannot surge on demand, and why industry has little reason to hold idle capacity for a war that may never come. He makes the case for public-private partnership, a clear government demand signal, and modernization as an investment in deterrence, and asks the question at the center of the episode: can the United States sustain a prolonged fight against a peer competitor like China?

Key Takeaways:

• Treat the munitions industrial base as a sustained national security priority, not a crisis response. Capacity that is not maintained in peacetime cannot be surged when a conflict begins. We’ve gone from 12 tactical rocket makers in the US, to two. That’s a big capacity problem.
• Plan for a long fight, and for allies who cannot do it alone. Look at Ukraine. Ukraine has been kept in the fight only because several nations have supplied it with munitions, a reminder that no single country’s industrial base can sustain a prolonged, high-intensity war by itself.
• Use government demand signals, such as offtake commitments, to give industry a reason to hold production capacity that the market will not fund on its own.
• Modernize aging production infrastructure. Renewing the organic base is itself a deterrence investment, and new capabilities cannot be fielded from early-20th-century plants.
• Build the government and commercial bases as partners in an all-hands effort, not competitors.
• Balance investment in emerging capabilities with the proven energetics and gun systems that do the everyday work.