Wartime industry: civilian conversion and dual-use goods

No long war is won on day-one stockpiles. As soon as consumption of ammunition, vehicles and spares outstrips output, the contest moves to the factories, and the military question becomes an industrial one: how much can a country build, how fast, and where are the bottlenecks.

History offers two uncomfortable lessons. Converting civilian industry to military output is possible and sometimes spectacular. But it is almost never quick: timelines run in quarters and years rather than weeks, and the binding constraint is rarely money.

The classic precedent: 1939-1945

The Second World War remains the most studied laboratory of industrial mobilisation. In the United States, the War Production Board redirected whole branches of the economy: carmakers stopped building private cars and turned out tanks, trucks, engines and aircraft, with landmark cases such as Ford's purpose-built Willow Run plant for the B-24 bomber. Britain had prepared shadow factories before the war — civilian plants designed from the outset to switch to aircraft production.

The Soviet Union faced the problem in its most extreme form: the 1941 evacuation of hundreds of industrial facilities east of the Urals, with machinery, drawings and workers moved by rail as the front advanced. The economic studies of Mark Harrison and Alan Milward agree on the essential point: what mattered was not one-off ingenuity but the ability to plan, standardise designs and sustain supply chains over years.

What converts easily and what does not

The recurring bottleneck is not the hull or the body shell but chemical inputs and large forging and pressing tools. European debates about raising artillery shell output since 2022 have turned on exactly that: powders, nitrocellulose, propellant charges, explosive filling capacity and the availability of skilled staff. That is why the European Union created a dedicated instrument, the 2023 ASAP regulation, to fund capacity expansion in ammunition.

What dual-use goods are

Dual-use goods are items, software and technologies with legitimate civilian applications that can also serve military purposes or weapons of mass destruction programmes. They are not weapons; they are inputs. Precision bearings, computer-controlled machine tools, thermal sights, gyroscopes, commercial drones and certain chemical precursors all fall into this category.

Hence a dedicated export-control regime. In the European Union it rests on Regulation 2021/821, which makes exports of listed categories subject to authorisation; internationally, the Wassenaar Arrangement coordinates lists and criteria among participating states. The logic is not prohibition but control: approval depends on the destination, the end user and the stated use.

• Dual-use does not mean clandestine: these are legal products subject to export licensing.
• Control applies to destination and end user, not only to the product itself.
• Commercial drones and their components are today the most visible part of this grey zone.
• Modern sanctions focus on cutting access to dual-use inputs rather than to finished weapons.
• Circumvention through third countries is the main practical weakness of these regimes.

Ukraine and distributed industry

The war in Ukraine has shown a new variant of the old problem. Alongside classical state production, a fabric of workshops, small firms and volunteer teams has grown up, building and modifying drones from commercial components with improvement cycles measured in weeks. That distributed production is fast and cheap, but it does not replace heavy industry: artillery shells, armoured vehicles and air-defence systems still require large plants, multi-year contracts and stable supply chains.

Industrial analysts draw a double conclusion. A country can improvise capacity at the light, electronic end of the spectrum, but not at the heavy, chemical end; and that heavy capacity cannot be created when it is needed. It has to exist beforehand, with orders large enough to keep the production line alive.