The Pieces Are Already Here

Northwest Florida has never had to make the case that it matters to national defense. That case was made generations ago.

The region is home to a remarkable concentration of military installations, aviation expertise, test and training capability, defense-adjacent institutions, and thousands of service members transitioning into the civilian workforce each year. We train warfighters here. We test systems here. We maintain aircraft here. We educate and reskill talent here.

But being a defense region and being a defense manufacturing region are not the same thing.

That distinction became increasingly clear during a collaborative feasibility study conducted by the University of West Florida and MIT Sloan School of Management earlier this year. Our team examined whether Northwest Florida could support a scalable unmanned aerial systems manufacturing operation, using Swarm Dynamics AI as the primary industry case study.[1]

The study began with a focused question: Could Northwest Florida support UAS manufacturing?

The findings were encouraging.

Across workforce, collaborators, incentives, industrial sites, infrastructure, and proximity to military end users, Northwest Florida demonstrated a distinctive foundation. The study identified approximately 5,200 military personnel separating annually in the region, evaluated ten potential industrial sites, mapped a network of educational and economic-development partners, and examined how defense proximity could create advantages for manufacturers needing technical talent, customer understanding, infrastructure, and rapid feedback.[1]

But the work also pointed toward something larger.

Neither does a military base. Neither does a university. Neither does an industrial park, a workforce program, a research laboratory, an incentive package, or a transportation network.

The advantage appears when those assets begin to reinforce one another.

That realization led us to develop what we describe in subsequent research as a Defense Manufacturing Ecosystem, or DME, framework.[2]

The basic idea is straightforward: manufacturing readiness is not simply a characteristic of a company or a plant. For complex defense products, readiness can also be a property of the region surrounding that plant.

A manufacturer may have a strong product and sophisticated equipment but still struggle to scale if it lacks trained technicians, reliable suppliers, secure logistics, testing pathways, institutional partners, or access to end users. Conversely, a region with those capabilities can make production faster, adaptation easier, and growth less risky.

Our DME framework organizes this readiness around five dimensions: workforce readiness; industrial and institutional collaboration; policy and incentive alignment; infrastructure and site readiness; and military end-user proximity.[2]

That is where Northwest Florida becomes particularly interesting.

The region is anchored by major defense and aviation assets. Florida’s Great Northwest identifies six military installations, more than 30 major aerospace and defense manufacturers, and a substantial existing industry workforce across the region.[3] The U.S. Department of Defense, meanwhile, has made resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition, and a stronger domestic industrial base explicit national priorities.[4]

Those two realities create an opportunity.

Northwest Florida does not need to manufacture an economic identity from scratch. Much of the underlying architecture already exists.

The region has military demand and mission knowledge. It has aviation heritage. It has transitioning military talent. It has universities, colleges, workforce organizations, economic-development agencies, industrial sites, transportation infrastructure, and growing research capability.

Yet DME thinking forces us to be disciplined about what those assets actually mean.

A collection of impressive institutions can remain just that: a collection.

The real competitive advantage emerges when a transitioning service member can move efficiently into an advanced-manufacturing career; when universities and colleges shape programs around industry requirements; when manufacturers can find qualified regional suppliers; when economic-development incentives address actual production bottlenecks; when testing and military feedback shorten development cycles; and when public, private, academic, and defense organizations operate around a shared production objective.

In other words, the next step is not simply attracting a defense factory.

It is building the conditions that make defense manufacturers want to come here, grow here, source here, hire here, innovate here, and remain here.

UAS manufacturing is an especially compelling place to begin because the national defense production challenge is increasingly about speed, scale, adaptability, and cost.

The Pentagon’s National Defense Industrial Strategy calls for a modern, resilient defense industrial ecosystem capable of responding to changing threats and strengthening domestic production capacity.[4] Unmanned systems make that challenge tangible: technology changes quickly, systems must be produced repeatedly, supply chains matter enormously, and operational feedback can alter requirements rapidly.

Northwest Florida’s proximity to the people who operate, test, evaluate, and understand defense systems could therefore become more than a geographic advantage.

Properly connected to manufacturing capability, it can become a learning advantage.

And the concept extends beyond drones.

The same ecosystem capabilities that support UAS manufacturing can support autonomous maritime systems, advanced materials, additive manufacturing, propulsion, sensors, components, deployable production systems, and other dual-use technologies.

The objective should not be to predict one winning product.

It should be to build a regional system capable of supporting many of them.

Our feasibility study did not conclude that Northwest Florida is already a finished defense manufacturing cluster. It identified meaningful gaps, including supplier depth, private-sector density, testing pathways, and regional coordination.[1][2]

That may be one of the study’s most important findings.

The region does not need to have everything today. It needs a deliberate strategy for connecting what it already has while filling the gaps that prevent those assets from becoming a true production ecosystem.

For generations, Northwest Florida has helped the United States train, test, operate, and sustain military capability.

The next economic opportunity is to build more of that capability here.

The pieces are already here.

The challenge—and the opportunity—is to connect them.

Research Foundation & Sources

1. MIT Sloan School of Management & University of West Florida. Northwest Florida as a Strategic Ecosystem for UAS Manufacturing and Defense Innovation: A Regional Feasibility and Site Selection Analysis with Swarm Dynamics AI as the Primary Industry Case Study. 2026. Unpublished regional feasibility study. See also the University of West Florida’s public overview of the collaboration: View UWF Newsroom article ↗
2. O’Connor, Kenneth W., and Gerry Goldstein. Defense Manufacturing Ecosystems and UAS Production Readiness: A Regional Framework. Working manuscript, 2026. The manuscript builds upon the original UWF–MIT Sloan feasibility study and develops the Defense Manufacturing Ecosystem framework.
3. Florida’s Great Northwest. Aerospace & Defense. Regional industry profile documenting Northwest Florida’s military installations, aerospace and defense manufacturers, industry employment, and transitioning military workforce. View source ↗
4. U.S. Department of Defense. National Defense Industrial Strategy. 2024. Establishes resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition, and economic deterrence as core priorities for a modernized U.S. defense industrial ecosystem. View source ↗

Original Feasibility Study Team

MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jonathan Qu
Lake Vitton

University of West Florida, Lewis Bear Jr. College of Business
Kenny O’Connor, Ph.D.
Gerry Goldstein

University of West Florida Research Contributors
Mike Arnett
Bella Kendall
Alana Camp
Josh Simon
Joel Havercroft

The subsequent DME working manuscript by Kenneth W. O’Connor and Gerry Goldstein recognizes the original feasibility-study research contributions of Mike Arnett, Bella Kendall, Alana Camp, Josh Simon, Joel Havercroft, Jonathan Qu, and Lake Vitton.

Kenneth W. O’Connor, Ph.D.

Professor, researcher, and business practitioner focused on professional sales, supply chain logistics, transportation, artificial intelligence, defense manufacturing ecosystems, and applied business education.