Executive Interview: Sustainment reform, obsolescence, aftermarket trends – Q and A with Ethan Plotkin, CEO of GDCA
StorySeptember 04, 2025
Military platforms often last for decades, long past the lifespans of modern computing components and boards. System designers for these aging platforms must rely on a variety of solutions from lifetime buys of components when they go end-of-life to working with aftermarket suppliers, who buy obsolete product lines and keep producing them for customers with ultra-long-term needs. In a recent podcast, Ethan Plotkin, CEO of GDCA, and I discussed military aftermarket trends, open architectures, artificial intelligence (AI), and how sustainment reform can help solve long-term obsolescence challenges in defense applications. Edited excerpts follow.
McHALE: Please provide a brief description of your responsibility within GDCA, your experience in the defense industry, and tell us what GDCA stands for.
PLOTKIN: GFCA stands for “Great Designs Continued Always.” We’re a legacy equipment manufacturer that manufactures and sustains and repairs obsolete circuit-card assemblies [CCAs]. What makes us a legacy equipment manufacturer [LEM] is that we only sustain and manufacture old gear. We don’t really do new product introduction at all. What we do is partner with embedded OEMs. Think Curtiss-Wright, think Ametek, think Motorola, the old Motorola Computing Group. We’ll basically take over their old designs and then continue to sustain them for those customers who really just cannot upgrade now, or maybe sometimes ever.
As CEO of GDCA, I consider myself a chief evangelist for the idea of sustainment. Sustainment, as opposed to last-time buys and then a quick or forced obsolescence, [or] forced tech refresh. A lot of times extending the life of an old design can be a lot more cost-effective and lower-risk than addressing the need with a tech refresh. One novel type of sustainment that we do, we call it a new source of supply, which is basically partnering with that OEM, as I mentioned, to restart the production line for those obsolete CCAs, which can be less expensive and less risky.
So that’s what I do in my day job with GDCA. In my night job I also work as a member for the National Defense Industry Association [NDIA] [and have] for the past several years. NDIA is basically a trade association based out of Washington, D.C. When the government – specifically the DoD [U.S. Department of Defense], but sometimes Commerce – wants to talk to industry about policies or resolving issues, they will work with NDIA or other industry associations to basically tease out and ease areas of friction between the industrial base and government.
For NDIA, the real focus is: How do we position America in this great power struggle that is really emerging and accelerating in the world today, specifically with China and also Russia, North Korea, and Iran. How can we, number one, have enough manufacturing capacity, how do we have resilient supply chains, so that if there are shocks like obsolescence, for example, how do we overcome those shocks and continue producing parts.
McHALE: We all know that defense life cycles don’t match commercial-technology life cycles. The military is a consumer of commercial tech, just like the rest of us. So [there’s a] need for aftermarket suppliers like GDCA. But how is that market performing for defense aftermarket suppliers?
PLOTKIN: The defense aftermarket has been strong for many years, and right now it’s never been better, but not necessarily for the reasons that folks think. For sure, defense demand is a factor. We’ve been using old systems longer than ever before. Defense budgets are tight, programs [get left] behind, and there’s not really enough money for every single program to stay completely current with all of the new technology.
An analogy I use a lot: People say “Oh, we have an $800 billion defense budget,” and that is true, but when you take off 70% of that budget for operations like fuel and people and the logistics, that leaves, what – $2.4 billion, give or take, for the rest of that stuff. And when you look at the sophistication and the number of the defense systems that we have, in the end, it’s not so much money as you would think. And then the government is extending the life of workhorse systems and repairs.
Supply-chain obsolescence is really the main reason why the defense aftermarket is so good, and specifically, so much of stuff in defense systems is commercial parts. Commercial-component life cycles are accelerating. A lot of the same memory that’s in phones is also in defense systems. Also mergers and acquisitions in the commercial space means that a lot of the gear gets cut off a lot earlier, or maybe without announcement, than it would have in the past. This has a waterfall effect: It affects the board makers, it affects the system makers, and it affects the end users.
And then finally, now that the new administration is signaling their intent for smaller and more efficient government, I sense cost-effective sustainment solutions will continue to gain traction as an attractive alternative to those traditional solutions I mentioned previously, like obsolescence, forced tech refresh.
McHALE: I’ve heard it said in the past that when DoD funding for R&D is high, demand for aftermarket parts decreases, but when R&D spending goes down, the reverse is true. But what you’re saying that might not necessarily be true going forward because of the cost. Is that correct?
PLOTKIN: There’s absolutely truth in that statement, but I think it’s less tied to R&D than other factors. And specifically, I think, back in the old days, when defense put in a lot of R&D, this would have been really the main truth, But now I hear people say we spend less on R&D as a percentage of our gross domestic product than we ever have before.
But I look at it a little bit differently. With the introduction of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts, a lot of that R&D has actually been handled by commercial companies. So, where the DoD would have paid a Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon to do R&D and develop something, they would have created their own semiconductors and created their own computers. That would have been straight out of the government’s pocket. Now that’s actually a percentage of every single commercial company’s budget – manufacturing and engineering and innovation. So if you look at it collectively, a good company is probably spending upwards of 5% of their top line on R&D. So, you take all these big companies in the hundreds of millions, sometimes in the billions, and you take 5% of that, and you put it all together. I think that the R&D spend is quite a bit larger, though, than a lot of people think it is. So indeed, I’ve heard that 70% or more of parts inside of defense systems are COTS circuit card assemblies, and that is all stuff that was funded by a company’s R&D.
So, in the end, I think that whole idea around commercial off-the-shelf, is a double-edged sword. On the plus side, you get [much] faster product introduction, which is great, and that’s what you really want. But on the other side, there are challenges that occur when parts become end-of-life. And that is where legacy equipment manufacturers like GDCA really come into their own and help.
McHALE: What’s the oldest part you have in your inventory that you’re still supplying to the defense market?
PLOTKIN: I get that question a lot. People often say you can’t do 10 years, can you? And we’re like, man, we do 20. We do a number that are more than 20 years. But there’s one that really comes to mind, because it’s just still going so strong. And that would be an old Motorola VME design. VME is solid in all its forms. This design was introduced in back in 1997 and discontinued in 2005, so that’s an eight-year lifespan. Not too shabby. It was transferred to us and resurrected in 2006 – so do the math. That’s 19 years after it was discontinued that we continue to provide spares and repairs at a high volume today.
Interestingly enough, that is a really good example of a dual-use product. It controls a Gatling gun that’s ship-mounted called the Phalanx, and it’s a defensive last resort. Not too long ago, in early 2024, it defended a ship against one of those Houthi rebel missiles. And it got close enough it perforated that pretty well. But that same part, for many, many years was also used in the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. Each has similar shock, vibration, and moisture type specifications, but that’s, I think, another good example of how dual-use and the government really benefit from commercial products.
McHALE: Everybody’s talking about artificial intelligence (AI). AI is being talked about and defined in so many different ways – some just hype and some real capability. How do you leverage AI in your business? Is it more on the manufacturing side?
PLOTKIN: We are starting to implement AI in general business practices right now, much like you would like a talented intern. That’s how my team is beginning to use AI. [We’re] starting with reviewing and editing marketing copy emails and even performing first-pass research. Obviously, I wouldn’t yet trust it and maybe never will, because I’m an old guy. Might not ever trust AI to do a finished product, but I think [it kind of can get] you started so that it’s easier to review something than to create something with a blank sheet of paper. That’s probably the primary first way that we’re doing it.
We’re doing this right now because it’s more of transactional AI, but then we’re also implementing enterprise AI right now, which is basically an AI that can look at everything that’s inside of your firewall in your enterprise, and then help educate you on that. It could do things like first-pass contract review, like you put all your Ts and Cs [terms and conditions] into the AI and then put a new T and C in from a customer and say, “Hey, what’s wrong with this?” It’ll go ahead and redline it and basically say, “Hey, you know we don’t typically sign up to that liability clause. We prefer these types of liability costs.”
My holy grail [for AI] is a kind of business-performance reporting. So if you could ask an oracle like, “Hey, do an analysis of profitability for this particular product line over the last couple of years, give me the materials breakdown. How is it buried?” I think that AI is there today. So that’s another thing that I’m looking to do with enterprise AI.
McHALE: The DoD is pushing for a modular open systems approach (MOSA), to leverage open architectures in new defense systems and upgrades. How does that impact what you do?
PLOTKIN: I think that’s good stuff. Commercial enterprise will benefit from engineers designing systems which use electronics parts interchangeably. And when they’re [saying] interchangeably, they’re really talking about mainly physical interchangeability. While I think that will be helpful for upgraded systems – because a connector is a connector, and then they’ll fit a next-generation board – I think there’ll still be a fair amount of software changes anytime a new part is introduced.
Most defense systems run on a real-time operating system (RTOS), which do a lot less management of an application than Windows, for example. But what does that mean? That means your software application actually has to do a lot of that stuff that Windows would have otherwise done when you’re writing in a RTOS environment. What that really means is that the software, anytime you change the hardware, is probably going to need to be cracked open. That is something everybody wants to avoid doing.
So while MOSA is good for hardware interchangeability, that software piece means there’s still going to be a need for aftermarket suppliers to extend the life of the hardware in situations where application OEMs and end users don’t necessarily want to go through the recertification of cracking open the software to upgrade it.
McHALE: What are some misconceptions about aftermarket suppliers that you come across when you talk to customers?
PLOTKIN: The most common is the notion that aftermarket parts are exclusively created by reverse-engineering an OEM’s part. That does happen, that’s the classic clone, but I think most people may not know that OEMs themselves offer the majority of aftermarket support in terms of spares and repairs. However, at some point the OEM themselves can’t really make money on aftermarket, because the opportunity cost is just too extreme.
Think about it. If Chevy started manufacturing 1956 Corvettes, which is kind of a classic cool Corvette, they could sell a bunch. Even if they charged four times the current model, they would find a bunch of people willing to buy it, but compared to the amount of money of people who want to buy the new Corvette, it’s not really going to move the needle. And so I think that’s where LEMs like GDCA come in. LEMs team with OEMs to take over responsibility for aftermarket services that fall below their target ROI or otherwise distract from new-product introduction. So, this means an LEM’s parts are authorized by the OEMs themselves, which reduces both the cost and risk of aftermarket support, and that’s how LEMs service the aftermarket a little bit differently than, for example, brokers who have a really good space in the market and also engineering boutiques who do reverse engineering.
McHALE: Many in the defense industry are calling for acquisition reform that speeds up the development of technology to get it into the hands of warfighters more quickly. Does the current pace of the DoD acquisition process help or hinder aftermarket sales?
PLOTKIN: Acquisition reform has been an ongoing challenge and a topic conversation for decades. The aim, of course, is to get suppliers on contract faster, which shortens the time to field new systems. While long acquisition timelines do create pressure on programs to extend life cycles longer than they otherwise would, it really is the technical challenge after the award that typically takes most of the time in my experience. These are extremely complex and complicated systems that require a lot of people looking after a lot of details, and if you get anything wrong, critical missions can fail and people will die.
This is why I’m a proponent of the idea of sustainment reform within the DoD. I was on a panel with a senior DLA [U.S. Defense Logistics Agency] guy, and he says everybody’s talking about acquisition reform, why don’t we talk about sustainment reform? And I was like, why indeed. Sustainment reform is featuring policies and practice that enable defense programs to more quickly evaluate all available options around sustainment, including engaging legacy equipment manufacturers to establish new sources of supply, basically restarting the production line in partnership with OEMs.
McHALE: Your company brings things back from the past, but let’s look forward. What disruptive technology or innovation will be a game changer in the aftermarket world? Predict the future.
PLOTKIN: I think there’s a number of technologies that are going to continue to deliver incremental changes to sustain state of the art, like AI to aid in hardware and software development and MOSA on interchangeability. I think those will continue to deliver those incremental changes. But, I sense the largest disruption in the industry will be a philosophical change – and I think this would be a big disruption – that’s mainly the idea of commercial product obsolescence as an industry problem that is best handled with an industry solution. Until now, DoD policy has largely been focused on solving obsolescence problems around extending life cycles organically. For sure, there are a lot of talented engineers and logisticians in the DoD, but they really will never be able to have or match the capacity or scalability of an industrial supply base that is much larger and more sophisticated, precisely because they are constantly innovating with new technologies. That’s their lifeblood in the industry: better, faster, more sophisticated. If folks take one thing away from this [interview], it’s that there are LEMs out there, like GDCA, who specialize in the lowest-cost, lowest-risk path to sustaining old technologies for as long as they’re needed.
Ethan Plotkin is the CEO of GDCA, Inc. (“Great Designs Continued Always”), who used his experience in supply-chain risk management (SCRM) to lead the company from its early days as a small OEM into becoming a trusted legacy equipment manufacturing (LEM) partner for defense and related OEMs. Ethan also works with the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA) and currently leads the Supply Chain Network Committee, which facilitates collaboration between government, industry, and other NDIA divisions to strengthen national security through industrial supply chains. Ethan holds a BS in industrial engineering from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo.
GDCA • https://www.gdca.com/
