OUR MILITARY – CAN IT DEFEND US ?
- Manufacturing victory
There is good news and bad news in American foreign policy . The bad news first: The country’s defense industrial base is hollowed out, leaving the United States without the weapons that it would need in future conflicts and barely able to maintain a precarious peace in the near term.
The good news: The problem is fixable, and doing so would not only strengthen America’s defenses but boost the economy by creating durable jobs.
On all fronts, in other words, America would stop writing checks it can’t cash.
We simply don’t have the industrial capacity to maintain our current policy menu indefinitely, which includes aiding Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression and boosting Taiwan to forestall an invasion from China.
Indeed, a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., detailed the challenges facing the defense industrial base. That study , titled “Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment,” concluded that “in the event of a major regional conflict — such as war with China in the Taiwan Strait — the U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense.”
Some of the report’s findings are bleak.
Seth Jones, the senior vice president of CSIS and the author of the report, said the U.S. would likely run through its stockpile of long-range anti-ship missiles, or LRASMs, a weapon that would likely be used in any showdown with China, in less than a week. CSIS ran war games that showed the U.S. would deplete many key precision-guided munitions in a very short time frame. This occurred, Jones noted , in “virtually every” iteration of the war games.
This is disturbing. As the historian Cathal J. Nolan convincingly argued in his 2017 book, The Allure of Battle, most modern wars are wars of attrition. A protracted conflict would likely take America to its breaking point, possibly leaving it without the means to fight and supply its forces. Such occurrences are not unheard-of. And they are not without severe political ramifications.
In World War I, for example, this happened to Russia and Great Britain. The czar’s inability to field arms properly contributed to the public’s loss of faith in his rule. And the so-called Shell Crisis of 1915, in which British forces had to contend with a shortage of artillery shells, became a scandal that weakened Prime Minister Henry Asquith and led to the rise of his successor, the former Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George.
It’s not just about offense. This problem erodes a country’s ability to prevent war. As Jones noted: “How do you effectively deter if you don’t have sufficient stockpiles of the kind of munitions you’re going to need in a China-Taiwan Strait kind of scenario?”
“The defense industrial base,” Jones has said, “is not prepared for the security environment that now exists.” At present, he warned , the U.S. defense industrial base is operating on a “peacetime footing” that is hardly adequate for the challenges of today, much less those on the horizon. Indeed, those threats are of a different caliber and magnitude than what the U.S. has encountered in recent years.
For the past quarter of a century, the U.S. has been mired in asymmetrical conflicts, primarily with nonstate actors such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State or with third-rate armies such as Iraq’s. These are hardly enemies that compare to the military and economic power of the Chinese Communist Party of today.
Indeed, the U.S. military hasn’t fought a war with industrialized nation-state competitors since World War II. Yet both the Biden and Trump administrations have correctly recognized that the world has reentered an era of great power conflict, with America and Europe facing threats from Russia and China. But our defense industrial base has yet to adjust.
As the New York Times reported on Jan. 18, in recent months the U.S. has begun to transfer weapons from stockpiles in Israel to Ukraine. The weapons are stored as part of an agreement in which Israel can request access to the weapons, should it run low — which happened during wars in 2006 and 2014. But otherwise, the stockpiles are only accessible to U.S. military personnel. The U.S. has also requested that the Jewish state transfer its Hawk missiles, which are in storage in the event that they need to be refurbished and used, to Ukraine. The U.S. is also dipping into stockpiles in South Korea to help arm Ukraine.
“Stockpiles in the United States,” the report said, “have become strained and American arms makers have not been able to keep up with the pace of Ukraine’s battlefield operations.” The CSIS study noted that it might take as long as three to seven years to replenish certain munitions that are now being used in Ukraine. With some top U.S. military officials predicting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by 2025, the U.S. might not have that long. Indeed, there is now a nearly $19 billion backlog in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
On Jan. 11, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro warned that if the defense industry didn’t boost production, arming both the U.S. and Ukraine would soon become “challenging.” Del Toro was responding to comments made by Adm. Daryl Caudle, the head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, at a Surface Navy Association conference. Caudle openly worried that “the Navy might get to the point where it has to make the decision whether it needs to arm itself or arm Ukraine.” That these officials felt compelled to voice their concerns publicly speaks volumes about how perilous the situation has become.
Nor are they alone.
In April 2022, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks warned of a “substantial decline” in competition in the defense industrial base. Hicks lamented that the U.S. is reliant on a mere “five prime contractors” and called for greater “competition.” Indeed, a February 2022 Pentagon report singled out the 1990s as a time in which “the defense sector consolidated substantially, transitioning from 51 to 5 aerospace and defense” contractors. Now, for example, 90% of missiles come from a mere three sources. The number of suppliers in major weapons systems categories has “declined substantially,” the Pentagon study noted .
Ironically, the U.S. is now suffering from the aftereffects of the “unipolar moment” of the 1990s when America was the sole, uncontested world power after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Those heady days are now gone, as even top administration officials have conceded.
During the 2022 rollout of the administration’s national security strategy, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan echoed Hicks’s concerns. Sullivan noted the importance of making “far-reaching investments” in the nation’s “industrial and innovation base.”
Policymakers are right to be worried.
“History has proved that nations once great that neglected their national defense are dust and ashes,” Gen. Douglas MacArthur warned in 1935. MacArthur was then serving as the Army’s chief of staff, battling with Congress over defense budget cuts amid the Great Depression.
As Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan increased their defense spending, the Western democracies of France, Germany, and the U.S. cut theirs.
Yet the Depression alone wasn’t responsible for the sorry state of military readiness on the eve of World War II. The U.S. has often rapidly drawn down its forces after conflict, including after World War I and, in later years, after both World War II and Operation Desert Storm. At the end of World War I in 1918, the U.S. had the fourth-largest army in the world. By the late 1930s, it was 18th — just ahead of the Netherlands.
When then-Brig. Gen. George Patton took over the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade in the months before Hitler invaded Poland, it had a mere 325 tanks, compared to Nazi Germany’s 2,000. Patton even had to use a Sears and Roebuck catalog to order nuts and bolts for the tanks as the Army’s quartermaster was unable to supply them. As historian Arthur Herman detailed in his book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, at the time, the Army had just six working arsenals to manufacture weapons. Eighty-five percent of the machines in those arsenals were over 10 years old, with some stretching back to the 1860s and the Civil War.
As Herman chronicled, it took American ingenuity and government-backed incentives to unleash the country’s industrial might, providing the U.S. and its allies with the “arsenal of democracy” that proved key to victory. But history offers another warning, as well.
The U.S. didn’t start to arm seriously until 1938 — three years before Pearl Harbor. And it was still woefully unprepared and underarmed in the beginning stages of that conflict. Indeed, it didn’t have the means to launch a full-scale invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe until the summer of 1944. Absent the use of nuclear weapons, many military planners didn’t think an invasion of mainland Japan would be possible until 1946 at the earliest.
Importantly, the U.S. also had key allies in World War II, such as the Soviet Union and the British Empire, which could tie down their opponents. And even at the war’s opening stages, the U.S. dwarfed Japan as an industrial power. Also: Many of the key American defense industrial planners in World War II had learned from the bitter experiences of World War I, when the U.S. was similarly late to mobilize — and when many arms and material didn’t reach Europe until after the fighting was over.
The U.S. was late to enter both world wars, giving its industrial powers time to gear up and prepare. And it was not initially the primary combatant. Suffice it to say: These are not advantages that the U.S. currently possesses.
In the event of a Sino-American conflict over Taiwan, time is a luxury that the U.S. might not have. As one secretary of defense famously said : “You go to war with the Army that you have, not the Army that you might want or wish to have at a later time.” This is particularly true when it comes to the defense industrial base, which can’t be built overnight.
Encouragingly, there is growing awareness of the deterioration of the defense industrial base. And concern is bipartisan. Lawmakers as ideologically diverse as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), among others, have called to revitalize our nation’s industrial base to better safeguard U.S. interests.
Multiyear contracting for munitions would alleviate some of the fears of companies, allowing them to produce needed arms without incurring undue risks. Indeed, such a strategy was critical to harnessing its industrial strength on the eve of World War II. The U.S. must incentivize industry, cut red tape, and promote innovation.
“Spending more money,” defense strategist Elbridge Colby said , “isn’t necessarily the answer.” Competition is. And that is something that America has historically excelled at. As British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey observed during World War I: “America is like a giant boiler” — once the fire is lit, “there is no limit to the power that it can generate.” That fire needs to be lit — and fast.
As Jacob Helberg, the newly appointed commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, observed, “The decline of American manufacturing jobs and the rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse” has had “profound consequences for U.S. national security.” It is, he lamented in 2021, “shocking how reliant the U.S. military is on Chinese production.” The U.S. must reduce its dependency on the manufacturing capabilities of hostile nations. This is common sense that needs to be more common.
The past few years have shown the importance of supply chains and the need to reshore critical materials. This will mean more investment upfront. But it will also mean more jobs for the U.S. and key allies.
Finally, the very definition of the defense industrial base needs to be expanded to include areas beyond armaments. The growing importance of rare earth metals, which are key to defense technologies, has been belatedly recognized. But China’s chokehold on the production of basic drugs, including penicillin and blood pressure medication, gives Beijing leverage that could allow it to shut down U.S. hospitals — or hamper the fighting ability of American fleets and fighting men and women.
It is incumbent upon both U.S. officials and businesses to do what’s necessary to avert a looming disaster. As MacArthur told journalist Theodore White in 1940: “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too late.”
Sean Durns is a foreign affairs analyst based in Washington, D.C. His views are his own.
