China is watching - and laughing.
The hard truth, delivered without any soothing euphemisms, is this: The United States of America is running low on weapons.Not because we fought a cataclysmic, generation-defining world war. Not because we mobilized the full might of the republic against a peer adversary. No. We have burned through far too many of our munitions stockpiles in a limited, months-long air campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran—a country that is a terrorist menace, but which also boasts a GDP smaller than Texas.
Let that sink in.
A damning new Pentagon inspector general report should end all complacency. Between February 28 and June 30, the U.S. spent an estimated $33.4 billion on the Iran war, including $22.3 billion on munitions alone. The inspector general warned that this has resulted in crippling strategic inventory shortfalls. The Congressional Budget Office has also warned that replenishing those depleted inventories could take years.
Bloomberg has helpfully provided some of the grisly estimates:
Bloomberg Economics estimates the U.S. has fired off a third of its global supply of Tomahawks—long-range strike missiles used heavily in the early days of the conflict, before Iranian air defenses had been degraded. Even more alarmingly, the US may have used up more than half of its Patriot missiles and about 40% of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, which are designed to knock out high-flying ballistic missiles. Smaller stockpiles of some newer strike missiles are reportedly near depletion.
Lest we forget: This was Iran.
Not China.
Not a simultaneous two-front war against peer or near-peer adversaries.
Iran.
And yet the war has consumed quantities of sophisticated missiles and interceptors that we cannot easily replace any time soon.
To be clear: I’m not criticizing the war—or at least not criticizing President Trump’s initial decision to wage it. (Reasonable minds will differ as to the manner in which the war was subsequently conducted).
I’m merely recognizing reality.
That is not just a procurement problem. It is a massive national security problem.
For years, Beltway swamp-dwellers have talked about “great power competition” as though merely uttering the magical incantation were itself a strategy.
It’s not.
China, that most worrisome fellow “great power” which poses the 21st-century civilizational risk to the American people and the American way of life, has built out enormous manufacturing capacity, including in its defense-industrial sector. Xi Jinping’s People’s Liberation Army is not merely acquiring weapons; it is preparing for a conflict in which industrial endurance, supply chains, production rates, logistics, and magazine depth could matter as much as the technological superiority of any particular platform.
The United States must start thinking the same way.
Military assessments of American preparedness for a prolonged war with China have identified shortages in long-range munitions, air defenses, interceptors, and unmanned systems. Some critical weapons have production timelines measured in multiple years.
That is simply unacceptable.
America needs a revolution in how we think about, and act upon, defense-industrial matters.
First, Washington should treat munitions capacity as strategic infrastructure. The government routinely spends enormous sums subsidizing pretty much everything that moves. That same seriousness—if not the same cronyism—must apply to missile motors, explosives, propellants, energetics, guidance systems, air-defense interceptors, and the thousands of specialized components required to manufacture them.
The goal should not merely be larger stockpiles. It should be surge capacity: the ability to exhibit economies of scale and multiply production rapidly when war begins.
Second, procurement bureaucracy must be subjected to something resembling wartime discipline. The Pentagon cannot demand Silicon Valley-like innovation while purchasing weapons through processes designed for the last century. American companies capable of producing useful autonomous systems, drones, sensors, and precision weapons should not need years of bureaucratic pilgrimage before receiving meaningful contracts.
Simply put, the military should buy, test, break, modify, and buy again.
Third, America needs to embrace the economics of mass. The defense establishment has developed an unhealthy obsession with exquisite platforms that cost extraordinary sums and take extraordinary amounts of time to manufacture. Some exquisite systems are indispensable. But a relatively inexpensive drone that can accomplish a mission previously requiring a multimillion-dollar munition changes the arithmetic of waging war. Recently, we’ve seen this arithmetically asymmetric warfare at play in Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon and in the killing fields of Ukraine.
America’s future arsenal must contain both the exquisite and the expendable.
Fourth, Washington should stop pretending that the defense-industrial base exists independently of the broader industrial economy. Machine tools, skilled welders, semiconductor fabrication, chemical production, and precision manufacturing are all components of military power. A country that cannot reliably manufacture the physical inputs of its weapons cannot guarantee its sovereignty merely by possessing technological blueprints.
This is where China, home to some of the world’s most cherished rare earth metals, presents the real strategic challenge. We must rise to confront that challenge.
A war in the Indo-Pacific would impose demands vastly greater than those seen in Iran. Distances would be immense. Ships, aircraft, missiles, drones, and interceptors could be destroyed at a pace that makes today’s replenishment problems look trivial.
And unlike Iran, China is itself a world-class industrial power.
The United States therefore cannot prepare for a hypothetical war with China by assuming that tomorrow’s factory output will magically materialize when Washington finally needs it. --->READ MORE HERE
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