SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — As the U.S. and NATO deepen their involvement in a pair of major global conflicts, western nations face a critical security challenge: a decline in their weapons stockpiles.
For nearly two years, the U.S. has led an effort to send billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, and for the last three months, it has boosted an already-robust supply of American weaponry to Israel. Now, diminishing military resources in the U.S. and Europe have prompted a reassessment of defense priorities and raised concerns about the ability of Western nations to respond to global conflicts.
"This certainly is a cause for concern. Between lower defense production priorities and providing Ukraine and Israel with munitions, the U.S. is behind the curve for maintaining stockpiles," James Williamson, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel and owner of a defense-related business, told The Cipher Brief. "These are critical munitions and of even more importance with a potential war looming in the Pacific with China."
Andrew Lewis, President of the business and geospatial intelligence firm The Ulysses Group and former Special Assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, put it more bluntly.
"Under the normal weapons procurement process, we are years behind in fully replenishing and stocking the required weapons," he said.
Beyond the questions about American stockpiles and readiness, the production and procurement issues raise a profound question for the war in Ukraine: even if the political will exists to continue arming the Ukrainian resistance, can the supply chain keep up?
The Ukraine Supply Drain
Take the case of the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, known as NASAMS, a coveted short- and medium-range air defense system which can launch 72 missiles simultaneously and is known to guard the sensitive airspace around the White House. The U.S. and Norway have shipped NASAMS to Ukraine, and the systems had a perfect success rate in countering Russian cruise missiles and drones in the early phase of the war. The looming problem now? It takes two years to manufacture a single NASAMS system, global threats have led to a spike in demand, and Kongsberg Defence, the company that makes them, says it faces a several-year backlog in filling orders.
The NASAMS story is hardly an anomaly. Delivery delays persist for other weapons systems, and basic ammunition. NATO and British officials have cautioned repeatedly that Western militaries are running dangerously low on ammunition stocks to send to Ukraine. Adm. Rob Bauer of the Netherlands, chair of the NATO Military Committee, warned last October, that the "bottom of the barrel" was now "visible."
"This is an artillery-intensive fight," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last year, about the Ukraine war. "You know, we've seen large amounts of artillery be employed on both sides of the fence. And that puts a strain on the international supply of artillery munitions."
The Pentagon's repository of the NATO-standard 155mm artillery rounds dwindled to the point that in July, Washington decided to issue deeply controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine instead.
The Israel Factor
The eruption of war between Israel and Gaza has cast a fresh light on the weapons shortfall. A conversation that had been largely about the U.S. stockpile and how much could be shipped to Ukraine, now includes questions about military aid to Israel.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel, Washington returned its two highly regarded Iron Dome defense systems and their interceptors to Israel, where the Iron Dome systems are made. Then came a diversion of ammunition stocks.
The U.S. has shipped more than 2 million 155-millimeter artillery shells to Ukraine since the war began, including shells from stockpiles the U.S. had maintained in Israel in the event of a Mideast war. After Israel declared war against Hamas, the Biden Administration diverted tens of thousands of those shells to the Israelis, prompting questions about how the U.S. could do so while still supplying Ukraine and keeping its own domestic stockpiles intact.
A senior Defense Department official deflected the concerns. “The United States can walk and chew gum at the same time,” the official said.
The U.S. has boosted production of ammunition and other weaponry in recent months, but the needs are great and initially at least, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t spark a spike in weapons manufacturing. In a report published late last year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found that many Western arms companies hadn’t increased production despite the soaring need for weapons and military equipment.
While the report noted that "Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and geopolitical tensions around the world fueled a strong increase in demand for weapons and military equipment in 2022,” it found that “despite receiving new orders, many U.S. and European arms companies could not significantly ramp up production capacity because of labor shortages, soaring costs and supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.”
While Washington sought to ramp up munitions production in 2023, experts have warned that key systems can’t be produced and shipped on tight timelines. In short, supply isn’t keeping up with the demand. The order books of the ten largest defense companies in the West have surged to over $730 billion, marking a 57% increase since the end of 2017, when demand began to rise, and signaling what may prove to be the most significant supply quagmire since the Korean War in the early 1950s.
According to analysts, a major factor in the backlog is the complexity of modern weapons. Companies often design and assemble systems but rely on other firms to manufacture the various components. The NASAMS supply chain, for one, requires contributions from more than a thousand companies spanning two continents.
And as the SIPRI report found, the defense sector is also contending with an extended labor shortage and challenges in recruiting workers with specialized skills, ranging from software development to welding. Meanwhile, skepticism in Congress over weapons shipments to Ukraine has left some manufacturers unsure of how to proceed.
"There are several core issues, beginning with funding and demand. Congress has to appropriate the money, and the DOD has to prioritize acquiring weapons. When this doesn't happen, production lines are shut down and reduced,” Lewis explained. “That means you lose the skilled workers who can build the weapons, the machinery used is mothballed, and it is expensive and time-consuming to get it back online if that is even possible."
European politicians have also urged defense companies to increase capacity and speed up production, but there, too, geopolitical uncertainty has hampered manufacturers. Industry officials say they need assurances that demand will not plummet once hostilities cease in Ukraine.
The China Worry
For those worried about the implications of all this when it comes to potential conflict with China, a recent Taiwan wargame simulation published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) came as a jolt. The CSIS scenario envisioned the U.S. coming to Taiwan’s defense after a Chinese invasion, and it estimated that the U.S. would run out of critical long-range anti-ship missiles in less than a week.
More broadly, analysts fear that the West is failing to keep up with the competition. CSIS noted that Russia and China possess a combined total of roughly 5,020 land-based air-defense missile systems, topping the 3,200 such weapons in the combined arsenals of the U.S., Europe and Japan. Moreover, Chinese and Russian defense companies are primarily state-owned and thus face fewer commercial restraints and red tape than their Western counterparts.
"Contrast China's strategic intent, their rapidly developing capabilities and unmatched industrial capacity to provide material, with the fact that the U.S. defense industrial base has atrophied dramatically over the past three decades," said John Mauk, a national security analyst and consultant who served as the Director of Operations Research at the U.S. Army War College.
Mauk believes that were China to invade Taiwan, the U.S. would likely be spun into a protracted conflict "that decidedly favors the Chinese, whose industrial capacity to support a long conflict is relatively assured."
Lewis said the “key question” is whether weapon systems that have been sent to Ukraine would be needed to counter the China threat. While many weapons systems involved in a Taiwan conflict differ from those the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, Lewis said that "at some point, any conflict in the Pacific will ultimately require large stocks of small arms and ammunition, and the ability to replenish our stocks of things like the Javelin, Stinger missile, and even basic rifle ammunition.” All of those items have been included in the U.S.-to-Ukraine supply chain.
According to Mauk, among the U.S.'s challenges in supporting the Ukrainian and Israeli conflicts is the reality that the U.S. would have to prioritize industrial capacity in a conflict with China – and this "means largely leaving allies and partners to fend for themselves."
“Constrained US capacity to resupply itself in a protracted fight means Taiwan’s capacity to fight is also constrained,” he cautioned.
It also means that some domestic U.S. weapons inventories are slipping to minimum levels necessary for current war plans and training. Recently Washington has responded to the shortfalls by investing billions of dollars in retrofitting factories for increased production of rockets, missiles, shells, and rocket motors. Contracts totaling nearly $25 billion have been issued to support the arming of Ukraine and replenishing U.S. stockpiles.
"There needs to be a sense of urgency – and investment – to bring us back to comfortable levels,” Williamson said. “In short, the administration needs to take a proactive stance as opposed to being in a reactive situation if we're drawn into a world conflict."
Lewis said that Washington politics was making it a difficult problem worse.
"One of the biggest impediments is the lack of consistent funding; all of the stop gaps and continuing resolutions kill the ability of defense contractors to manage risk associated with their business,” he said. “And most of the time, this business will contract rather than risk doing work they won't get paid for."
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
