The military has discovered that it can buy missiles in advance.
The military has discovered that it can buy missiles in advance.
A pair of reports from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan think tank specializing in foreign affairs, has sparked appropriate concern over dwindling U.S. munitions supplies. Relying on public data and reported munitions usage rather than anonymous leaks, the organization estimated stockpile levels before the war with Iran and now, concluding that America’s arsenal has reached dangerous new lows.
CSIS’s first report tells us where we presently are on seven critical munitions, used for either long-range ground attack or air and missile defense. On the offensive side, the Department of Defense still possesses most of the munitions it had before the war. The situation is much more dire defensively: The Iran war may have consumed a majority of three out of four stockpiles.
The report concludes that America has enough munitions to handle any plausible scenario in Iran, but not nearly enough to fight a military peer like China for any prolonged period:
The diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk. A war against a capable peer competitor like China will consume munitions at greater rates than in this war. Prewar inventories were already insufficient; the levels today will constrain U.S. operations should a future conflict arise.
Such a crisis was already in the offing even before recent depletions. War games against China over a Taiwan attack projected, well before the Iran war broke out, that the United States would run out of key munitions in a few weeks of fighting — if not a few days. But what was an emergency in February is now a five-alarm fire.
Even worse are the findings of the second CSIS report, which estimates that the military may need four to five years merely to restore the slowest-replenishing stockpiles to their pre-war levels. That is, it could require a half-decade to rebuild munitions supplies to the woefully insufficient level at which they previously were. Five of the seven stockpiles examined by the second report may not return to pre-war levels until 2029 or later. Meanwhile, China’s rumored window to invade Taiwan is set to open next year.
No matter how the war in Iran ends, the terrifying reality is that the United States will not have enough missiles to fight a major war for the next several years at least. A surge in funding is not enough to resolve the danger, as CSIS explains:
Funding for additional munitions began in the Biden administration and has accelerated under the Trump administration. Congress has supported this funding reflecting bipartisan agreement on the issue. As a result, the problem today isn’t money; it’s time. It takes time to expand production capacity and to build these complex systems.
Thus, there will be a window of vulnerability for several years until inventories return to their previous levels and another several years before they get to the levels that war planners desire. The DOD will need to make plans for dealing with this gap. Some munitions could be substituted, but these carry tradeoffs. Alternative ground attack munitions, for example, are short- or medium-range and increase vulnerability of the launch platforms. Alternative counter-drone systems are expensive.
To be sure, necessity is the mother of invention. The munitions shortage has concentrated minds at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to reform not just how much money is spent on buying munitions, but how that money is spent. One policy proposal that has rightly taken off is — brace yourself — contracting over multiple years.
Someone in government realized a few years ago that, to reliably produce a certain number of munitions every year, suppliers should really know how many munitions the military plans to buy in advance. Instead of renegotiating a fresh production contract every year, the Pentagon can commit to several years of planned purchases under a single contract, subject to future appropriations. Stable demand signals would translate to stable supply.
They call it “multiyear procurement.” The concept is ancient by Pentagon standards: Congress codified MYP authority for major weapons systems in 1981. What was strangely novel was applying it systematically to the high-volume missiles the Pentagon knew it would need year after year.
There are few obvious and clearly sound policies left unfilled as long as multiyear procurement (MYP). Absent MYP, munitions builders had been left to make semi-informed guesses about what purchases Congress would appropriate for each cycle. Because the military is a monopsony — the U.S. defense market’s single buyer — contractors lacked the revenue certainty they needed to invest in permanent production capacity.
Today, in the shadow of shortages, Congress is increasingly allowing the Pentagon to contract for several years of munitions at once. Essentially, lawmakers are allowing the military to do what Costco shoppers have done for decades: buy in bulk, upfront. Of the seven critical munitions CSIS tracks, four are already covered by MYP contracts or major multiyear production awards. The remaining three now have either statutory multiyear authority or other long-term production frameworks. Long-term deals have also been inked for anti-ship missiles, precision rockets, and air-to-air missiles unrelated to the Iran war.
In addition to boosting supply, the military also assesses that MYP saves defense dollars. By giving contractors confidence to optimize their workforces and production facilities for years to come, they require less money — and thus can bill taxpayers less — than under annual purchases. Such economies of scale can reduce costs by 5 to 15 percent, and savings can be plowed back into larger acquisitions.
There are still munitions outside the MYP framework that should be included, like anti-ship torpedoes that could sink Chinese destroyers. But the dramatic push toward dependable purchases in the past few years, since Ukraine revealed the depths of the crisis, constitutes desperately needed progress.