President Trump hasn’t been the picture of consistency on the Iran war, and it’s becoming clearer that one reason why he’s continually climbing down from threats of unleashing massive destruction is that we don’t have the munitions.
According to media reports and public estimates, our stocks are running shockingly low. We’ve depleted our stores of Patriots and THAAD interceptors (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense: they can knock out ballistic missiles flying outside the earth’s atmosphere). The list of other munitions that have been significantly drawn down includes ATACMS (short-range ballistic missiles), Tomahawks, and other precision weapons.
Trump has denied reports of shortages, claiming that the U.S. has “massive amounts” of ammunition. Perhaps, but the more pressing question is whether we have enough of the right types of “ammunition.” Certainly, the evidence, sometimes circumstantial, sometimes not, suggests that there is a real problem.
The proximate cause of the shortages is the Iran war and the cumulative effect of smaller campaigns beforehand such as that against the Houthis. But the underlying reason is that the U.S. has skimped on weapons acquisition and been handicapped by self-defeating Pentagon procurement practices for a very long time. In the years after the Cold War, the working rule was that the U.S. must be prepared to fight two simultaneous wars against smaller opponents, but we effectively abandoned that standard and have relied on rosy scenarios about potential conflicts to justify acquiring insufficient munitions.
If we have been strained waging a limited war against Iran — an economically beleaguered second-rate power — imagine the challenges of a confrontation with Russia or China. Having enough munitions to deter or fight them is critical.
There’s also the need to be able to supply our allies, whether in Europe or (a delayed $14 billion contract with Taiwan comes to mind) the Far East.
Maintaining our traditional role as the West’s leading arsenal is strategically vital and an unusually hard form of soft power.
Dealing with this issue is going to take significant resources, great urgency, and new thinking. The administration is making the right sounds and wants to go in the correct direction but ultimately should be judged on follow-through and results.
The administration is asking Congress for the appropriate amounts of money and wants to emphasize lower-cost munitions that can be manufactured faster and at scale. Expending large amounts of munitions over the course of a few months that will take years to replenish obviously doesn’t work, and neither does shooting down cheap drones with expensive interceptors.
For good reason, we have to this point put an emphasis on exquisite, highly effective interceptors to deal with high-end threats, but making cheaper systems manufactured in bulk to deal with lower-end threats needs to be much more of a priority. We can learn much from the Ukrainians and need to exploit new, tech-style defense concerns that can be nimbler and more innovative than traditional firms.
The Air Force’s recent agreement with the likes of Anduril to buy thousands of cruise missiles at roughly $200,000 apiece when they’ve heretofore cost more than $1.3 million each is the right idea.
In addition, we must look again at the extent to which our munitions are still dependent on Chinese raw materials and other inputs. Wherever that dependency exists, it should be brought to an end as quickly as possible.
War is a stern teacher, Thucydides wrote. The lesson of the Iran war regarding the state of our munitions is alarming and must be treated as a crisis of U.S. national security.