Rich Lowry is right to warn that our shortage of munitions — specifically missiles — is not only embarrassing but dangerous. The initial focus on a shortage of the Patriot interceptors needed to shoot down ballistic missiles, a shortage that Russia is exploiting in Ukraine, has been joined by concerns about other areas in which stocks may be running low. These include THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors, and precision offensive missiles (ATACMS and their successors, the newer PrSMs). There are also reports that we have used up a large percentage of our Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Making matters worse, the North Koreans are, Reuters reports, deploying a missile unit (together with perhaps 120 ballistic missiles) to Western Russia. North Korean missiles have already been used against Ukraine, but for the North Koreans themselves to fire them (if that is to be their role) would represent a further deepening of the relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow.
Reuters:
North Korea’s KN-23 and KN-24 missiles have a greater range and larger payload than Russia’s equivalent, Iskander, but are much less accurate and have been linked to strikes with high civilian death tolls, Ukrainian military sources say.
The use of KN-23/24 missiles fits a pattern in which Russia has tried to use more ballistic missiles like its Iskander 9M723 that can only be stopped by U.S.-made Patriot air defence systems.
The use of these missiles makes sense, both as a way of taking advantage of Kyiv’s lack of interceptors and as part of an intensified strategy of bludgeoning Ukraine from the air. That the North Korean missiles will lead to higher “collateral” civilian casualties won’t worry Putin or Kim Jong-un.
A major problem faced by the U.S. is, as Constant Méheut explains in the New York Times, the length of time it takes to build interceptors:
So far this year, Russia has fired 650 ballistic missiles at Ukraine, according to a New York Times analysis of figures from the Ukrainian Air Force. That is more than the number of [Patriot] PAC-3 interceptors — the advanced weapons most capable of intercepting ballistic missiles — that their U.S. manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, delivered worldwide all of last year.
This only underlines the point made by Rich, that “we need to put missile production on a wartime footing and leverage hungry new defense firms to produce cheaper precision missiles and interceptors at scale.”
A year into the First World War, it took the 1915 “shell crisis” (and countless numbers of dead) for the British to get to grips with the fact that they had not been making enough of the right kind of shells for the new kind of war that they were fighting on the Western Front.
One of the best ways we have of avoiding a new kind of great power conflict now is ensuring that we have the munitions we need to fight one — and that everyone else knows it.
That’s not how things currently stand.