Hal Brands
The arsenal of democracy is in a pitiable state, and so is America’s ability to sustain — or better yet, deter — a great-power war. That fragility didn’t develop overnight; it was the result of decades of deliberate policy choices. Those choices didn’t carry much penalty in a post-Cold War world defined by American dominance. As the conflict in Ukraine has shown, however, they are likely to prove far costlier in the years ahead.
The US once had an unbeatable defense industrial base. By the end of World War I, its shipyards were building more ships than the rest of the world combined. By the middle of World War II, America’s industrial output was four times Germany’s. The (perhaps apocryphal) quip of the German antitank gunner, explaining why he was overwhelmed by American forces — he ran out of shells before they ran out of tanks — illustrated how manufacturing superiority translated into military superiority.
So how did US wind up in its current predicament — needing years to replace the number of antitank rockets and other weapons Ukraine has sometimes used in weeks? Part of the answer involves the changing structure of the US economy.
American economic leadership endures but now rests on primacy in the high-tech knowledge economy rather than primacy in manufacturing. That transition has allowed the US to develop the world’s most sophisticated weapons while also complicating its ability to produce them at scale.
Other post-Cold War changes have compounded the effect.
After the superpower struggle ended, US defense spending plummeted as a share of gross domestic product, from around 6% in the mid-1980s to around 3% in the late 1990s. Even today, defense spending is less than 4% of GDP, compared with an average of 7.5% during the Cold War.
This trend required consolidation within the defense industry, with the number of prime contractors declining from 51 to 5 today, and the number of subcontractors — companies that contribute somewhere in the supply chain — shrinking significantly, too. The post-Cold War industrial base developed higher levels of efficiency, as a matter of survival, but boasted less resiliency and capacity to surge production in a crisis.
Meanwhile, as US capabilities have become more complex, the process for acquiring them has become more cumbersome. Today, the Pentagon thrives at procuring, over years or even decades, small numbers of exquisite capabilities — but not at quickly incorporating new technologies or replacing weapons and the platforms that deliver them.
This approach seemed rational enough for most of the post-Cold War era. America’s wars were either against overmatched opponents, such as Serbia, or were long but low-intensity conflicts — in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance — that didn’t consume huge numbers of top-quality munitions or inflict heavy attrition on US tanks, ships and planes.
Even then, there were warning signs: The US ran dangerously short of precision-guided munitions during its campaign against the Islamic State. Now the lights are flashing red.
American assistance to Ukraine has saved that country. It has also demonstrated how hard the US finds it to replace depleted capabilities because of long-accumulating shortfalls such as a lack of trained manpower and logjams created by reliance on single providers for rocket engines or components of artillery shells.
Case in point: The single US factory that makes black powder, a crucial ingredient in military-grade explosives, itself exploded in June 2021 and has remained closed ever since.
Now imagine the debilities the US might face in a war against China. The Pentagon would quickly burn through stockpiles of torpedoes, missiles and precision-guided bombs. If recent war games are any indication, America might lose hundreds of aircraft and large numbers of ships early in the conflict.
If China didn’t simply give up after the opening blitz, it might well have the advantage in the race to rearm for the next round of fighting. If America can’t win that race, it might not win the war — or, preferably, deter China from ever starting it.
A problem that develops over many years isn’t fixed immediately. The Pentagon needs more money, allocated over longer periods, to make it a more predictable purchaser of weapons — and to persuade defense firms to build larger workforces and new production lines. The US will have to invest in relatively cheap add-ons that can turn dumber bombs into smarter ones and in new capability development and acquisition processes that accept higher risk of failure in exchange for greater speed and flexibility.
The US may also need to pursue deeper integration with the defense industrial bases among friendly democracies so they can collectively produce what they need in a conflict. Most of all, the US must make an intellectual shift similar to what is happening in other key supply chains — deemphasizing pure efficiency for greater resiliency — and transition, quickly, from peacetime complacency to wartime urgency.
Otherwise, the penalty for weakness in the defense industrial base won’t be a temporary slowdown in the air campaign against some terrorist group. It could be losing a great-power war against the country that is challenging American influence in the Western Pacific and around the globe.
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