Jack Detsch
If U.S. President Joe Biden wants to check the pulse of the arsenal of democracy, all he has to do is look at Bill LaPlante’s wall in the Pentagon. The U.S. Defense Department industrial chief’s office is covered with production charts for every weapon that the United States is building to fend off a potential war with China while helping countries such as Ukraine and Israel fend for themselves in wars of their own.
It’s like an electrocardiogram of the U.S. defense industry: There’s a line going up to count the number of units moved and a line going sideways for the time that it took to move them. There are production rates for the Patriot missiles that the United States has sent to the Middle East to provide backup for Israel, the sea-launched Standard Missile-6 that the United States has deployed to the Indo-Pacific to potentially bloody China’s nose if it launches an assault on Taiwan, and the guided multiple launch rockets—known as GMLRs—that helped the Ukrainians liberate Kherson and the areas around Kharkiv in a one-two punch to the Russian army in 2022.
“It’s a whole stair step,” LaPlante told a small gaggle of reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California in early December 2023. The chart, he said, “keeps going and going.”
And even though business is booming, Defense Department officials are facing a problem from hell. How can the Pentagon mobilize the U.S. defense industry to respond to not just one conflict or two, but potentially three wars? Foreign Policy talked to a dozen defense ministers, officials, and experts across the NATO alliance. They described an almost Sisyphean task to rebuild the trans-Atlantic—and trans-Pacific—defense industrial base to fight three wars not during a world war, but when much of the Western world is at peace.
“We are moving from a just-in-time, just-enough economy model to a peak demand model,” said Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, in an interview in his office at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters in October. Much like the manner in which the Western world had to convert factories at dizzying speed to produce protective medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic, Western leaders need to “make sure everybody understands the sense of urgency of where we are,” Bauer said.
Officials are still trying to figure out what the right number is for every weapon on LaPlante’s chart. What makes planning especially difficult is the friction of war. Nobody expected the war in Ukraine to suck up thousands of artillery shells every single day, year after year. Few thought that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip would exhaust precision-guided munitions in a couple of months. If the United States were in a war with China over the Taiwan Strait, it could run out of long-range precision munitions within a week, according to one study.
There was a time when the United States could turn plowshares into swords; in the Second World War, the United States built more of pretty much everything than any other combatant, from tanks to planes to ships to landing craft. Then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it the “arsenal of democracy” because it was. In five years, U.S. factories built 141 aircraft carriers, 88,410 self-propelled guns and tanks, and 257,000 artillery guns.
Now, Washington is trying to get back in business after three decades of post-Cold War belt-tightening that saw companies merge and production lines slow down. LaPlante said that the Pentagon has built a facility in Texas that has the capacity to surge 155 mm artillery shells as needed. Boeing is growing its capacity to build sensors for Patriot missiles at its Huntsville, Alabama, facility by nearly a third.
In Europe, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are becoming major producers of ammunition. Germany is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of artillery shells while Rheinmetall sets up shop inside Ukraine. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have begun jointly procuring 155 mm barrels for Ukraine. And the Swedish manufacturer Saab—which no longer makes cars—is producing so many diesel-electric submarine hulls that it’s even looking at Southeast Asia as potential clients.
Building industrial muscle means that the Pentagon needs to rebuild long-atrophied bureaucratic muscle, too. LaPlante has deputized a so-called “joint production cell” within the Pentagon, comprising defense officials who are visiting production floors. It’s not just a question of getting scientists and dollars, but also of getting factories full of skilled welders, assemblers, and foremen.
“It’s dusting off a lot of skills that we’ve had in this country that we haven’t used in a while,” LaPlante said.
But there’s a bigger problem, too: It’s one thing to assemble shells and missiles, and another thing altogether to assemble higher-end gear such as the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, which runs at about $750 million per airplane, with a production line that snakes across three U.S. states. Building the aircraft is so complex that U.S. officials have compared it to the nearly four-decadeslong process of building the interstate highway system.
Some of the weapons still have to be funded. Congress has already agreed to fund SM-6 and GMLRS. Other projects, such as the Pentagon’s plan to get up to 100,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery produced by 2025, need Congress to pass the supplemental budget, LaPlante said. With Congress out for the holidays, that’s on hold until at least January. And across the Atlantic, the European Union has fallen far behind its target of producing 1 million artillery rounds per year to feed Ukraine’s voracious appetite for ammunition while replenishing NATO stockpiles.
But when LaPlante and other Pentagon officials go into meetings with industry and members of Congress to tout their plans, they face two big questions about the United States’ military-industrial buildup. Are they going to pull the plug, especially as Congress wavers on additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel? And even if they’re for real, are their plans even enough?
When it comes to putting shells in barrels, since December 2022, the U.S. industrial base has doubled its output of 155 mm ammunition, growing it from 14,000 rounds per month to between 28,000 to 30,000, LaPlante said. U.S. Army officials hope to get to 60,000 rounds per month by September 2024, and to the magic number of 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025.
The Pentagon has put about $3 billion toward the ramp-up so far, the price of about four B-21 bombers, sprinkling contracts across five U.S. states and three countries.
The European Union is producing between 600,000 and 700,000 artillery shells per year, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told reporters in November, well short of the 27-nation bloc’s 1 million shell goal, which it hopes to reach next year. To support Ukraine and recapitalize its own stockpiles, Europe will have to reach about 3 million rounds per year in the next 10 years, Pevkur said.
But Ukraine’s appetite for artillery ammo is voracious, about 6,000 shells per day at the peak of fighting this year— and the shortage of U.S. military aid is already causing troops to hold their fire on the front lines. The pain of growing the arsenal is hard, Western officials concede, but the pain of losing the war would be far worse.
“There is no option but to rise to the occasion in this regard,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said in an interview with Foreign Policy.
And when it comes to so-called smart bombs—weapons with GPS guidance kits built in—the situation is even more dire. Despite the United States allowing Israel to raid precision munition stockpiles in the region, more than half of the air-to-ground weapons fired into the Gaza Strip since October have been unguided “dumb bombs,” according to U.S. intelligence reports.
All of that is without accounting for the weapons needed to fight the next war: ships, submarines, sea-based missiles, and coastal defenses. China has done everything short of invading Taiwan, though it has vowed to do so at some point soon. In a naval fight, shipyards count as much or more than hulls in the water, and there the United States is beached. Even when it comes to what the United States is really good at—building and operating high-end nuclear submarines—they are artisanal affairs. The rest of the U.S. Navy is shrinking while China’s is growing.
“We’re spending 3.3 percent of GDP on national defense and you’re building a paltry 1.2 subs” a year, said U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I don’t think that is making [Chinese President] Xi Jinping quake in his boots.”
The United States has to outsource its defense procurement, as do most countries—which, in the long hangover of the post-Cold War era, means a very rude awakening. Some NATO countries, such as Poland, which keeps more of its defense industry in state hands than most other member countries, can expand production lines on the back of public spending.
The United States can only prod and pray—the Pentagon’s own soon-to-be-released industrial strategy indicates that defense companies wouldn’t be able to respond fast enough for the U.S. military to fight a modern war.
For instance: The biggest bottleneck in sending GMLRS and 155 mm ammo to Ukraine is the lack of rocket motors, said Heidi Shyu, who oversees the Pentagon’s technology strategy. So the U.S. Defense Department has initiated a parallel effort to make sure that rocket motors get built, too. But it’s a slog.
“Ramping up production is not like a light switch, where you can flip the switch and bang, you can tenfold your production,” Shyu said. “You just can’t do that. Every country that has the ability to ramp up production is in the process of ramping up.”
Further down the food chain, the U.S. Defense Department is running into problems; there aren’t enough testing beds for new weapons systems, for example. There aren’t enough good programmers to write good code. And there aren’t enough little things that go boom up and down the U.S. supply chain to feed all of the Ukrainian gun barrels, let alone those of other allies.
Europe is feeling the same crunch.
“What are the smaller obstacles? First, fuses. Second, gunpowder. Third, shells.” said Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister. “You have to be able to solve all of these small details in order to be ready to produce more rounds.”
U.S. partners are getting creative, given the lack of backup. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced a 1-million-drone target to build one-hit kamikazes that can strike Russian troops deep behind their lines. They’re conducting do-it-yourself air defense with obsolete Soviet-era munitions. And Taiwan, still stuck in a billion-dollar backlog of U.S. weapons sales, has started doing F-16 maintenance on its own.
But none of that is going to restore the arsenal of democracy, whose shelves—already bereft, if not barren—aren’t getting restocked like they used to.
“There is an end to every stockpile,” Bauer said. “There’s an end to it.”
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