America’s Munitions Crisis

Even a military with the best strategy and the best soldiers cannot win an extended conflict without an adequate supply of arms, munitions, and other critical supplies. The industrial might of the United States was a critical factor in it is victory in World War II and earned it the title the “Arsenal of Democracy.” But after the end of the Cold War, defense policy planners lost sight of this basic truth.

For nearly three decades, American defense policy assumed no peer competitor would challenge the United States at scale and that any interstate conflict would be short and decisive, won through air superiority, precision strikes, and special operations forces. Meanwhile, the long wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria reinforced a counterinsurgency mindset focused on systems for low-intensity conflict rather than the deep stockpiles of missiles, artillery shells, and air defense interceptors required for great-power war.

The result is a defense industrial base that is not adequately sized or capable enough for the threat environment the United States faces today.

NOTE: This study guide was researched and drafted before the current conflict with Iran. However, events unfolding underscore many of the structural issues discussed here, especially the strain sustained operations can place on U.S. munitions inventories and defense industrial capacity.

What You’ll Learn

This study guide was produced in-house at American Moment, and is designed to give you a working knowledge of one of the most urgent national security crises facing the United States: our inability to produce and stockpile the critical munitions necessary to deter and, if necessary, win a major conflict.

The purpose of this guide is to help readers understand the scope of the problem, why it happened, what it means for American foreign policy, and some of the solutions to the problem. You’ll learn:

Why wars are won by industrial capacity
How post-Cold War defense policy hollowed out U.S. munitions production
The specific munitions shortages facing the U.S. today (155mm shells, Patriot, THAAD, SM-3/SM-6)
How U.S. production compares to Russia, China, and other nations
Policy options for rebuilding America’s munitions industrial base

Part I: Main Drivers

Before diving into specific shortfalls, it is worth understanding the three structural forces that created this crisis:

The Peace Dividend and the hollow industrial base. After the Cold War ended, the United States dramatically reduced defense spending, consolidated its defense industrial base, and allowed production lines for key munitions to go dormant. Factories and ship yards that supplied the U.S. military and key allies during the Cold War shuttered. The skilled workforce that supported these production lines — machinists, engineers, propellant chemists — retired or moved on.

The “Prestige Systems” Trap. Instead of buying large quantities of capable arms that could be produced rapidly, the Pentagon developed an addiction to extraordinarily complex and expensive weapons systems. The result: fewer units purchased, longer production timelines, and a force that fields small numbers of systems that are difficult to replace.

Ukraine changed the math, and we weren’t ready. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 turned a theoretical concern into an immediate crisis. The United States and its NATO allies began drawing down their own stocks to supply Kyiv. What the drawdowns revealed was sobering: American magazines were far shallower than anyone had publicly acknowledged, and the industrial base had no ability to quickly refill them.

The U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China

Report by CSIS

Summary: Here’s the bottom line: the United States may not currently possess the stockpiles, production capacity, or replenishment speed required for a sustained conflict with China, particularly in a Taiwan Strait scenario — especially with multiple domains of conflict. Because it was published in early 2023, the report also gives you a valuable snapshot of how analysts were thinking before subsequent acceleration in defense spending debates amid the current conflict with Iran.

Why Read: Rather than discussing deterrence only in theoretical terms, CSIS shows how deterrence depends on production lines, second-source suppliers, multiyear contracts, and logistics. Modern great-power competition is as much about industrial depth and replenishment capacity as battlefield tactics.

Study Question: Since this was written in 2023, what developments since then most alter the article’s assumptions, especially regarding Indo-Pacific deterrence timelines, missile production capacity, allied burden-sharing, and lessons from Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Part II: Case Studies

Patriot Missiles

The Patriot missile system is America’s primary theater air defense system. It is what we deploy to protect troops, allies, and critical infrastructure from ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and advanced aircraft. It is also being expended faster than we can produce it.

The PAC-3 MSE — the most capable Patriot interceptor — costs approximately $4 million per missile and is produced at a rate of roughly 600 per year by Lockheed Martin. That number sounds meaningful until you consider that a single engagement against a ballistic missile attack can require two to four interceptors per target.

Ukraine’s use of Patriot batteries against Russian missiles has been extraordinary — and a genuine vindication of the system’s capability. But every missile fired into an Iskander ballistic missile or a Su-34 bomber is a missile that is not sitting in a magazine somewhere in the Pacific.

Russia’s 9K720 Iskander is a short-range ballistic missile system with a range of approximately 500 kilometers. It is accurate, capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear warheads, and has been used extensively in Ukraine. Russia’s production capacity for Iskander missiles (possibly up to 1,200 a year) — combined with its broader ballistic missile arsenal — exceeds the rate at which the United States produces Patriot interceptors (600 a year).

In The National Interest, Brandon J. Weichert explains how Russia is beating Ukraine’s Patriot Missile batteries.

There is also a brutal but inescapable mathematical reality: we produce interceptors more slowly than adversaries can produce the missiles they are designed to stop.

Artillery Shells — The 155mm Crisis

The most visible manifestation of America’s munitions problem emerged almost immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States began supplying Ukraine with 155mm artillery shells — the standard artillery ammunition of most American allies — only to discover that American production capacity was woefully inadequate.

Before the war, the United States produced approximately 14,000 155mm shells per month. Ukraine’s peak 155mm consumption was approximately 6,000–9,000 rounds per day, with monthly consumption around 75,000–180,000 rounds. Even accounting for the fact that the U.S. was not responsible for supplying all of Ukraine’s ammunition, the gap between what we could produce and what a modern peer-level conflict demands was staggering.

The Biden administration pledged to increase production, and by 2025 the Army had ramped output to approximately 40,000 shells per month — an increase, but still a fraction of current demand.

The U.S. Army went into the Ukraine crisis producing artillery shells at a peacetime rate designed for a world that no longer exists. Scaling up takes years — and in the interim we could find ourselves in a conflict without the ability to produce a critical munition at required quantities.

Case Study: The Twelve-Day War

In June 2025, Israel conducted a 12-day military campaign against Iran. During the course of that campaign — which involved sustained Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks against Israel — the United States deployed significant air and naval assets to the region and participated directly in the defense of Israeli territory.

The cost, in terms of both dollars and munitions expended, was substantial.

American forces expended a significant portion of the deployed inventory of three of the most critical — and most expensive — missile systems in the U.S. arsenal:

THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors, which cost approximately $10-12 million per missile. According to news reports, the United States fired up to 150 THAAD missiles in defense of Israel during the 12-day war. This is more than 25 percent of all the THAAD missiles ever produced. (Note: A January 2026 framework agreement targets quadrupling production to 400 per year.)
SM-3 (Standard Missile-3) interceptors, fired from Aegis-equipped naval vessels, which cost approximately $10-30 million per missile depending on variant. According to news reports, the United States fired up to 80 of these missiles during the 12-day war.
SM-6 (Standard Missile-6) interceptors, which cost approximately $4 million per missile and serve dual air defense and anti-ship roles.

The production rates for these systems are painfully slow. The United States currently produces approximately:

~50-75 THAAD interceptors per year
~75-100 SM-3 Block IIA per year (in cooperation with Japan)
~125 SM-6 per year

This has enormous implications. The SM-3 and SM-6 are the primary weapons systems aboard our Aegis destroyers and cruisers — the ships that would be expected to defend carrier strike groups and conduct theater missile defense in conflict in East Asia. THAAD is one of the few systems capable of engaging ballistic missiles in the terminal phase at high altitudes. These are not niche capabilities. They are cornerstones of American power projection and alliance defense

Part III: Structural Issues

A natural response to reading the above is: why don’t we just make more missiles? The answer to that unfortunately reveals deep structural problems in the American defense industrial base that are not easily or quickly fixed:

The production line problem. Many critical munitions require specialized production facilities and highly-skilled workforces. When production lines are shut down — as they were across the board during the 1990s drawdown — they cannot simply be restarted. Tooling must be recreated. Supply chains must be rebuilt. Workers must be trained. This takes 5-10 years in many cases, even with aggressive investment.
The raw materials problem. Certain components of advanced missile systems rely on rare earth elements and specialty chemicals that are either not produced domestically or are produced in quantities insufficient for surge production. In addition, China controls a significant portion of global rare earth production.
The single-source supplier problem. Much of the American munitions industrial base is now served by a single prime contractor with limited competition. Raytheon builds the Patriot. Lockheed builds THAAD. Single-source arrangements reduce competitive pressure on cost and timelines, and create fragility — if one facility faces a disruption, production stops.

The Contrast with our Competitors

While the United States has struggled to produce Patriot interceptors at 600 per year, our adversaries have been on a different trajectory entirely.

Russia dramatically increased its defense production following the invasion of Ukraine. Despite sanctions and export controls, Moscow has — with assistance from Iran, North Korea, and China — sustained and in some cases increased production of key munitions. Russian artillery shell production is estimated at approximately 3 million rounds per year, compared to roughly 1.2 million for the entire Western alliance combined at peak production in 2024.

China has been conducting a sustained buildup of precision-strike munitions for decades. The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force fields thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles. Chinese production capacity for key munitions is estimated to exceed American production capacity across almost every category relevant to a Pacific conflict.

North Korea supplied Russia with an estimated 3-5 million artillery shells during the Ukraine war — demonstrating that even relatively poor authoritarian states can produce munitions in quantities that dwarf American production.

The picture this paints is uncomfortable but important: in a prolonged major conflict, the United States would likely run out of the critical munitions it needs to fight before the war was decided. That is not a fringe view. It is the mainstream assessment of serious defense analysts.

Part IV: Consequences

The munitions crisis is not simply a military readiness problem. It is a foreign policy problem. When American presidents contemplate the use of military force — or the threat of military force — they are constrained by what the military can actually do.

A military that would exhaust its key missile stocks in days or weeks of high-intensity conflict is not a military that can credibly threaten or execute a sustained campaign against a peer or near-peer adversary. In the link below, expert Jennifer Kavanaugh joins The John Quincy Adams Society’s Security Dilemma podcast and places this military readiness problem in the context of the Iran war:

This also has direct implications for various other domains:

Taiwan. A conflict in the Taiwan Strait would be primarily an air and naval fight involving exactly the kinds of munitions — SM-3, SM-6, THAAD, long-range precision strike — that are in the shortest supply. Wargames conducted by CSIS, RAND, and the Pentagon’s own analytical community have consistently found that the U.S. runs out of critical munitions within one to two weeks of a high-intensity Taiwan conflict.
NATO and Eastern Europe. In the event Russia were to attack a NATO ally, the United States would be called upon to conduct theater air defense and precision strike operations in Europe. Those operations would demand the same missile systems already under stress.
The Middle East at large. As the 12-day war demonstrated, defending Israeli airspace from a sustained Iranian ballistic missile campaign can consume a significant fraction of deployed U.S. missile defense stocks.

Perhaps most importantly: adversaries know this. Chinese military planners, Russian strategists, and Iranian defense officials all read the same open-source analyses that we do. They know that the United States has shallow magazines. They know that a strategy of attrition — firing large numbers of cheaper missiles to exhaust expensive American interceptors — is viable. This knowledge degrades deterrence.

Part V: Lessons

Treat Munitions Production as a National Security Imperative, Not a Procurement Line Item

The federal government has an important tool to help speed up the production of critical munitions: the Defense Production Act (DPA). The DPA exists to allow the government to compel and accelerate domestic production of materials essential to national security. It should be used — aggressively and consistently — to expand production lines for Patriot PAC-3 MSE, THAAD interceptors, SM-3, SM-6, and long-range precision strike munitions.

Fund the Industrial Base, Not Just the Platforms

Congress has a tendency to fund new weapons platforms — the shiny aircraft, the new destroyer hull — while not funding consistent supplies of ammunition and missiles that give those platforms meaning. This must stop. Every dollar spent on a platform that cannot be supplied and sustained in wartime is a dollar poorly spent. In addition, Congress should fund long-term contracts for munitions – not just year-to-year – to incentivize manufacturers to expand and maintain robust capacity.

Bring Production Home

The United States cannot be totally dependent on foreign sources for components critical to its own missile production. Supply chains for rare earth elements, specialty chemicals, and precision components must be re-shored. This is an area where an America First industrial policy and national security converge.

Rationalize Commitments to Match Capabilities

This is the hardest but most important point. The United States cannot maintain credible security guarantees to every nation on earth with the force structure and munitions inventory it actually possesses. Either we dramatically expand that inventory — which will take years and significant resources — or we make hard choices about which commitments are truly vital to American national interests. A foreign policy grounded in realism and restraint does not pretend that we can do everything for everyone. It makes hard choices and prioritizes ruthlessly.