Why America Is Out of Ammunition

Why can't the Pentagon get weapons firms to ramp up production? A new report shows the military doesn't track who owns its contractors, and has just two people looking at mergers in the defense base

One of the more important side stories to the recent wars in Ukraine and Israel, and competition with China over Taiwan, is that the U.S. defense industrial base, composed of 200k plus corporations, is being forced to actually build weapons again. Defense is big business, and since the end of the Cold War, the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending.

The consequence, as with much of our economic machinery, are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output. Wall Street and private equity firms prioritize cash out first, and that means a once functioning and nimble industrial base now produces more grift than anything else.

The signs are unmistakable. In Ukraine, fighters are rationing shells. Taiwan can’t get weapons it ordered years ago. The Pentagon has put together a secret team to scour stockpiles to find high-precision armaments in demand on every battlefield and potential battlefield. But the problem goes beyond national defense. In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police. This shortage may look like a story of a sudden surge in demand, but it’s actually, as Elle Ekman wrote in the Prospect in 2021, a story of consolidation and de-industrialization.

I agree and disagree: first off, the tech for things like basic artillery shells hasn't changed in a hundred years. There isn't any reason why we can't be churning out as many 1555mm shells as we need. Second, I agree there are bottlenecks for more sophisticated items. But someone should know what they are and should plan for increased stockpiling of critical materials and tooling: my point was we used to do that. In addition, while skilled machinists are in short supply we also have CAD/CAM machines generally available now that were not before, so we should be getting much more out of what machine tools we do buy than we were. I would add I also suspect there's a lot of gold plating on weapons systems, especially that extra 5% of capability that adds 50% of the cost.

Above all, what strikes me as unbelievable is the apparent utter lack of planning: any bottlenecks should already be known as well as ways of mitigating or preparing for them. But instead we get a deer in the headlights look from DOD despite $1 trillion in defense spending.

The most important reason, not mentioned in the article, is that the US military has not used large amounts of tube artillery in decades. JDAMs are better and cheaper if your planes can fly and the planners assumed the US planes can.

That is why this aspect was easy to neglect.

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