Much of this comes back to the peace dividend of the 1990s. With little to no procurement of many weapons systems, the industrial plant was sold off or repurposed, and the knowledge of how to build that stuff was not passed on to the next generation of skilled tradesmen.
After 2 1/2 years the situation is not really improving.
Things are improving, but extremely slowly, even with a will and no bureaucratic roadblocks slowing things down it takes 6-18 months to build new plant. When you have to navigate a bunch of permitting to even start 5-10 years is not uncommon.
And weapons stockpiles continue to fall.
Well duh! While production of systems has increased and will continue to increase, war consumes an order of magnitude more munitions than peacetime. Most munitions have a shelf life and there is no point in building any items with a shelf life any faster than they are consumed.
“Much of this comes back to the peace dividend of the 1990s. With little to no procurement of many weapons systems, the industrial plant was sold off or repurposed, and the knowledge of how to build that stuff was not passed on to the next generation of skilled tradesmen.”
No it is worse than that. The factory offshoring for everything, not just military, means that the companies which made factory tooling for civilian and military production have shut down or drastically downsized.
That’s why the production equipment for the new Texas artillery shell factory is from Turkey (Repkon)
[Much of this comes back to the peace dividend of the 1990s.]
WW2 US weapons were often outdated or ineffective at the outset because 1% doesn’t buy much. 3% in recent decades has bought the best weapons in existence, mostly due to grandfathered Cold War tech, when budgets hit 8%. But a world war fought against China might require the same 40% WW2 did.