The shell crisis of World War I reminds us just how hard it is to prepare for long wars. “In almost every war there comes a point when it's clear that the peacetime defense industry, even if it had been ramping up, is inadequate for the demands of war,” says Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Colonel who is now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The United States spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined, including rivals China and Russia. And yet, the U.S. military finds itself concerned about running short of key munitions in a war with a country, Iran, that could generously be described as a “middle” power.
President Donald Trump has angrily insisted that the U.S. has “virtually unlimited amounts of Mid to High Grade Ammunition.” However, the Pentagon’s own accounting tells a different story. An inspector general’s report in September admitted that the war had revealed “strategic inventory shortfalls.” Warnings from his senior military commanders about the state of U.S. stockpiles were reportedly one major reason why Trump has refrained from a return to full-scale combat against Iran.
All of this begs the question: How is it possible that the most expensive military in the history of the world doesn’t have enough ammunition to fight a war?
Perry’s prediction proved correct. Between 1988 and 1997, defense budgets fell by around 30% and about a dozen major U.S. defense contractors consolidated into four. Much of those budget cuts were taken out of funding for new weapons as the military drew down on Cold War-era stocks.
“For many years, in internal defense budget deliberations, to find savings to meet the overall target, munitions were often the ‘bill payer,’” says William LaPlante, who served as Under Secretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment in the Biden Administration.
All that changed with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, sparking a war featuring the kind of artillery use not seen in Europe since the days of the Battle of Aubers, as well as missile barrages on Ukrainian cities requiring a massive number of interceptors. All of a sudden, munitions were in high demand. After years of declines in America’s defense industrial base and manufacturing capabilities, increasing production of artillery shells as well as more advanced missiles and interceptors has been a frustratingly slow process.
Blaming and buzzwords
Trump, for his part, has blamed Biden’s decision to supply Ukraine for the current shortages in the war with Iran. This is misleading: the vast majority of the weapons systems sent to supply Ukraine’s land war are of little use in the war in Iran. A notable exception is advanced air interceptors like Patriots, which are at a premium in both conflicts.
These days, the buzzwords for defense planners, as well as the crop of Silicon Valley-linked defense startups that have emerged in this post-Last Supper era, are systems that are “attritable,” meaning cheap and replaceable, and “modular,” meaning they can be easily adapted for future wars. Plans for the defense of Taiwan, for instance, involve building swarms of cheap and most likely AI-controlled drones to create a “hellscape” for Chinese invaders. But given how fast battlefield technology and tactics are advancing, even those plans may soon be obsolete. “The whole system has to be shaken up because the move, counter-move cycle in modern warfare is eye-wateringly short, and we are not prepared,” says Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Too few shells, or too many wars?
Analysts often use the phrase “turning an aircraft carrier” to describe the challenge of reforming the bureaucratic behemoth that is the Pentagon and defense industry for a new age of warfare. The metaphor became literal earlier this year when the USS Ford was diverted from the Mediterranean to Venezuela and then back to the Middle East again as the administration jumped from one conflict to another. The ship would spend a record 326 days at sea—a mission that included food shortages, sewage leaks, and a nearly disastrous fire.
The Pentagon has prioritized the production of 14 critical munitions in its spending priorities, but it’s still going to have to compete with big-ticket priorities, including Trump’s dreams for a $1.2 trillion “golden dome” missile defense system, a new focus on space-based weapons, and nuclear modernization. Even with a proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget, it’s going to be difficult to do all those things while fighting one, if not more, ongoing military conflict—as well as preparing for a potentially much larger one to come.
Money can buy you a lot of firepower, but it doesn’t exempt you from the need to make real choices about priorities.
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