By Noah Rothman
Monday, January 16,
2023
“As I said from the
beginning, this fight is not going to be cheap,” President Joe
Biden soberly
cautioned back in May, “but caving to aggression would even be more costly.”
Biden urged the nation to reassume its role as the world’s foremost “arsenal of
democracy,” which would redound to the benefit not just of the globe’s
anti-authoritarian powers but also the nation’s domestic arms manufacturers,
which are the primary recipients of these congressional disbursements. But as
the war in Ukraine drags on, Biden’s proposition has become even more expensive
than he let on.
Last week, U.S. Navy
Secretary Carlos Del Toro unloaded on the American defense industry for its apparent
inability to keep up with increased orders amid the rapid deterioration of the
international security environment. When asked if the supply-chain issues
affecting the armaments industry could put the U.S. in a position of having to
choose between the need to “arm itself or arm Ukraine,” the secretary could not
dismiss the premise. “I wouldn’t say we’re quite there yet,” Del Toro
replied, “but if the conflict
does go on for another six months, for another year, it certainly continues to
stress the supply chain in ways that are challenging.”
The comments caused a
stir, particularly among critics of the West’s effort to provide for Ukraine’s
defense against Russia’s war of conquest. “I’m not as forgiving of the defense
industrial base,” Del Toro later added. “They now need to invest in their people,
again, their workforce, as well as the capital investments that they have to
make within their own companies to get their production rates up.”
Del Toro isn’t the
only one who has recently expressed concerns about America’s ability to defend
itself and its allies. “What would happen if something blew up in Indo-Pacom?”
the Pentagon’s head of acquisitions, William
LaPlante, asked in November.
“What do we have in any degree of quantity? That will actually be effective?”
The State Department’s approval of $428 million in aircraft parts to keep Taiwan’s F-16s in the
air notwithstanding, a potential ordnance shortfall looms large in the minds of
American war planners.
The matter of how we
quickly resolve this threat to our strategic capabilities is as important as
understanding how we got here. It’s no accident that the United States now
faces an armaments crisis. To an unnerving degree, America’s inventory problems
were engineered.
In the last decade,
the United States engaged in a dramatic drawdown of its domestic defense
industry’s capabilities. The production line for the shoulder-fired Stinger
air-defense missile system was closed in December 2020, only for Raytheon to win a contract to ramp up
production again in July 2021. By then, however, only one facility could make
the thing. And not quickly, given the limited stockpiles of the missile’s
constituent parts.
High Mobility
Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) munitions are also in short supply, and for
the same reason. Production of this multiple-launch rocket system, which has
had singular success in ejecting Russians from their entrenched positions in
occupied Ukraine, was shut down by
the Army from 2014 to 2018. Nations
such as Poland, Lithuania, and Taiwan have put in orders for this effective
weapons platform, but production lines are strained, and Ukraine has privileged
access to remaining ammunition stockpiles. For weapons buyers such as LaPlante,
the whole affair is just inexplicable. “The thing now that is saving Ukraine,
and that everybody around the world wants,” he observed, “we stopped production
of it.”
Just days ago, a detachment of
Ukrainian soldiers landed
in the United States to begin training on the sophisticated Patriot missile
system. America had been hesitant to share with Kyiv this anti-air weapon,
which can shoot down incoming cruise and ballistic missiles. They required U.S.
operators to use, and Washington had ruled out American “boots on the ground”
in Ukraine. The U.S. and Germany have overcome that initial aversion, but the
relative scarcity of these platforms will increasingly become an issue. And
those platforms are also in short
supply despite
increasingly high demand.
The frustrations
expressed by U.S. officials like Del Toro and LaPlante are understandable.
Despite the Pentagon’s outsize budget, high demand for U.S.-built weapons
platforms and munitions, and a global threat environment that has been
degenerating for a decade, the arms industry just can’t keep up. And this
sector cannot place all the blame on disruptions associated with the pandemic.
Among the challenges the industry has confronted are “fears among defense
companies that they would be stuck with unwanted arms when the Ukraine war
winds down,” Reuters
reported. Likewise, according
to ABC News, “keeping a production line open is expensive, and
the Army had other spending priorities.”
“U.S. defense
production lines are not scaled to supply a major land war,” ABC’s dispatch
continued. But why? Chinese expansionism into the South China sea, where it
seizes land and menaces U.S. and allied assets, is a decade-old project. Moscow
demonstrated its willingness to use force to invade and annex territory in Europe
nine years ago, which occurred six years after it carved up its neighbor in
Central Asia. In the Middle East, revisionist powers willing to use chemical
weapons on civilians, attack critical civilian infrastructure (like the world’s
largest petroleum processing facility), and hold U.S. naval personnel and ships
hostage have been a fact of life.
America’s material
deficiencies make little sense given the nature of these growing threats and
the great sums of capital the nation has invested in its defense. The most
disturbing revelation is that resolving these issues isn’t a question of money,
demand, or awareness about the fact that we live in an ever more dangerous
world. It is a question of will. Or, rather, the lack thereof.
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