America’s guns are rapidly running out of ammunition, and there are serious questions about how quickly they can be reloaded.
From President Biden on down, officials have publicly warned that key segments of the nation’s arsenal are nearly “depleted,” sparking fear in national security circles that Washington could find itself vulnerable if another unexpected conflict erupts.
A sudden Chinese attack on Taiwan, for example, could pull America and its Pacific allies into battle, but there is mounting evidence that the U.S. could lack necessary firepower.
The rare public warnings about the deteriorating state of America’s weapons stockpiles — including artillery rounds and rocket launchers — come against the backdrop of continued assistance to Ukraine in its war against Russia.
For example, Mr. Biden’s recent decision to supply Ukraine with controversial cluster munitions was met with fury from critics who say the weapons inevitably kill civilians.
In reality, the choice to send cluster bombs to Ukraine seems to have been based on practical concerns.
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“The stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running low, about to be depleted,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told MSNBC this week. “And so the hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this: If we didn’t do it, we don’t do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, they will be defenseless.”
“We have been working very hard to make sure that the productive capacity to make the conventional munitions that they need is being ramped up,” Mr. Blinken said. “But there was going to be a gap between when they ran really low on those munitions, and when the new ones were able to come online. These cluster munitions fill the gap.”
Mr. Biden, too, admitted as much. He told CNN last Sunday that Kyiv is low on the 155 mm artillery rounds that have been key to its defensive strategy against the invading Russians.
“And we’re low on it,” the president said, taking the unusual step of admitting publicly that U.S. stockpiles are drying up, though the specific figures remain classified.
Alarming numbers
In explaining the shortfall, the raw numbers tell the story.
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Over the past several years, as tensions between Ukraine and Russia neared the boiling point, the U.S. has given Kyiv:
• More than 2,000 Stinger anti-aircraft systems.
• More than 10,000 Javelin anti-armor systems.
• Nearly 200 155 mm Howitzers and a whopping 2 million 155 mm artillery rounds.
• More than 14,000 155 mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine Systems.
• 100,000 rounds of 125 mm tank ammunition.
• More than 50,000 152 mm artillery rounds and 40,000 122 mm artillery rounds.
• More than 300 tactical vehicles.
• 18 armored bridging systems.
• Hundreds of mortar systems and more than 345,000 mortar rounds.
• A Patriot missile defense battery.
• 20 Avenger air defense systems and a host of other ammunition and equipment.
Those figures, publicly posted on the State Department website, show the most significant transfer of U.S. military hardware and weapons to another nation in recent history.
The U.S. has provided $41.3 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the State Department said.
But America is paying a price for that aid.
Last fall, a detailed analysis by Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, found that assistance to Ukraine has left the U.S. with “limited” inventories across key areas.
U.S. stocks of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stingers, M-777 Howitzers, 155 mm ammunition, and other munitions were considered limited as far back as September 2022.
The situation has grown more dire in the months since, as the Ukraine-Russia war drags on — and it’s much more serious than just numbers on a page.
Analysts warn that the U.S. defense industrial base, already reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, unreliable foreign supply chains and other factors, may not be able to rapidly ramp up production to the degree policymakers might think.
If America finds itself in an unexpected conflict that dragged on for months or years, serious problems might arise.
“This expectation of rapid conflict is combined with the flawed belief that in the unlikely event of a longer war, munitions demands would, as in the Cold War, be met by surge production,” Tyler Hacker, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote in a recent analysis for WarOnTheRocks.com.
“But after decades of downsizing and consolidation, today’s weapons industrial base lacks the capacity to surge production of many precision munitions because of inconsistent demand signals, fragile supply chains, and aging workforces. Manufacturers have struggled to increase production of relatively simple weapons like the Javelin and Stinger, let alone advanced cruise missiles like the long-range air-launched Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile,” Mr. Hacker said. “Clearly, the United States has a precision munitions problem — one that it cannot easily spend or produce its way out of in the immediate future.”
Production surge
Pentagon officials say that they’re working with the defense industry to surge production as quickly as possible, both to replenish American stockpiles and to aid the Ukrainians.
“We don’t see this as a permanent solution but rather a bridge,” said Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s outgoing undersecretary for policy, referring to the decision to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs.
“We’ve already substantially increased the production of unitary 155-millimeter rounds. The Europeans and others are also investing in their defense industrial base,” Mr. Kahl told reporters at the Pentagon last week. “That’s good news and it’s starting to pay dividends, but the reality is we’re going to need to build a bridge to the point at which that capacity is sufficient on a month-to-month basis to keep the Ukrainians in the artillery fight.”
More specific to U.S. needs, officials say that the Pentagon’s most recent budget request seeks to address the problem by doling out multiyear contracts for ammunition and weapons production.
Critics might see that as another high-dollar giveaway to the defense sector, but officials argue it’s the best way to guarantee higher levels of production over a period of years.
“In this year’s budget submission, we asked for multiyear procurement, and that multiyear procurement was designed to help increase our stocks,” Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Air Force chief of staff and nominee to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate panel this week.
“What it does for us is help provide predictability to the defense industrial base, to their supply chains, and to the workforce,” Gen. Brown said.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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