Anti-ship missiles against the background of a warship, circa March 2020. The US military munitions crisis results from poor defense planning, not the Ukraine and Iran Wars, writes Can Kasapoglu. (Shutterstock/mrivserg)

The Real Cause of the Munitions Crisis

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By failing to rebuild its defense industrial base after the Cold War, the United States and its allies left themselves vulnerable to aggression.

The West did not run short of missiles and interceptors because it fought too many wars. It ran short because, for three decades, it planned as though major war had become impossible. From the waters around Taiwan to the Persian Gulf and the black-earth plains of Ukraine, a single reality is beginning to govern the strategic balance: modern wars can consume precision munitions faster than democracies can produce them.

It is now commonplace to see commentary portraying the US military’s empty magazines as a consequence of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. However, it would be more accurate to say that these conflicts exposed a structural weakness in US and allied armed forces. To blame contemporary American or European military engagements is therefore to mistake smoke for fire—and to turn the case for stronger deterrence into an argument for strategic retreat. 

The empirical record supports this distinction. A recent CSIS six-factor reconstruction of America’s munitions shortage identifies the campaign against Iran as only one cause. According to the report, arms transfers to Ukraine were generally a partial factor in the inventories most relevant to the war with Iran and a Western Pacific conflict scenario. Of the 102 categories of equipment supplied to Ukraine, only four—Patriot, ATACMS, HARM, and Stinger—overlapped significantly with those requirements. 

Even among the hundreds of Patriot interceptors transferred to Ukraine, some came from European inventories or new production rather than directly from existing American stocks. Overall, the wars in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East have imposed real costs, but they did not design........

© The National Interest