About Those Ammunition Stockpiles
A magazine at 'critical minimum' is already effectively empty
Originally attributed to Elbridge Colby, the latest disruption of Ukrainian ammunition supplies turns out to have been the decision of Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is being excoriated because he made his decision after a review found “while some high-precision munitions are running low, levels haven’t dropped below critical minimums,” according to NBC News. Democrats and supporters of Ukraine are demanding answers.
Regular readers will know that I support Ukraine. My analysis of Hegseth has been limited to his importance for the president as a leader of the veterans community, a constituency which has held Hegseth in very high regard. I certainly do not agree with Colby and Hegseth that the United States ought to withhold ammunition supplies. However, I do understand their thinking. I have read their books, after all.
What matters here is not whether ammunition stocks meet some critical minimum threshold decided by the Pentagon bureaucracy, but whether the magazines are deep enough for a real war in the estimation of the Trump administration. (Spoiler alert: magazines are never, ever deep enough for a sustained war.) In real strategic terms, an ammunition magazine that is even close to “critical minimum” might as well be empty, already.
Consider the Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missile. Ukraine needs them. NATO needs them. Japan needs them. Israel needs them. The US Army needs them in the Pacific and the Middle East. Just take a guess how many interceptors the United States and its allies plan to need if they have to wage any wars on the near-horizon. Imagine that number. Then compare it to the actual production figures: 42 PAC-3 interceptor missiles per month, or 500 per year. China probably has somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 missiles ranged on Taiwan right now. The problem will now be self-evident.
Since 2022, the United States munitions industry has ramped up production, opening new facilities and lines, to meet the increasing demand for weapons in a world bracing for more war.
For example, after Poland observed the effects of two dozen HIMARS launchers on the Russian Army in Ukraine, Warsaw ordered 486 of the world’s most famous rocket launchers on wheels. The Polish Ministry of National Defense wanted to buy even more HIMARS trucks than that, but Lockheed Martin did not have the production capacity to meet their demand, so the Poles bought 72 very similar wheeled launch systems from South Korea.
Imagine the mountain of ammunition that Poland will want to assemble for all those vehicles, and the sheer scale of the problem that Hegseth and Colby and the Trump team face becomes a bit easier to appreciate. They judge that it is better not to let ammunition stocks reach “critical minimums” at all, and on this score they have history backing them up. Wars invariably consume more ammunition at a faster rate than anyone expects.
To make matters even more complicated, the overall performance of the American ammunition manufacturing sector in this time of enlargement has been disappointing. A report last September found that 155mm shell production had reached just half the target of 80,000 units per month and Javelin production was lagging as well. Both weapons are on Hegseth’s list of suspended aid. How would these companies be doing if the United States was in a shooting war?
If there is a problem here that needs solving, that can be identified and addressed by politicians, it is not Russian influence or domestic partisan feuding. It is the long, bipartisan neglect of the American defense industrial base (DIB) by Washington.
Wars put tremendous stress on economies. “In June, the Russian manufacturing sector contracted at the sharpest rate in three years, with declines in production, new orders, and employment, according to a business activity survey,” Ukrainian Pravda reports. After the initial expansion of the industrial sector to meet wartime demand for weapons, production began to decline last year, and it has shrunk four months in a row through June.
As a rule of thumb, wars are generally won by the larger macroeconomic alliance. Russia does not really have allies. At best, China is a Russian customer for fossil fuels and a store for buying everything that Russia cannot get from the West while under sanctions. Iran barely rates as a partner, let alone an ally, as Kremlin inaction during the Israeli and American attacks on Iran bears witness.
Now the Russian economy shows signs of crisis. Vladimir Putin told the St. Petersburg Economic Forum a week ago that defense spending will have to decline for three years starting in 2026. A banking crisis looms because the government forced the banks to make preferential loans to defense contractors. But because the government also sets the prices for the weapons and components that it buys, critical manufacturers are going broke and shutting down.
“Optron-Stavropol, a supplier of power semiconductors for MiG, Sukhoi and Tupolev aircraft, as well as the next-generation MC-21 airliner,” stopped operating in March. “The company’s head Pavel Bondarenko blamed the crisis on defense contracts that lock the company into selling at state-mandated prices far below its production costs.” Russia has met wartime ammunition demands on the cheap, with the usual amount of inefficiency and corruption. This presents American policymakers with an opportunity to make their ‘Pacific pivot’, and deter China from invading Taiwan, by supplying Ukraine.
In my view, Colby and Hegseth take exactly the wrong approach. China will not attack Taiwan in force until 2027, whereas the Russian economy will not make it to 2027 if Ukraine has the means to fight back now. The United States needed a serious program of DIB investment and accountability to deepen our magazines and the Ukraine war has exposed the flaws in the current Pentagon procurement system. In the meantime, supplying Ukraine proves that the United States can supply Taiwan, too.
An ounce of strategic deterrence is worth a kilogram of wartime spending cure. But on the question of whether magazines above “critical minimums” are good enough, I heartily agree with the Trump team that they are not.
How To Invade Taiwan
It may look like some sort of mechanical narwhal, but it is assessed to be an invasion barge. Maritime experts have been watching Chinese developments very closely, and the construction of these unusual vessels could not go unseen. Three major variants have been identified by Tom Shugart. They have been photographed operating linked together as a single extended, deployable pier.