The U.S. has only eight THAAD batteries worldwide. At least one of them has been damaged by Iranian strikes in the current conflict, and the U.S. is now moving in components from a system in South Korea, where it had been considered a key part of North Korean deterrence. “The reports of some number of those eight radars being disabled—even if temporarily—ought to really concern you, because those are the kind of things that they’re small in number, they’re really good at what they do, and they’re going to be really important on a bad day with China,” Karako said. “And—oh, by the way—we didn’t have enough of them already.”
A 2023 war game developed by C.S.I.S., and later run for the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, found that, in a conflict with China over Taiwan, the U.S. would run out of key munitions in just a month—and, in the case of one missile, in three to seven days—a worrisome conclusion even before the giant depletion of stockpiles caused by the Iran war. “What we learned, in a protracted war—our defense industrial base does not have the resources it needs to win that war,” John Moolenaar, a Republican House member from Michigan, who chairs the committee, said in an interview on Fox News. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that he worries Chinese officials might be watching the U.S. war in Iran and thinking that the strength of the U.S. military isn’t all that they might have imagined. “They have to be seeing some of the full might of the U.S. and Israel, and that Iran is still standing,” he said. “I’m afraid that they may be amazed at the specificity of our ability to target, but it raises the question of our staying power.”
The crisis of American defense production has been slowly worsening since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “Official Washington added a new word to its vocabulary in the months after February, 2022, and that new word was ‘munitions,’ ” Karako told me. Jon Finer, who served as Biden’s principal deputy national-security adviser, said that the limited ability of the United States to meet the endless need for weapons in the war in Ukraine was the “the most jarring thing that I learned during the entire time I was in government.”
Heavy-duty munitions had long been an afterthought in the “global war on terror,” which prioritized close fighting, special forces, and weapons platforms such as the Predator and Reaper drones. “We adjust our industrial base to the kinds of wars that we are fighting,” Finer told me. “I think we got out of the mind-set where we were ever going to fight a very munitions-heavy war again. That was a bit of a failure of imagination.” At the same time, the nation’s weapons manufacturers—part of what is known inside the Beltway as the defense-industrial base, or DIB—have grown cautious after years of fast-shifting congressional priorities. “If you’re a defense prime, you have basically had to use a Ouija board and a divining rod to try to guess what number of munitions that the government will want to buy two years from now,” Karako said. “These are publicly traded companies—they have to maximize the return for their stockholders—and they can’t, unfortunately, as good Americans, build stuff on spec and hope that the government will show up and buy it.”
The Pentagon has tried to revamp its famously slow and sclerotic acquisitions pipeline. Last summer, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg began leading the newly formed Munitions Acceleration Council, which focussed on rapidly growing the production of a dozen weapons that the Pentagon believes would be key to a future conflict with China—including Patriot interceptor missiles and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, known as JASSMs. (In early April, before the ceasefire, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. was redeploying stockpiles of JASSMs from the Pacific to the Middle East, a move that would leave around four hundred and twenty-five of the missiles, out of a prewar stockpile of more than two thousand, for the rest of the world.) Later in the fall, as part of what the Department of Defense dubbed an “Acquisition Transformation Strategy,” the Pentagon laid out how it aimed to rebuild the nation’s defense production; one of the main strategies is to give companies “bigger, longer deals, so they’ll be willing to invest more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapons.”
