U.S. Defense Department officials profess to have learned one of the starkest lessons from the war in Ukraine: that high-intensity conflicts consume a huge number of munitions and that weapons production cannot rapidly expand. William LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, coined the phrase “production is deterrence” in late 2023, and this mantra has been repeated by other senior leaders, including Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
Unfortunately, the Defense Department’s budget request for fiscal year 2025, which asks for $1.2 billion less than last year for key conventional precision-guided munitions, belies these claims. The Pentagon cannot continue to kick the can down the road and promise to buy more munitions next year. Supplemental appropriations are needed to replenish inventories of weapons given to partners and expended during operations in the Middle East, but on their own, they are a Band-Aid that will not fix the fundamental problem of production levels that do not match the intensity of modern warfare. The Pentagon needs to consistently buy more of the right weapons to support allies and partners, deal with the threats it faces today, and deter future challenges.
Understandably, U.S. military weapons stockpiles shrunk and the defense industrial base consolidated at the end of the Cold War as the threat of superpower war receded. Over the next few decades, the Pentagon sought to become leaner and more efficient, deciding that it was wasteful to buy and store large caches of weapons that might never be used.
Instead, the department purchased small stockpiles, typically numbering no more than several thousand of the more sophisticated, longer-range missiles—such as the PAC-3, SM-6, Tomahawk, or Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missiles— that could be supplemented by just-in-time production. This procurement strategy was sufficient for U.S. forces that were focused on lower-intensity counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations because the demand for weapons was expected to be low.
But even small contingencies, such as the 1999 air war in Kosovo and the 2014 operation against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, nearly exhausted U.S. stores of key precision weapons.
In response, munitions procurement followed boom and bust cycles. The military bought weapons when they were being used during a conflict and stores ran low, but then quickly deprioritized weapons purchases once the immediate need subsided. Inconsistent buys led the armaments industry to atrophy and lose its ability to surge, a result of increasingly fragile supply chains and a proliferation of sole-source suppliers. For example, there are currently only two American companies that produce the solid rocket motors that propel the majority of U.S. missile systems.
With their 2024 budget request, U.S. defense officials addressed this problem of volatile munitions buys by requesting multiyear procurement authorities for several priority weapons. Across the portfolio, according to Hicks, the request focused on procuring “the maximum amount of munitions” for defeating “aggression in the Indo-Pacific” and strengthening production lines. Our analysis of the 2024 request confirmed that the Defense Department was addressing critical gaps in maritime strike and air defense weapons, but needed to do more.
Unfortunately, the fiscal 2025 presidential request does not sufficiently build on the progress made last year. Spending levels for key conventional precision munitions are down in this request, dropping from $12.3 billion to $11.1 billion. Congressionally imposed fiscal caps forced the Pentagon to make hard choices in this budget, and munitions once again became the bill payer.
The news isn’t all bad, however. The Defense Department is seeking additional multiyear procurement contracts and continues to request more maritime strike weapons—the latter of which is one of the greatest needs for a potential war with China. In particular, the Air Force and Navy nearly doubled the number of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles bought last year. But after decades of neglecting anti-ship weapons, the Pentagon is still not making the scale of investments needed to meet projected demands.
The Navy, for example, stopped buying heavyweight torpedoes for decades, and since restarting production lines, it has only purchased 539 torpedoes. That’s enough to arm 20 Virginia class submarines—just half of the Navy’s attack submarine fleet.
In a Center for a New American Security war game conducted for the U.S. House of Representatives select committee on China, the U.S. team fired approximately 90 percent of its inventory of air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles and 80 percent of its long-range air-launched land-attack weapons in less than a week. The U.S. team managed to destroy approximately 25 percent of the Chinese surface ships and more than 150 Chinese combat aircraft, but it could not keep that level of pressure beyond the first week of the fight. Thus, Chinese troops secured a lodgment on Taiwan, and the U.S. team did not have enough weapons to stop reinforcements.
The United States also does not have the weapons inventories to support less stressing but persistent challenges, such as Iranian and Houthi attacks in the Middle East. Between October 2023 and this February, U.S. naval vessels fired more than 100 standard missiles to shoot down Houthi drones and missiles fired at ships in the Red Sea.
Most of the munitions used by the United States were older SM-2 missiles, but the Navy also fired some of its advanced SM-6 missiles. Each of these interceptors’ costs between $4 million to $6 million today, so the Navy is buying only 17 SM-2s and 125 SM-6s this year, bringing total historical buys to fewer than 10,000 and 1,681 respectively. Only 219 SM-2 have been bought since 2009, while investments have been made to increase SM-6 annual production from 125 missiles a year to 200 missiles a year by 2026.
U.S. forces have also conducted offensive strikes to destroy Houthi missiles and drones before they could be fired. For example, the Navy used at least 94 Tomahawk cruise missiles in multiple strikes against the Houthis in January, expending almost two years’ worth of missile buys in less than a month. The Navy purchased no land-attack Tomahawks last year, and it is not buying any this year.
U.S. air defenses were stressed again in April, when Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones against Israel. For the first time, U.S. missile destroyers successfully employed SM-3s in combat to intercept four to six Iranian ballistic missiles, while Air Force F-15 and F-16 fighters shot down at least 80 kamikaze drones.
Despite this, the Pentagon plans to terminate production of SM-3 block IB missiles to save $1.9 billion and proposes purchasing only 12 SM-3 block IIA annually for the next four years. The weapons used by U.S. fighter aircraft were not disclosed. But if, for instance, the fighters employed one AIM-9X air-to-air missile to interdict each of the 80 drones, they would have expended 40 percent of the Air Force’s 2024 purchase in one operation.
While supplemental appropriations help to restore weapons stockpiles to their prior levels, the Pentagon has not adequately increased the baseline number of weapons that it is buying and continues to count on industry to surge when needed. But as the U.S. defense industry has struggled to meet the Ukrainian military’s needs, it has become clear that it cannot quickly surge—and that it will not make investments to expand production that may not yield returns because of inconsistent annual buys.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan asserted that the U.S. defense industry is “still underestimating” the worldwide demand for weapons, suggesting that it should invest in production capacity based on expected foreign military sales. Yet foreign sales are not enough to strengthen the munitions industrial base. Industry is unwilling to invest without a predictable demand signal—for example, through multiyear contracts—and the process of selling weapons to other countries is notoriously slow and uncertain.
The Defense Department vastly underestimates the number of munitions that it needs to deal with adversaries in the Middle East that have large stocks of relatively cheap missiles and drones, let alone what it would need to face a more capable potential foe—such as China, which is believed to have thousands of sophisticated long-range missiles and drones. The first seven days of a conventional war with China would likely exhaust supplies. Despite the Pentagon’s continued pledges to expand inventories of key conventional weapons, munitions continue to lose in budget battles to larger platforms. But these ships, submarines, aircraft, and guns will be worthless without the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets to arm them.
Even in today’s constrained budget environment, the U.S. Defense Department needs to do more to prioritize munitions buys and prove it has learned the lessons of Ukraine. Congress can play a role in holding the Pentagon to its word here, increasing the buys of key conventional weapons as well as authorizing and appropriating money for the multiyear munitions contracts that would give much-needed stability to the munitions industry.
When it comes to these critical weapons, dramatic and consistent change is necessary to reverse the Defense Department’s poor record. Business as usual will not cut it.