American defense industries lack the capacity to supply the missiles and other weapons needed for a war with China and U.S. forces would lose the conflict as a result, members of Congress and private defense experts warned Thursday.

The shortcomings were highlighted by a recent simulated conflict with Beijing held by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. The war game exercise revealed the U.S. military would quickly run out of bombs, missiles and other weapons within days after a war with China, which the Pentagon has identified as the U.S. military’s “pacing challenge.”

The growing risk of war with China over Taiwan or other flashpoints in the Indo-Pacific was the backdrop for Thursday’s committee hearing, as members and experts called for emergency measures to rebuild the American defense industry as a way to head off an armed clash with Beijing.

“Our defense industrial base lacks the capacity to deter and win a fight with the PRC,” said committee Chairman John Moolenaar at a hearing, using the acronym for People’s Republic of China.

U.S. defense firms also are proving unable to innovate rapidly, supply chains for key defense components are vulnerable to coercion and manipulation by China, the Michigan Republican said, calling for bold new policies and adding significant resources to the defense industrial base.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the panel’s simulation of a conflict with China revealed large gaps between the two countries’ defense production capacity. The Illinois lawmaker also warned that U.S. defense industries rely heavily on three key minerals used in making weapons that right now are mainly supplied by China.

“History tells us we need a healthy defense industrial base now to deter aggression and make sure the world’s dictators think again before dragging the U.S. and the world into yet another disastrous conflict,” said Mr. Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Democrat.

Exhausted stockpiles

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan voiced similar concerns in public remarks this week, warning a day before the hearing that, given current stockpiles, American munitions would be exhausted in a China conflict “very rapidly.”

“God forbid we end up in a full-scale war with the PRC,” Mr. Sullivan said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But any war with a country like the PRC, a military like the PRC, is going to involve the exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly.”

Mr. Sullivan said the United States needs to be building up stocks of vital munitions, as well as the components needed for producing them on short notice.

U.S. defense industries must “close the gap” with China’s large-scale defense and weapons production capacity, he said.

Private analysts told the Hill panel Thursday that the capacity problems for the U.S. defense industry were real and growing, in part as the result of a long period of neglect and misguided production priorities.

Christian Brose, chief strategy officer with the autonomous weapons maker Anduril Industries, said the problem was caused by decades of U.S. and allied military powers producing increasingly small numbers of expensive platforms and weapons that are costly, slow and difficult to produce.

War simulations like the one carried out by the committee show that the U.S. military will run out of weapons in less than a week of war with China, Mr. Brose said.

The war in Ukraine also has sharply drawn down the store of U.S. weapons: Ukraine’s military used a decade’s worth of U.S. tactical weapons in the initial months of the war with Russia, he said.

“America and our allies increasingly lack the industrial capacity to deter — and, if necessary, fight and win — a great power conflict,” Mr. Brose said.

Mr. Brose said one solution being offered by his company is to build thousands of aerial and underwater drones that can be replaced inexpensively in a conflict.

William C. Greenwalt, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, said the American defense industry was once the “Arsenal of Democracy” that won World War II. Today, he said, that arsenal is in decline.

“We have now reached an inflection point, as our industrial deterrence is no longer credible,” Mr. Greenwalt testified.

Despite large amounts spent on defense for the last two decades, the once-vast U.S. technological dominance also has eroded, he said.

Government leaders lack a sense of urgency in restoring the defense industrial base, Mr. Greenwalt said and the defense industry needs to retool.

Shrinking pool

Part of the problem, analysts said, is a lack of competition in the defense sector, which has contracted sharply to a small number of defense contractors.

“Just as was the case in the Soviet Union, centrally-planned, linear, predictive processes and hubristic mindsets have destroyed innovation and creativity,” Mr. Greenwalt said.

Mr. Greenwalt said 25 years of outsourcing industry to China produced rising uncertainty about the security and reliability of the American defense base supply chains.

A war industries board should be created to end the vulnerabilities. Supply chains and critical infrastructure need to secured, Mr. Greenwalt said, applying advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence to remove or reduce Chinese-sourced components currently in the defense supply system.

“It is now time to act and take measures to improve the defense industrial base and build a new Arsenal of Democracy,” he said.

An emergency program over the next one to five years is needed to avoid war with China, Mr. Greenwalt said. “Peace comes through strength and that strength at its foundation begins with our industrial base,” he said.

Long timelines

Mr. Brose said drawn-out defense manufacturing timelines have resulted in lower numbers of weapons and defense platforms being produced.

In fiscal 2023, the Pentagon planned to build one or two submarines, several warships, 22 tanks and a few dozen stealth jets. Fewer than five intelligence satellites or long-range bombers were ordered, Mr. Brose said,

“Each year we are retiring ships, combat aircraft and other major platforms at a faster rate than the industrial base is capable of replacing them,” he said.

Critical munitions needed for a major conflict also are not being produced. The Biden administration’s budget request for fiscal 2024 planned for 118 Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, 39 Standard Missile-3s, 125 Standard Missile-6s, 34 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and 550 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles - Extended Range, Mr. Brose noted.

“Most of these weapons cost several million dollars apiece, and the capacity to scale production does not exist,” Mr. Brose said. “It is not hard to imagine how the United States would run out of these and other critical munitions in a matter of days in a war against China and then struggle to replace them on a relevant timeline.”

U.S. Stinger anti-aircraft missiles supplied to the Ukrainian military were depleted in several months of fighting and replacing the missiles will take two to three years, Mr. Brose said.

China’s defense industrial base does not have the same problem and is outproducing U.S. industry in a range of weapons, including warships, combat aircraft, missiles and drones.

The U.S. capacity problem “did not happen overnight either. It was the product of decades of systematic U.S. de-industrialization and Chinese hyper-industrialization — itself a consequence of long-standing U.S. policy toward Beijing that aspired to forge a symbiotic bilateral relationship with America as buyer and China as builder,” Mr. Brose said.

The policy produced “a colossal disparity” in the ability to build weapons. China’s shipbuilding capacity, for instance, is more than 200 times larger than in the U.S., he said.

“Our current defense industrial base simply cannot build enough of these platforms and weapons to win a conventional arms race against China,” Mr. Brose said.

Halimah Najieb-Locke, until recently deputy assistant defense secretary for industrial base resilience in the Biden administration, said supply-chain problems were highlighted when a shortage of semiconductors emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Notably, the shortages of key parts impeded our ability to produce mission-critical weapons needed in the Russia-Ukraine war and amplified the growing concern over our depleted stockpile,” said Ms. Najieb-Locke, now with the technology firm Entanglement, Inc.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.