Both Parties Spent Thirty-Five Years Closing the Factories That Make the Ammunition

Both parties, across six administrations, spent thirty-five years closing the factories that make the ammunition, and called it a peace dividend.

The United States has one propellant factory left. It is a World War II-era plant in southern Virginia. None has been built since the early 1970s. Europe has a single TNT manufacturing plant, down from seven after the Cold War. The U.S. relies entirely on imports for its TNT, particularly from Poland. In 1978, according to the U.S. Army Sustainment Command, the country had 32 government-owned ammunition plants. It now has 11.

Three companies that make RDX and IMX, the compounds that make artillery shells actually work, are delayed roughly eight years, with the target date slipping from last year to around 2030. An Army spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. Production remains at 2017 levels. The cost of TNT has increased almost fourfold since 2024. After two years of fighting in Ukraine, American customers of the Polish TNT maker Nitro-Chem received notice the company could not guarantee shipments because of the war.

Now, I’m just a simple man, but I can read a parts diagram. And what these numbers describe is a supply chain that does not exist. The political class designed and funded the assumption that American wars would be short. The force was built around a 40-day intense war, as an Indian defense executive recently put it. Ukraine tells you that modern conflict goes on and on, and that you need industrial capacity to sustain it. Each year of fighting in Ukraine is the indictment, because each year makes the deficit more visible and the cost of filling it higher.

Sun Tzu, Art of War, Chapter 2, on the costs of prolonged campaigns: “When your weapons are dulled and ardor damped, your strength exhausted and treasure spent, neighboring rulers will take advantage of your distress to act.” Four years of artillery war have consumed munitions faster than the alliance can produce them, and neighboring rulers have indeed taken note.

Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, paragraph 24, warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The industrial complex he named has spent decades doing something he did not anticipate: it hollowed out its own manufacturing base. The bipartisan consensus accepted the hollowing because it assumed the bills would never come due. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden: each administration inherited the depleted base and, with the exception of recent years, allowed the depletion to continue. The political class authorized wars while allowing the industrial base required to sustain them to atrophy. The Constitution charges Congress with raising and supporting armies. What the political class permitted was the dismantling of the capacity to fulfill that duty.

The forty-day assumption was everywhere. It shaped the force design, the production contracts, the Congressional appropriations, and the Pentagon’s own planning. Ukraine’s grinding artillery war has exposed it as the most consequential miscalculation in post-Cold-War defense policy. An executive at Kalyani Strategic Systems, an Indian conglomerate that produces 60,000 shells monthly, put it plainly: “Production was based around a 40-day intense war, but what Ukraine tells us is you need to go on and on.” He is describing what American policymakers built and called a peace dividend.

The Trump administration has now proposed spending nearly $50 billion of its $1.45 trillion defense budget on developing domestic sources of critical minerals, chemicals, and energetics. The U.S. has already allocated $46 billion for critical minerals over five years, eight times the EU’s comparable spending. NATO countries are launching at least 24 new projects to bring explosives production back into the alliance. Three new factories are planned for Arkansas, a center of U.S. weapons production. Regulus Global aims this year to start work on a site to produce triple-base propellant, a particularly powerful variant that the U.S. has not manufactured since 1986. D&M Holding is already building a propellant factory there and is in talks with the Pentagon to help finance it. South Korea’s Hanwha Defense plans to build one as well. Three companies are building TNT plants in Europe. The U.K. plans to complete at least six new energetics factories by 2030. Twenty-four projects to replace what six administrations spent thirty-five years dismantling. Thirty-two ammunition plants in 1978, eleven today. These projects will not close that gap.

Making explosives is dangerous, and Western companies face high regulatory hurdles that their competitors do not. A blast at Accurate Energetic Systems, a Tennessee manufacturer, killed 16 workers last year. In Sweden, a former software executive spent two years and more than $2 million obtaining permits for a TNT factory, received permission in January, and now faces appeals from local residents. He does not expect production before late 2028. Russia, he noted, faces fewer constraints. Russia can build the same capacity in one to two years, because the Kremlin relaxed planning regulations for explosives makers after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The mismatch is structural and it will take years to close. The factories we are now scrambling to build should have existed already. The industrial base was not destroyed by an adversary. It was dismantled by the same political class that authorized the wars. Congress is charged under the Constitution to raise and support armies and to provide and maintain a navy. It allowed the manufacturing base required for that charge to be exported, consolidated, and abandoned, while the contracts kept flowing and the factories closed.

Eisenhower warned, in the same farewell address, that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” We let the factories close. We let the shipments depend on one Polish supplier. We let the prices quadruple. The alert and knowledgeable citizenry Eisenhower described is not the one that permitted this to happen. And the soldiers who fight under the forty-day assumption, and the workers who will build the new factories in Arkansas, are the ones who will pay for what the political class allowed.