Western governments spent thirty years hollowing out the war factories that defended them. The United States has one propellant factory. It was built before the Normandy landings, and no new one has been built since 1971. Europe has one TNT manufacturing plant, down from seven after the Cold War. Sixteen workers died in an explosion at a Tennessee munitions plant last year. And the Trump administration is now proposing to spend nearly $50 billion to rebuild what three decades of bipartisan outsourcing dismantled.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that NATO countries have launched at least 24 new projects to bring explosives and propellant production back to the West — the kind of work allies have been racing to do since American capabilities began to be withdrawn. The Trump proposal, drawn from a $1.45 trillion defense budget, would fund domestic sources of critical minerals, chemicals, and energetics. The figure fits a pattern this column has previously tracked — $46 billion already allocated for critical minerals over five years, eight times what the European Union has committed. Three new factories are planned for Arkansas. The United Kingdom says it will build at least six new energetics factories by 2030. Regulus Global, a company I had not heard of until I read the Journal’s reporting, plans to start work this year on a site to produce triple-base propellant that this country has not made since 1986. South Korea’s Hanwha Defense is planning a propellant factory in Arkansas. D&M Holding is already building one.
These are necessary projects. The pace is the problem.
Let me take you back to January 17, 1961. Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address, paragraph 24, said this: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Paragraph 25: “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. 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.”
Sixty-five years later, the misplaced power has manifested in exactly the way Eisenhower warned. Not in the form of coup or conspiracy — but in the form of industrial demilitarization. The bipartisan political class that built the Cold War arsenal decided, with general agreement, that the arsenal no longer needed to exist. The U.S. had 32 government-owned ammunition plants in 1978, according to the U.S. Army Sustainment Command. Today it has 11. Europe closed seven of its eight TNT plants after the Cold War. The U.S. has built no new propellant factory since the early 1970s. The single remaining plant is in southern Virginia, and it is a World War II-era plant.
The country that ran out of factories did not decide overnight. It decided in the Clinton-era base closures, in the 1990s peace-dividend budgets, and in the Obama-era sequestration cuts. It decided in pieces, year after year, without a single roll-call vote in defense of an explosives plant, because no constituency in the country was organized to demand one. Andrew Bacevich, in Washington Rules, named the bipartisan consensus that kept the post-Cold War posture in place: maintain global military preeminence, lead, be present, intervene. The framework held. The factories did not. The arsenal the framework promised was already disappearing before the framework could notice.
My background is the units that ran those operations — the Abrams crews of the 3rd Infantry Division, in Iraq from 2003 to 2005. The supply chain on which those units depended had always worked. The men who had built that supply chain were long retired or dead, but the chain held. I will not claim to have known then that our propellant came from a single factory built before the Normandy landings. I will say this: the country that sent those units to war had already outsourced the production of the means of war to suppliers whose loyalty was not American. The supply chain was treated as a given. The given was about to break.
The Journal’s reporting makes the picture plain. TNT prices have increased almost fourfold since 2024. After two years of fighting, U.S. customers of the Polish TNT maker Nitro-Chem received notice that the company could not guarantee shipments because of the Ukraine war. The United States, the largest economy in the history of the world, is waiting on Poland for the high explosive that goes into artillery shells. Production of RDX and IMX — the two main military explosives in the U.S. arsenal — is delayed by roughly eight years. The target date for new production has slipped from last year to around 2030. Helmut Rauch, chief executive of the defense unit at the German company Diehl Group, told the Journal the supply of RDX is “a concern for Europe.”
That is the polite phrase for what it actually is. A nation that cannot make its own explosives cannot make war. A nation that cannot make war cannot keep its promises to its allies. One must assume the Baltic states are watching this scramble with the same eyes that watched the Cold War end: the same understanding that a patron’s production capacity determines a client’s survival. The 24 new projects announced this week will arrive in 2028, 2030, 2032. Russia’s new projects arrive in one to two years. The arithmetic does not flatter us.
The class dimension of the hollowing out is not subtle. The men who serve in the U.S. military come disproportionately from working-class towns in the South and Midwest, the places where recruiters set up offices in strip malls because the local economy offered no other path to the GI Bill. The workers who staff the explosives factories come from the same places. The 16 workers who died at Accurate Energetic Systems in Tennessee last year were the same demographic the military draws from. They bore the cost of the production the political class decided to keep at home but not at sufficient scale to be safe. They were not the political class’s children. They were the children of the men who built the supply chain Eisenhower warned about.
Joakim Sjöblom, a former software executive who turned to explosives manufacturing after being surprised by the gap between European and Russian production, told the Journal he spent two years and more than $2 million to obtain permits for a TNT factory in rural Sweden. His company, Swebal, received permission in January and now faces appeals from local residents. He does not expect production before late 2028. Russia, he noted, “can do it in one to two years.”
That is the difference between a country that treats explosives production as national-security infrastructure and a country that treats it as a permitting problem. The permitting regime exists for good reason — explosives are dangerous, and the 16 Tennessee workers died because the production of explosives is dangerous — but a regulatory framework that adds five years to a project timeline while the adversary adds none is a regulatory framework that has lost its way. It is treating an act of war like an act of zoning.
The 24 new projects are a beginning. The $50 billion is necessary money. The Arkansas factories are welcome. None of it is enough. The country that ran out of propellant factories will not be made whole by 24 announcements. The country that depended on a single Polish supplier for its TNT will not be made whole by a 2030 target date. The country that has not built a new propellant plant since 1971 will not be made whole on the schedule of a Western permitting process while Russia, China, and Iran operate on theirs.
The reshoring is necessary. The reshoring is also late. And the country that runs late on this reshoring, while the men who would build it work at single plants built for their grandparents, is the country that Eisenhower was talking about in January 1961. Sixty-five years ago. The warning was plain. The warning was ignored. The cost is arriving now.