The West spent decades dismantling its own explosives supply chain and now wants taxpayers to pay $50 billion to buy it back.
The numbers are a documentary record of a deliberate choice. The U.S. in 1978 operated 32 government-owned ammunition plants, according to the Army Sustainment Command. It now operates 11. Europe had seven TNT manufacturing plants after the Cold War; it now has one. The U.S. has exactly one propellant factory, a World War II-era plant in southern Virginia, and has not built a new one since the early 1970s. These are not the numbers of a nation caught by surprise. They are the numbers of a nation that decided, repeatedly, that the capacity to make its own ammunition was not a priority.
The Trump administration now proposes spending nearly $50 billion of its $1.45 trillion defense budget on domestic sources of critical minerals, chemicals and energetics — the same pattern the U.S. has been running for critical minerals, as the administration has spent months building this very list. NATO allies are already racing to replace withdrawn U.S. capabilities, and now the production push covers all types of energetics. Three new propellant factories are planned for Arkansas. Regulus Global aims to start work this year on a site to produce triple-base propellant, a variant the U.S. has not manufactured since 1986. D&M Holding is already building a propellant factory there. The U.S. will soon produce TNT again for the first time in decades.
The cost of the delay is measurable. The price of TNT has increased almost fourfold since 2024, according to Clark Mica, president of the Institute of Makers of Explosives.
A U.S. attempt to increase production of the explosives RDX and IMX is delayed by roughly eight years, with the target date slipping from 2025 to around 2030, an Army spokesman acknowledged. Production remains at 2017 levels despite ongoing projects.
The regulatory hurdles are real. A former software executive in Sweden spent two years and more than $2 million to obtain permits for a TNT factory and received permission in January, but now faces appeals from local residents and does not expect production before late 2028. Russia, he noted, “can do it in one to two years.” That gap is not a regulatory accident. It is the predictable result of a system that spent four decades perfecting the art of saying no to explosives production and never rehearsed saying yes. The U.S. and Europe do not lack the technical knowledge to make explosives. They lack the regulatory infrastructure to do it quickly, because the decision was made, decade by decade, that they did not need it.
The $50 billion is the accumulated cost of that decision. The plant closures, the permit delays, the fourfold price increase, the eight-year production delay — these are not separate problems. They are the same problem at different stages of its lifecycle. The U.S. has been through this cycle before: build capacity for war, close it in peacetime, rebuild at crisis cost.
The West outsourced not just the production of explosives but the risk of accidents, the environmental liability, and the regulatory burden. The cost came back when the fighting started. The $50 billion is not a cost of war. It is the cost of the assumption that the capacity to manufacture ammunition is a line item you can restore with a check. The West had the plants. It chose to close them. The bill is now on the table.