Trump and the Pentagon are burning through America’s arsenal on a war they cannot finish.
Let me get to the parts counter before I get to the policy.
A man came into my shop last week with a 2014 F-150. The transmission had gone out. He had the money to fix it, he said, but the part was backordered six months because the supplier had shifted the line. The line went where the contracts went. The contracts went to the missile plants. The missile plants are running three shifts. The truck plant in this county closed in 2019. The supplier that used to make the transmission part now makes a component for a guided munition. The arithmetic is the same arithmetic the Pentagon is running, and the man in my shop understood it without me having to explain it.
That is what I want to talk about in this column. Not the think-tank reports, though I will come back to those. The production numbers, which a man at a parts counter can read, and what those numbers mean at the kitchen table, the VFW hall, the factory floor, and the recruiter’s office in the strip mall where a kid goes in because the only path to the GI Bill runs through the building with the flag out front.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has estimated that the war with Iran has consumed roughly half of America’s prewar stock of Patriot interceptors and THAAD antimissile batteries, and about a third of the Tomahawk cruise missiles and JASSM standoff munitions. The Council on Foreign Relations put the conclusion in writing this month: “the U.S. weapons arsenal has been depleted and no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan.” Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the Patriot, said it delivered 620 PAC-3 interceptors last year, up more than 20 percent from the year before. Sounds impressive until you do the parts-counter arithmetic. We had about 800 left at last count. Russia alone makes more than a hundred ballistic missiles a month. China, North Korea, and Iran have their own lines. The interceptors do not multiply because the Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell says the shortage is “false.”
Parnell’s argument is the argument a man gives when he cannot argue the substance. The deputy White House press secretary added that the United States has “more than enough munitions, ammo and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals and beyond,” and that “Operation Epic Fury has exposed what happens when you mess with the United States.” A senior European defense official put it more plainly: “This is the existential problem: our foes think they are at war, while we pretend that we are not.” That formulation is the column in miniature. The foes are counting interceptors. The administration is counting press releases.
I served in an Abrams crew in 2003. What stays with me from that deployment, more than anything specific that happened on the road, is what I learned when I came home: the war had been sold to the men who fought it on terms the political class had already decided not to honor. We were told we had the best equipment in the world. We were told we were doing what had to be done. We were told the arsenal was behind us. The arsenal was half-empty in 2003 too, and the men who carried the difference were the men in the trucks and the men in the houses they pulled up to. The same arrangement is the arrangement today, except that the political class has been doing it longer and the bill is bigger and the kid signing up at the recruiter’s office in 2026 is signing up on the same promise that was sold to me in 2002.
The political class that built the arsenal shortage is not one party’s project. That is the part I want to be plain about, because the bipartisan consensus that built the post-2001 war machine is the bipartisan consensus that starved the production base that was supposed to back it. President Bush put the wars in motion and let the production base atrophy. President Obama escalated the drone campaigns, continued the production starvation, and signed off on a procurement system that paid contractors on cost-plus accounting, which means the more they spend, the more they make, and the slower the line runs, the more it costs. President Biden expanded the wars and left the production base on the same peacetime tempo. The Trump administration is now spending the arsenal those decisions left behind, and the contractors who profited from every step of it are still on cost-plus. Lockheed Martin’s stock is up. RTX’s stock is up. The CEO compensation packages are up. The factory that used to make parts in this county is closed. The line that closed moved. The supplier that took the line is running three shifts on a guided-munition component. The men who used to work the line are working two jobs or they are not working.
You do not need a strategic-studies degree to see what that means for the kid in uniform. You can read the parts catalog. The kid who ships out next time will be sent with what the arsenal has, and what the arsenal has is half-empty. The promise is “we will send you with the best.” The reality is “we sent the arsenal ahead of you.” The kid does not get to refuse. The kid took the contract because the recruiter’s office was the only door open. The kid trusted the country. The country let the warehouse run low. The arithmetic does not pencil out for the kid in uniform.
The $59 billion Lockheed contract the Pentagon announced last month would triple Patriot PAC-3 production by the end of 2030. The $35 billion THAAD contract would quadruple that line. Neither contract is fully funded. Russia produces more in a month than those contracts will produce in a year, and the contracts are press releases until Congress writes the checks. The press release is what we have done. The check is what we have not written.
The allies are reading the empty warehouses. Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker from the ruling party, said: “Unofficially, we all know that they won’t risk their security for the sake of the Baltic states, or for the sake of Germany. The American nuclear umbrella is gone.” Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states will not support renewed operations against Iran because their own interceptor stocks are too low to protect their own oil and gas infrastructure from the Iranian missiles we already let through. Ukraine’s energy grid will be hit by Russian ballistic missiles this winter because the interceptors that would have defended it are in the Persian Gulf. Taiwan will be coerced because the $14 billion in military sales the Trump administration just froze were the sales the Council on Foreign Relations study says we need to deter a Chinese attack. None of these people voted for Trump. None of them sent soldiers to Iraq in 2003. They are civilians, and they are being spent the way the Abrams crews were spent, except that in this case the spending was done by a political class that knew what it was doing and has told you, with a straight face, that the warehouse is full.
Matthew Kroenig, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who served in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration, named the shift with a precision the Pentagon has not matched. “If you think about deterrence, it’s about capability and credibility,” Kroenig said. “The question used to be credibility, will the United States really do it? But capability is an important part of this equation. And, with all the reporting about how the U.S. is expending munitions, it’s just logical that adversaries would assume that the U.S. is less capable now than it was several months, or several years, before.” When the warehouse goes empty, the credibility goes with it. You do not need a degree to read that. You need a parts catalog and the willingness to look at the empty shelves.
The production base the country needed was not built. The production base the country had was run at peacetime tempo while the wars ran at wartime tempo. The contracts that would have built the wartime tempo are announced at press conferences and not funded. The contractors are paid on cost-plus accounting and have never had it so good. The political class on both sides of the aisle voted for the wars and the procurement system that did not build the arsenal behind them. The kid who enlists signs on the same promise that was sold to me in 2002, and the promise is emptier now than it was then. The ally who depended on the arsenal is told to wait. The contractor who profited from the procurement system is asked to do more, on the same accounting that paid him to do less.
This is what a small shop in Georgia looks like when the parts catalog runs short. The arsenal is half-empty, the contractors are full, the political class is in denial, and the kid in uniform will pay the difference the next time the country sends him. The country can fix it with a vote, with a budget, and with the willingness to read the parts catalog before the warehouse is needed. The country has waited until the warehouse is half-empty. The interceptors are not coming. The allies are not waiting. The citizenry had better get to the parts counter.