The ousting of Kevin McCarthy last week as Speaker of the US House of Representatives, along with that event’s immediate predecessor, 100 congressional Republicans’ vote to withhold US$300 million in military assistance to Ukraine, is self-destructive.
Unless reversed, it will stop the US from making sorely needed improvements in its ability to produce more arms more quickly.
Leaving aside the immense global consequences of abandoning Ukraine, American leaders who waver in supporting Ukraine overlook how increased supply demands of a major war revitalize the US defense industrial base.
As great-power competition deepens, the US is ever more in need of a robust defense industry and institutions that can adopt innovations and sustain high-intensity warfare. Yet the US defense base is ill-prepared to meet increasing challenges after three decades of underinvestment, while bureaucratic structures at the Pentagon are often too outdated to adapt at the speed demanded to succeed on a contemporary battlefield.
Continued US military support for Ukraine provides the necessary shake-up of defense institutions. By reviving America’s aging defense base and requiring the Pentagon to rethink its stultified ways of buying vital equipment, continued US support for Ukraine offers a dividend that prepares the US for future wars.
Artillery shortfall
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, American production of 155mm artillery rounds – the most commonly used caliber in the US artillery arsenal – was only 14,000 units per month. To put this number into perspective, the Ukrainian counteroffensive consumes up to 6,000 rounds per day (around 183,000 units per month).
The Ukrainian military says that it needs 10,000 rounds per day to defeat the enemy. Russia fired its artillery at the staggering rate of 60,000 shells per day (1,830,000 units per month) at the peak of its barrages in 2023.
To satisfy the larger-than-expected Ukrainian need for artillery munitions, the US has doubled its output to 24,000 155mm shells per month as of August. The Pentagon plans to reach the target of 1 million rounds per year (around 83,000 units per month) by autumn 2025.
This increased capacity is there to stay even when the war in Ukraine ends. The US Army invested about $2 billion to expand the output of artillery munitions in the US. The construction of new production lines and modernization of old ones in factories like Pennsylvania’s Scranton Army Munitions Plant will revive the US ability to produce enough munition to sustain future long, high-intensity wars waged by itself or its partners.
Beyond the 155mm artillery, the war in Ukraine has led Lockheed Martin to invest in doubling the production of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) from 48 to 90 units per year in its factory in Camden, Arkansas. The plant plans to hire 20% more workers over the next several years to expand the production of weapons for Ukraine.
The Camden factory also produces Javelin man-portable systems – another family of weapons decisive for Ukraine’s defense. Manufactured jointly by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, Javelin anti-tank missiles have helped Ukrainians destroy Russian armored columns, throwing off Russia’s initial assault against Kiev.
After multiple Ukraine-related orders from the Pentagon, the two companies plan to expand production of Javelin missiles from 2,100 to 4,000 units per year. Another $340 million order from the Pentagon led Raytheon to restart the previously discontinued production of Stingers, another man-portable system widely used by the Ukrainian military to shoot down Russian aircraft.
Fueling arms sales
If the US stops providing military aid to Ukraine, some of these changes could be reversed or slowed down. High demand by the Ukrainian military continues to drive the sales and production of US artillery munitions, HIMARS, man-portable systems and other weapons.
Quoted in an article in Inside Defense from last year, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief Bill LaPlante said, “This has traditionally been something that is feast or famine. We go into panic mode, we increase production, and then when the crisis is passed, we just go back to minimal production again.”
The war in Ukraine acts as a testing program for experimental US weapons systems, permitting the US military to observe their debut performance in a large, high-intensity war.
US drones, such as Anduril Industries’ Altius 600M, AeroVironment’s Switchblade, and Aevex Aerospace’s Phoenix Ghost, were used on a large scale in Ukraine for the first time. Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, highlighted the speed of learning from the war, “as the Russians change their tactics and their systems, we’re able to push software changes to our platforms that change their capabilities.”
AeroVironment chief executive officer Wahid Nawabi likewise labeled the war in Ukraine an “inflection” point. The firm has already used lessons from employing its drones in Ukraine to develop an upgraded version of Switchblades.
Supplying the Ukrainian military has also allowed US companies to develop totally new systems, such as Boeing’s Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), and put them to use right after production, accelerating the military learning and adaptation process.
Modernization
US defense startups have been especially rapid in utilizing the war in Ukraine for developing and testing new technology. From drone swarms and commercial satellites to anti-drone jamming and real-time AI targeting, the war in Ukraine has spurred major innovations in defense space.
In addition to newer systems, the war in Ukraine enables US military planners to refine their understanding of how older systems, such as HIMARS and Bradleys, perform in a large-scale modern war against a peer adversary.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the last time US weapons were used to fight a significant conventional force. With the advent of new technologies and doctrines, warfare has changed over the last 20 years. General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that with the war in Ukraine, “we are witnessing the ways wars will be fought, and won, for years to come.”
As modern technologies make the battlefield ever more mobile and complex, defense institutions must keep up. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the US had not mobilized its military production to surge levels ever since the Vietnam War. Practices on both the public and private sides had grown rusty. If the US is to succeed in a large war against a peer competitor, its institutions urgently need an update.
Continued support for Ukraine and mobilization of the US defense base provide this opportunity. Over the last year and a half of the war, the Pentagon has already learned how to adapt Covid-era mass-production techniques to the military sector, expediting contracts to restock Stingers and Javelins and provide Ukraine with modern National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS).
The military’s new procurement authorities, such as multi-year contracts, are enabling the military to accelerate the refill of its dwindling stockpile of munitions for Patriot air defense launchers, HIMARS, and other systems. The Pentagon is also learning how to build industrial partnerships with foreign nations to develop, produce, and procure weapons with the urgency demands.
By stress-testing the defense industrial base, US support for Ukraine reveals potential bottlenecks producers might experience if the US were to enter a large-scale war, from difficulties with attracting a high-skilled workforce to the shortage of intermediate inputs.
Bipartisan support for future war preparation
Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle state that the war in Ukraine showed the US lacked adequate surge capacity for a major war, inducing Congress to fund the recovery of the upscaling capacity.
A greater sense of urgency because of the need to support Ukraine also helps the Pentagon remove barriers in its commercial partnerships. The US European Command, the command structure responsible for US military operations in the European theater, has rapidly expanded its use of commercial satellite imagery to provide Ukraine with intelligence.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the conflict is already driving the Defense Department to consider how to better integrate commercial systems beyond Ukraine.
The integration of commercial and military intelligence is at the nexus of US broader intelligence sharing with Ukrainians – an exercise of the capability vital for supporting partner non-allied governments in future wars.
Lessons from the Ukrainian experiences, such as improved rules for intelligence sharing, will be vital in a Taiwan contingency. The US would face the same hurdles in sharing intelligence with the Taiwanese as it does with the Ukrainians, as neither is a formal US ally.
If not for the continuing US support for Ukraine, a sense of urgency and an impetus for reforms would fade away. Government bureaucracies, set up to be ponderous, tend to resist major changes unless forced by circumstances. The Pentagon has discarded any integration with private satellite intelligence firms before the war in Ukraine and was slower in developing industrial partnerships with allied countries.
Before the war, Congress kept refusing to permit multi-year procurement of munitions and begrudgingly granted this authority last December only for a limited scope of contracts. Even though institutional transformations are already under way, their continuation without potent external stimuli is not a given.
As the war in Ukraine shows, numbers still count. The US improves its own security not only by turning back Russia’s aggression, but by improving its ability to make weapons swiftly and streamline production. This will give the US an edge over its enemies, many of whom have not seen large wars for decades. Does Congress really want this?