Empty arsenal, empty threat: how to fix America’s arms deficit

The Pentagon is starting to understand that the current arsenal of traditional and precision weapons is far too small to fight any prolonged war longer than a few days.

The exhaustion of key weapons such as Patriot and HIMARS missiles, shortages of 155mm ammunition, and lack of replacement radars and missile launch platforms, is illustration enough of the problem. The failure to protect US and allies‘ bases adequately against a second-tier threat such as Iran illustrates that current-day solutions don’t work.

The Russians and Chinese, plus the Iranians and even the lowly Houthis, have certainly figured out that the US and its allies face a serious problem. Today, any conflict in Europe or Asia would prove devastating for the United States.

On top of everything else, American weapons have become uber-expensive and hard to manufacture. A Patriot interceptor costs almost US$4 million per shot, and since two are required to knock out a single target with a high kill probability, it is unaffordable.

Meanwhile, America’s defense industrial base is primarily made up of five huge companies (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Boeing), where each mammoth company is actually a glued-together series of acquisitions, many of which were not designed for mass production.

In the more traditional category, ammunition makers and gun tube manufacturers are typically old companies that cannot significantly accelerate production.

The consolidation of America’s defense industrial base was concocted by the Pentagon to reduce overhead and speed up procurement.

That got underway on July 21, 1993 when then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Deputy Secretary of Defense Matthew Perry invited a dozen of the top defense companies (at the time there were 20 companies in this category) and told them that in five years time half of them had to be gone.

The Defense Department, Aspin and Perry reportedly said, would not give them any more contracts. The dinner at the Pentagon has since been dubbed The Last Supper.

The consolidation promoted by the Pentagon created five very large defense companies who controlled most of the top defense systems, priced their output very high and were under no pressure to speed up production, save money, or worry about competition.

Foreign competitors were blocked. For example, the superior European Airbus refueling aircraft was scrapped in favor of a problematic and untested Boeing-proposed refueler. Even when the UK offered a STOL platform (Harrier), the US forced a redesign and US production, which jacked up costs considerably and delayed deliveries.

The same thing happened with the US now scrapped frigate program called FFG-(X). It was based on Europe’s highly successful FREMM platform. Had the Navy not messed with it, stuffed it with incompatible US systems, and reengineered it when it didn’t need it, the US Navy would have the new frigates at sea today.

In fact, it would have made good sense just to buy the ships ready-made from European shipyards. Unfortunately, US laws prohibit the use of foreign hulls. Beyond the failure to outsource, US government-controlled arsenals face serious manufacturing problems.

A good example is the Watervliet Arsenal in upstate New York. It was founded in 1813 and manufactures the gun tubes for 155mm guns and 120mm guns for US tanks. These gun tubes wear out fairly quickly, or warp, or both, which means they have to be replaced.

Watervliet can produce only 216 155mm gun tubes annually, far below the need. In Ukraine, fully one-third of its big guns are out of action mainly because of missing replacement gun tubes. Today, Watervliet has a $900 billion backlog. It takes the Arsenal four months to produce one tube.

Watervliet is a defense “untouchable,” so any idea of funding a competitor is a non-starter. Arsenal is government-owned and government-operated.

The search for a cheaper, faster way of doing things is just starting, but it will be years before any real reform. Despite the significant defensive failures in the Persian Gulf, where the US, with its most up-to-date air defense hardware, failed to protect military bases from Iran (and more recently from the Houthis), this suggests that even the US’s best “solutions” don’t work well enough.

Consider the Patriot, America’s number one air defense system. It was first deployed in 1985 and, over the next 40-plus years, has been “evolved” in various ways. It was originally designed to shoot down enemy aircraft, like the I Hawk, which it replaced.

Improvements in Patriot include the most modern intercept missile, PAC-3, introduced in 1999, better radars and better integration with other systems, for example THAAD.

Today, PAC-3 interceptors are in very short supply. During a single five-week window at the height of the conflict in the Middle East earlier this year, US and allied coalition forces expended an estimated 1,700 Patriot missiles.

The current US reserve is estimated at 750 missiles. Lockheed Martin produces about 650 missiles each year, but there have been many delays, including on the radar seeker, which Boeing produces for the PAC-3 and PAC-3 MSE interceptors.

The Pentagon just authorized a sale of 500 Patriot missiles to Ukraine, but as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has noted, it will take years before they arrive.

The problem isn’t that evolved Patriots don’t work well, although some question their overall efficacy against modern ballistic missiles. The issue is their survivability under waves of attack that include everything from drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. They also cost a fortune, which has stimulated the hunt for “something” cheaper.

There is no competitor to Patriot in the United States. While the Department of War is trying to speed up interceptor missile production, that is not enough.

The Pentagon needs to figure out how to deal with massed swarm attacks, which likely means that far more air defense platforms are needed and lots of innovations, including the use of artificial intelligence, deep networking and multiple land, sea and air systems that can take out enemy drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.

Instead of the narrow-minded “Buy America” approach, which is simply a protectionist racket, sharing and distributing production among allies is the only practical way to produce enough to fight today. The Pentagon also must rethink the overhead it imposes on production and testing, because bottlenecks are not the way forward.

America’s potential adversaries already know that it is not ready to fight today except in very limited operations. This impacts not only US foreign policy but, ultimately, national security.

Stephen Bryen is a former US deputy undersecretary of defense and special correspondent at Asia Times. This article was first published on his Weapons and Strategy Substack and is republished with permission.