The U.S. military is low on weapons. Can it restock before a major conflict breaks out?

What is it running low on?
Drones, missiles, ammunition, nearly everything. Weapons shipments have strained U.S. stockpiles, particularly deliveries to Ukraine, which burned through a year’s worth of American 155mm artillery in just eight weeks in 2022, and to Israel. This month, the Pentagon paused transfers to Ukraine of Patriot missiles, precision-guided rockets, howitzer rounds, and more while it assessed inventory (though President Trump partly reversed that order). Middle East skirmishes have also eaten up material. In the $1.5 billion campaign to protect Red Sea shipping against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the U.S. fired 125 Tomahawks and 155 standard missiles and had seven Reaper drones shot down. And the Houthis are a ragtag militia compared with the real threat: China. When the Center for New American Security gamed out war with China, the U.S. fired 90% of its anti-ship cruise missiles and 80% of its land-attack weapons in less than a week. We’d better hope the next conflict is short-term, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in May, “because we don’t have enough munitions to sustain a long-term fight.”

Can’t the U.S. replace the weapons? 
Not fast enough. The defense budget is about $850 billion a year, but 22% goes to military salaries, and the biggest chunk, 39%, is for operations and maintenance. Only about 17% goes toward weapons procurement. And even if the Pentagon wanted to spend more, the U.S. industrial base has atrophied since the end of the Cold War. At this point, it “may be incapable of meeting the munitions demand created by a potential future fight against a peer adversary,” the Army Science Board said in a 2023 report. Defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglen, who co-authored that report, told The Atlantic that it’s “a miracle the U.S. military has anything that blows up, ever.” While companies are modernizing production, the process requires new equipment and skilled workers and will likely take years to complete. Shipbuilding, too, is lagging: The Navy had some 600 ships in 1987 and 300 now.

Why is shipbuilding lagging?
The U.S. industry dried up. Thanks to 19th-century laws requiring that any voyage between two U.S. ports be made in a U.S. vessel, American shipbuilding was protected from international competition and lost its competitive edge. The U.S. did ramp up the building of naval and cargo ships during World War II but sold them off after the war and dismantled the shipyards. Because of high costs, red tape, and a loss of subsidies, the U.S. now produces almost no oceangoing commercial ships: just five in 2022, compared with China’s 1,794. And the few military ships the U.S. has built tend to be insanely expensive. The Navy spent $22.5 billion to build three Zumwalt-class destroyers, for example, only to cancel the program because the gun on them would be too costly. Restoring U.S. shipbuilding will be a “generational project,” said Jake Sullivan, national security adviser under President Joe Biden, since “we don’t have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base to rest our naval shipbuilding on top of.”

How did we get to this point?
It’s partly that weapons production and shipbuilding declined along with the general drop-off in U.S. manufacturing. But it’s also the result of winning the Cold War. The Clinton administration swept into office in 1993 expecting to enjoy a peace dividend, and it slashed defense spending by some 15%, nearly two-thirds of which came from weapons procurement. That put many of the big defense contractors out of business, and by the end of the 1990s, the U.S. defense industrial base had shrunk from over 100 firms to just five. To this day, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing dominate the market. Critics say this lack of competition has stifled innovation and poured defense dollars into costly and outdated weapons systems like fighter jets, guided missiles, and aircraft carriers.

What should we be building instead? 
Drones. The U.S. arsenal is heavy on high-tech stuff like Tomahawk cruise missiles ($2 million each), interceptor missiles (up to $28 million) and F-35 fighter jets ($100 million). But as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown, quantity trumps quality in a protracted war. Kyiv has stayed in the fight thanks partly to its use of cheap drones that can swarm. Yet even if the Pentagon wanted to reorient around drones, its procurement process is clogged with red tape and designed for weapons systems that take 15 years to develop. “Drone innovation is happening at warp speed,” said Mark D. Jacobsen, a former professor at the Air Force’s Air War College, “but Defense Department acquisition is happening at industrial speed.”

Are changes underway? 
Yes. Production of artillery ammo has accelerated and is expected to increase fivefold this year. The big spending bill passed earlier this month added $25 billion for munitions, $29 billion for shipbuilding, and $16 billion for drones. And the Army is planning a $36 billion overhaul to equip its 10 combat divisions with 1,000 drones each and improve anti-drone defenses. To pay for that, it will halt procurement of things drones can take out, like tactical vehicles and M10 light tanks. “You’ve got to identify the attributes of a future force,” said Gen. Mark Milley, former chair of the joint chiefs. “We are in the midst of really fundamental change here.”

China arms up 
While the U.S. remains the most advanced military in the world, China has been adding weapons, ships, and aircraft carriers at a rate five to six times faster—and it’s increasingly producing them at home rather than buying them from Russia. Since China has a manufacturing-dominant economy and plentiful raw materials, it is effectively already operating on a wartime footing, while the U.S. would need to adjust its industries and workforce if a major conflict broke out. The contrast is particularly stark at sea: Chinese shipbuilding capacity is 230 times larger, thanks largely to dual-use shipyards, and China now has the bigger navy. Many Pentagon insiders believe Beijing is planning to attack Taiwan in 2027, which could spark a war with the U.S. “They are certainly putting a lot of resources into the capabilities,” says Gen. David W. Allvin, Air Force chief of staff. “Will they fight? I don’t want to find out.”

It’s “hard to imagine a more surreal or absurd scene” than last week’s viral incident at a Coldplay concert outside Boston, said Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press. As captured on an audience member’s cellphone and shared on TikTok, the stadium’s “kiss cam” landed on a middle-aged couple in a swaying embrace, whose blissful smiles abruptly turned to “looks of sheer panic” as they saw themselves on the jumbotron. “Either they’re having an affair,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin told the crowd, “or they’re just very shy.” Internet sleuths understood what to do next: Seemingly within minutes, they’d outed the pair as Andy Byron, the married CEO of software startup Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s also married head of HR. Then came a “tidal wave” of spoofs, joke memes, and merch—one Etsy seller is hawking a T-shirt with the slogan “I Took My Sidepiece to the Coldplay Concert and It Ruined My Life.” Byron soon resigned. It was a dismal orgy of “public shaming,” with a gleeful mob feeding on the “ruination” of people felled by “terrible luck and atrocious judgment.” 

The “morality police” are impossible to escape in the internet age, said Tatum Hunter in The Washington Post. Between kiss cams, Ring doorbells, omnipresent surveillance systems, and a cellphone in every pocket, “the cameras are always rolling.” Everyday transgressions—from cutting in line to being a poor party host—are shared online and turned “into entertainment fodder for millions.” The “surveillance state” follows us even at a rock show, once a place to “let yourself go a bit,” said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial. Then there’s the army of “laptop trolls” who stand ready to dig up dirt and otherwise amplify “human misery.” This “cautionary tale” raises a question: “When did America get this cruel?” 

“Schadenfreude” plays a role here, said Chip Cutter and Lauren Weber in The Wall Street Journal. The kiss cam vid blew up in part because the pair were top tech executives at a time of “simmering frustrations toward the executive class.” And given HR-enforced policies about office romances and “power imbalances among co-workers,” the irony and hypocrisy were hard to miss. It was a sordid affair, said Helen Schulman in The New York Times, but an oddly “refreshing” one. In our era of “shamelessness,” with a blame-dodging president convicted of 34 felony counts sitting in the Oval Office, it was “a strange relief” to watch two people face the consequences of their actions. For a brief moment, the concept of shame was “brought back from the dead,” and that seemed like “something to celebrate.”

Getting crushed by a 14,000-pound snowplow was an oddly special moment for Jeremy Renner, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. The Hurt Locker and Mission: Impossible actor nearly died at his Nevada residence on New Year’s Day 2023 when, jumping in the way of a snowcat to protect his nephew, he wound up pinned beneath the machine. As he writes in his new memoir, the hulking vehicle “slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body.” He suffered gruesome injuries—a broken pelvis, eye socket, and mandible; a collapsed lung; and a pierced liver—and believes he briefly died. 

“What I experienced when I passed was this collective divinity and beautiful, powerful peace,” says Renner, 54. “It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. It all made perfect sense.” But the actor, raised by a theologian father, doesn’t consider it a religious experience. In fact, the accident left him even more concerned with the here and now—so much so that, these days, he struggles to discuss his films. “I have a real issue with fiction now. I don’t have much time in my life for it, having come back from such a harrowing experience of real reality. I have to focus on reality even though I play make-believe for a living. I have to really believe in my recovery to walk again right and to breathe again right and to love and experience.”