The Hard Math of Big Wars

...money, action, inventory...

In spite of the rough lessons on the importance of mass in the Korean and Vietnam Wars in the second half of the 20th Century—and even the cold bucket of sand thrown in our face about what is required for even heavy imperial policing like we had in Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of the first decade of this century—a large segment of the national security nomenklatura was content with boutique-levels of warstocks in our relatively shallow magazines.

We’ve discussed this here and at the OG Blog for a long time, as have others, but until recently the need to purchase and stockpile the weapons we know we will need in the big fight—heck, like we’ve seen in Iran recently, even for extended punitive expeditions—simply has not been getting the support it needs.

It is nice to at last see a shift, but let’s not celebrate it until we understand how we got here. If we don’t have a good understanding why we forgot the need for the magazine depth that is inefficient in peacetime but essential in war, then we are condemned to repeat it when the immediacy of the crisis starts to fade and the accountants, backed by hucksters selling sketchy theories, start clawing back supremacy in the argument.

Generations have grown to positions of power in our defense establishment riding on their success of selling the shallowness of our magazines as a reflection of modern natsec theory.

It started before the guns from WWII were even cold.

Most famous was the nuclear club that convinced everyone, because they were the Smartest People in the Room™, that ‘war was new’ and that they knew that the future was nuclear. No need for large navies, armies, or tactical air forces taking up space with ‘old think’. No. Nuclear war will either be the new normal, or would prevent wars from happening at all.

Oops.

We don’t really need to cover the Jesus Jones Era and the peace dividend that didn’t even last a decade.

After Desert Fox and the Balkans conflicts, at least to me, it became clear that the few hundred TLAM expended were a shockingly large dent in our precision stockpile. Once I got a peek at the numbers, it had me nosing around everything from Light Weight Torpedo inventory to small arms ammo. Then at the end of the century I got a peek at some of our OPLAN requirement…and even then, there was no there there.

JOs would ask questions like: “What happens when we run out of XXX and YYY. There is only enough for about two weeks at the rate we will expend them.”

The answer from those trusted to be ready to fight, “That is not our job here.”

It never got better because the issue never had the top cover it needed.

No accountability then or now.

Then 9/11 happened. It has been a quarter century since then, and we still have the problem of numbers.

The vanity of our ‘Deterrence by Denial’ vs. ‘Deterrence by Punishment’ debate was, as Bryan pointed out in the link, largely an argument by those trying to wrap their desire to under-resource the military in a pseudo-intellectual wrapper—roughly from the same school that thought a ‘light footprint strategy’ was a smart strategy in GWOT. Cheaper for the accountants, disastrously expensive for strategists.

The worst school of thought was being sold by highly credentialed and self-referential natsec luminaries to gullible people lusting for a sage to give them an easy fix to a hard problem: the concept of a ‘72-hour War’.

Anyone who thinks there is an easy and cheap solution to hard national security challenges is at best not a very good student of history, or at worst a fool, most likely thinks the people who buy their Theory™ are fools.

Someone briefed Putin the 72-hour CONOPS in February of 2022, and we all know where that led to.

The Russians clearly had an industrial scale problem with optimism filters in the buildup to their 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but they are not the only ones with that problem.

Effective militaries are not cheap. The desire to save money on a military you might needs is only encouraged for the very real need you have to sate the appetites of your political allies who want that money for something else now. If some bright guys with solid reputations from All the Right People™ can tell you this is also the ‘smart power’ and ‘modern thinking’ approach to war at the same time, then all the better.

For those who do not have the spine to take the pressure and the wisdom to listen for hard truths, people offering comfortable vignettes that help justify smaller investments will allow you to work backward from ‘less’ to justify the smaller purchases justified by the assumption that the war might never come.

Well, not ‘you,’ since someone else will be holding the bill when it comes due.

What is the opposite of stewardship? Neglect? Exploitation? Pick one of those or another more fitting.

This is very much a ‘feeling and believing’-centered worldview encouraged by a willingness to be an agent of neglect, that won the argument for a long time against a ‘reason and knowing’ world view attempting to execute responsible stewardship.

The kindest view, and probably describes some or not all of our situation, is that good people in hard jobs did the best they could do, and tried to keep as much as possible on life support until opinions—and funding—change directions.

That’s the past. Can’t change it, but what do we do now?

Time to look at our elders’ bar tab.

Over at The Dispatch earlier this month, our friend Mackenzie Eaglen lays some sobering numbers on the table using clear and direct language.

Art. A beautiful music to my ears.

Credible institutions and war colleges all come to the same war-gamed conclusions: The U.S. military consistently runs out of critical long-range weapons within the first weeks of a major war. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Hal Brands has warned, without immediate investment, America can “get ready for ‘missile famine’ if there is a great-power war.”

Operation Epic Fury offers a real-world preview of exactly that scenario. The American military reportedly fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles over a few weeks, even though this weapon is built at a rate of just 90 to 100 units per year. Absent acceleration, replenishing this key armament from one short but intense operation would take roughly 10 years.

And the offensive munitions shelf is only half of the problem.

Stocks of defensive weapons protecting our troops or territory, such as the Patriot interceptors or THAAD missile defense system, are running either very low or nearly empty. Since 2021, we have produced around three dozen or fewer THAAD interceptors per year, but fired off 150 during last summer’s 12-Day War against Iran. On the current schedule it would take three-and-a-half years to replace what was fired in just under two weeks. As for the critical Patriot interceptor, relied on by militaries around the world, the Pentagon used more than 1,200 against Iran in Epic Fury. While the Army hopes to order 2,798 PAC-3 missiles with the pending budget request, those funded in the annual base budget won’t begin delivery until May 2029.

This shortfall is all over the warfighting spectrum.

This generational habit created some incredible weapons, but they are designed for a world where no war lasts more than a portion of a deployment.

I’m sorry, that is not the world we live in.

The popular precision strike missile (or PrSM), also heavily used against Iran, has a construction timeline of 36 months. The Tomahawk’s build time averages 26 months. In all these cases, the long build cycles offset plans to order munitions in large quantities. That leaves the U.S. military to supplement what it does not have with what it does—a plethora of old, cheap, non-precision weapons that would fail to accomplish strategic goals in an environment such as the South China Sea, where long-range precision strike capabilities are critical.

There is no training timeout in war. You keep going until one side loses the will or capacity to continue.

Precision weapons are, more than anything else, life savers. They save the life of your people. When you run out of precision weapons, you can’t ‘touch base’ and stop the game, it keeps going. In order to bring the fight to the enemy—unless you want to quit—then you will have to use other, less precise weapons—weapons that will force you to close the enemy and lose a lot more of your people in the process: a much deadlier battlefield for you, and maybe or maybe not for your enemy.

It does not have to be that way, but we have to make changes and find the funding to ensure it doesn’t happen. Change is not easy when so many people have their jobs, paychecks, and egos wrapped around … well … how things have always been done.

Thankfully, this is a solvable problem—but not in the traditional Washington way. A wartime production surge to rebuild the industrial base and boost manufacturing capacity is part of the answer. But it’s just as important to rethink what America builds and how we build it—pursuing production with intention, putting more key assets underground, and modifying what we already possess.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to think about making what we already have better—and make new things with a different mindset.

America’s military needs weapons it can print by the thousands and lose by the hundreds without breaking the budget. The Pentagon must ramp up its build-to-print model for munitions. America’s government research labs have tremendous innovative ideas primed for production. Outsourcing the key fabrication of parts while keeping design control in-house will help yield tangible results sooner.

The military can also repurpose older weapons and reimagine uses for legacy systems with modest modifications. The Hellfire missile, originally designed in the 1970s, had by the 2010s become a victim of its own success: effective enough to keep ordering but too expensive to keep in surplus. By redesigning the Hellfire’s warhead and guidance section into a modular configuration, Lockheed Martin transformed the existing Hellfire airframes into a substantially more effective asset for its replacement system. Weapons that had been warehoused as second-tier munitions came back into inventory as first-tier ones.

Scale. We need not just industrial scale, but intellectual scale. We need a growing mass of people with access to—or better yet control of—levers of power to force change.

If we rely on the same people, institutions, and processes that got us here to force that change, we will fail.

Towards the end of her article, Mackenzie coins a phrase—really a warning—that captures our legacy problem well.

We have leaned back on our grandfather’s pride of our nation being the mid-20th century’s Arsenal of Democracy far past the point it was still valid.

We’ve morphed into something else. Emphasis is mine.

Until our arsenal is rebuilt and restocked, a commercial mindset to acquire technology rapidly and purchase off-the-shelf components must reign supreme in government. A majority of the munitions mentioned above are housed within the mandatory portion of the 2027 defense budget request. This side of the ledger is key to making one-time injections at scale into the munitions, shipbuilding, and drone industrial bases, accounting for surge capacity.

If reconciliation does not become reality, the low quantities requested in discretionary funds for 2027 will ensure America remains the artisan of democracy and not the arsenal.

Exquisite designed, Tiffany-jawed, and craft-built may look good at trade shows, but they don’t win wars that last more than 72-hours.

The Artisan of Democracy is an invitation to disaster.