In the early months of sustained combat in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces were expending artillery ammunition at rates that stunned Western defense planners. Not because the rate was unusual for high-intensity conventional warfare — it wasn't. It was typical of what large-scale artillery duels have always consumed. The shock was the recognition that the United States and its NATO allies could not produce ammunition at anything approaching that rate.
The 155mm artillery shell that Ukrainian forces needed in vast quantities took the United States roughly 14,000 rounds per month to produce at the war's outset. Ukrainian forces were consuming multiples of that number weekly. The gap between American production capacity and the actual demands of peer-level conventional warfare was, and remains, a serious strategic problem.
Three Decades of Optimization for the Wrong War
After the Cold War ended, the United States defense industrial base was systematically restructured. The logic was sound given the assumptions: the Soviet threat was gone, future conflicts would be smaller-scale and faster, precision weapons would substitute for volume, and maintaining excess industrial capacity was wasteful. Defense companies consolidated. Factories closed. Supply chains that had been maintained for surge capacity were allowed to atrophy.
The result was an industrial base optimized for the kind of warfare the United States had experienced since 1991 — technologically sophisticated, air power-dominant, relatively short-duration operations against adversaries without peer conventional capabilities. It was not optimized for a sustained land war between industrial powers consuming munitions at Cold War rates.
That is the war that Ukraine is fighting. It is also, in various scenarios, the war that a Taiwan contingency could produce.
The Munitions Gap
The specific shortfalls extend well beyond artillery ammunition. Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, transferred to Ukraine in large numbers, require years to replace due to supply chain dependencies on components no longer in mass production. Javelin anti-tank missiles face similar constraints. Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System munitions, critical to Ukrainian long-range fires, are in limited supply.
The Navy's inventory of long-range strike missiles — Tomahawks, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, anti-ship missiles — represents strategic concern in any scenario requiring sustained offensive operations. A Taiwan scenario that consumed these weapons at realistic combat rates would exhaust stocks faster than they could be replenished under current production timelines.
Why Surge Capacity Is Hard to Rebuild
The challenge of reconstituting production capacity is not simply a matter of funding. The workforce skills, specialized manufacturing equipment, supplier relationships, and production processes required for defense-specific manufacturing cannot be rebuilt quickly. A skilled munitions production technician requires years of training and experience. A facility retooled from commercial to defense manufacturing needs qualified supply chains for specialized materials.
The explosives supply chain illustrates the problem. The energetic materials used in artillery shells and missile warheads require specialized facilities with particular safety requirements. Those facilities do not exist in commercial industry. Their capacity is fixed in the short term regardless of funding levels.
What Is Being Done
The Pentagon has accelerated munitions production investments, authorized multi-year procurement contracts to give industry the demand certainty required to justify capacity expansion, and pushed to expand the supplier base. These actions will produce results — on timelines measured in years, not months.
Defense industrial base expansion requires a sustained commitment that survives budget cycles and administration changes. The investments being made now will matter. Whether they will produce sufficient capacity before a scenario arises that tests them is a question no one can answer with confidence.
The structural lesson of Ukraine is that the United States cannot assume that the military balance it maintains in peacetime will persist through a sustained conventional conflict. The industrial base that supplies that military is a critical variable — and right now, it is a vulnerability.