Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan

The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We do make recommendations based on what their ask is and how that impacts our readiness if it’s going to come from our stocks,” Brown told reporters during a Defense Writers Group event in March.

Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.

In addition to Israel, the Biden administration has sent an enormous quantity of materiel to Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Meanwhile, the U.S. is gearing up to rush an influx of arms to Taiwan in hopes of deterring a possible Chinese attack on the island, which Beijing considers a rogue province.

The U.S. Defense Department already struggled to maintain robust munitions levels in the decades before the recent wars in the Middle East and Europe. But the shipment of arms to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan has placed intense pressure on the Pentagon’s inventory, forcing it to make challenging risk management assessments as it tries to move the defense industry from peacetime production to a wartime footing.

“The [Defense Department] is likely drawing down close to that minimum number that they would need for multiple ground scenarios that could happen simultaneously,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told Defense News.

“And depending on how the leadership has decided to manage risk, they may have gone below that two-scenario number already, but they would certainly not go below the number needed for one scenario.”

Total munitions requirement

At a March conference in downtown Washington, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer opened with a message for America’s adversaries.

“You do not want to go to war with the United States,” said Bill LaPlante, the undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment. “Our stocks are not depleted.”

Perhaps more important was his reason why.

“Every time that we make a decision, we’re looking at our stocks and saying: ‘Can we do this and take the risk?’ ” he said. “If we do, it means we’re OK.”

In short, the Pentagon has a system, and the public should trust it, the argument goes. That system, known as the annual munitions requirements process, has three phases: choosing what to target, how to target it and what to buy.

The first part starts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which considers the targets America would need to hit if it went to war against another country. The agency sends its list to the relevant combatant commands, which handle U.S. military operations around the globe.

The commands then develop their plans around these targets, and then assign each target to the military services, who study how to best hit each one.

“The services say: ‘What’s my best way to deal with this target?’ ” said Chris Michienzi, a former Pentagon official who spent years working on this process. “ ‘Do I use this airplane with this missile?’ ”

Pentagon officials then use a classified formula to calculate how much of each different munition they need per year, which is known as the total munitions requirement.

Analysts, former defense officials and congressional aides said it’s been difficult to produce enough weapons to execute the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy around the globe.

“Pre-Ukraine, we had munitions requirements that were in almost every important case — particularly for the Indo-Pacific — not even close to being met,” a Republican congressional staffer told Defense News, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. “For the most important [Indo-Pacific] munitions, we haven’t hit the total munitions requirement.”

The shortages are in part symptoms of a chronic issue, said a senior defense official, granted anonymity to discuss the closely held process. The Pentagon has long used munitions as a “bill payer,” neglecting their purchase in favor of platforms like ships or planes in the annual budgets, the official added.

Over time, the low orders led to some companies exiting the market, which in turn reduces the number of businesses that will build those munitions and the speed at which they come off the line.

“There are very few places where we have what you might call surplus stockpiles,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “It’s a question of how much risk do you want to accept in our own war plans. That has been the driver in a lot of the decisions about what to give to the Ukrainians and the Taiwanese.”

For example, the U.S. could use Javelin anti-tank missiles or Tomahawk cruise missiles against at least four major competitors: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But the military doesn’t necessarily expect to fight all four adversaries at once and may calculate requirements based on fighting two enemies at a time.

“So you can choose a couple of scenarios and say, ‘Here’s two scenarios that are very stressing,’ and they’re going to form the basis for a number,” Clark said. “For example, the number for the Javelins is probably driven by Russia and North Korea. It depends on the weapon.”

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