Staff Sgt. Jao'Torey Johnson, U.S. Air Force via Associated Press U.S. Army troops work near a Patriot missile battery in 2022. It is no secret that the U.S. has seriously underestimated the rate of munitions expenditure in its conflict with Iran. In the course of the ten-week war and on-again off-again confrontations that have followed its supposedly formal conclusion, the Army reportedly has consumed most of its stockpile of long-range ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles.
At the same time, the Army is also confronting a serious shortage of THAAD and Patriot air defense systems. The Navy faces a diminished supply of Tomahawk land attack and Standard air defense missiles. The Air Force is suffering from a shortfall of joint air-to-surface standoff missiles.
Responding to these shortages, the War Department is issuing long-term agreements with industry to accelerate production of THAAD, Patriot and other critical munitions.
A case in point is the contract the department recently signed with Lockheed-Martin for high-rate Patriot missile production that could total $59 billion over seven years, ending in 2032. The contract provides for tripling Raytheon’s current production rate by the end of 2030. Lockheed-Martin is planning to increase its workforce by 50 percent, and to upgrade or open 20 new plants.
The Lockheed deal parallels one with RTX, Raytheon’s parent company, which in February agreed to increase annual production of Tomahawks to at least 1,000. Current annual production stands at only about 60 units. Raytheon will also increase production of AMRAAM medium range air-to-air missiles from 1,200 to more than 1,900 missiles. It will increase planned Standard Missile SM-6 multi-purpose missile production from 300 to 500 annually; the levels stood at only about 150 before Raytheon began to ramp up production. RTX also announced that it would “increase production of SM-3 IIA and accelerate production of the SM-3 IB,” without specifying final production rates for these missiles.
The munitions shortfalls that these and other agreements are meant to overcome are the product of three primary factors. First, policymakers determined when the Cold War ended that the need for munitions was likely to decline. Second and related to that view was the Pentagon’s constant recourse to munitions as a bill-payer for other programs. That was what I experienced as comptroller, especially during so-called “cut drills,” those last minute requirements to find funds to meet other urgent priorities. The practice did not change in subsequent years.
Finally, the military seriously underestimated its munitions consumption rates during the long war with Iraq. And it again failed to anticipate the rate at which it would consume munitions during its battle with the Houthis to keep the Red Sea open for commercial navigation.
Higher utilization rates ate into munitions stockpiles that were not sufficiently refilled.
The Biden administration came to recognize that just-in-time munitions production was not a viable policy and began to ramp up munitions production accordingly. Both the Trump administration and Congress have allocated even more resources to munitions production.
Nevertheless, despite War Department’s new long-term agreements, it may prove difficult to accelerate production, even when money is available to pay for additional systems and industry attempts to ramp up to build them.
To begin with, subcontractors, especially small third- and fourth-tier suppliers, will need funds to invest in expanded production facilities. In addition, although the leading prime contractors are poised to expand their workforce, it is not at all clear whether they, and especially lower tier subcontractors, will find the workers they require.
Lockheed cannot fully meet its Patriot production targets until 2030, despite its three-shift 24/7 production line. Likewise, other contractors will also find it difficult to meet their targets long before that date. Meanwhile, America will continue to face threats from Russia, China and possibly still from Iran and its proxies in the Middle East.
Lastly, given the Pentagon’s commitment to ramp up both strategic and conventional nuclear powered submarine production; the new battleship program; the B-70 bomber; the Golden Dome missile defense system; space, hypersonic and cyber capabilities; and unmanned system programs among other procurement and research and development priorities, there is no guarantee that the current munitions production frenzy actually will continue.
The danger is that once the war with Iran and its proxies comes to an end, Pentagon bureaucrats will revert to their habitual complacency and treat munitions as the bill payer for other programs. Both the administration and the Congress must ensure that does not happen so that the next war, wherever and whenever it takes place, does not once again catch the military flat footed as it consumes munitions far more quickly than anticipated while replacements are nowhere to be found.
Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.
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