Del Toro isn’t the only one who has recently expressed concerns about America’s ability to defend itself and its allies. “What would happen if something blew up in Indo-Pacom?” the Pentagon’s head of acquisitions, William LaPlante, asked in November. “What do we have in any degree of quantity? That will actually be effective?” The State Department’s approval of $428 million in aircraft parts to keep Taiwan’s F-16s in the air notwithstanding, a potential ordnance shortfall looms large in the minds of American war planners.
The matter of how we quickly resolve this threat to our strategic capabilities is as important as understanding how we got here. It’s no accident that the United States now faces an armaments crisis. To an unnerving degree, America’s inventory problems were engineered.
In the last decade, the United States engaged in a dramatic drawdown of its domestic defense industry’s capabilities. The production line for the shoulder-fired Stinger air-defense missile system was closed in December 2020, only for Raytheon to win a contract to ramp up production again in July 2021. By then, however, only one facility could make the thing. And not quickly, given the limited stockpiles of the missile’s constituent parts.
[Noah expertly identifies key issues, but leaves out another: industry consolidation. The defense industry has undergone a transformation since the end of the Cold War, with a previously diverse contractor community to a narrowed industrial base with an even narrower executive structure, thanks to decades of mergers and acquisitions. The aerospace industry had as well, until SpaceX and Blue Origin launched, so to speak. We are much less flexible and responsive as a result. — Ed]
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