THE FREEPRESS
America’s Munitions Mess Is Even Worse Than You Think
Soldiers fire a Stinger missile during Formidable Shield 25 in Andøya, Norway, May 9, 2025. (Captain Alexander Watkins via U.S. Army)
If American weapons stockpiles are running low after just five months of war against Iran, the discouraging prognosis for fending off China ought to jolt us into radical changes.
By Aaron MacLean
07.28.26 —
International
Aaron MacLean is a columnist at The Free Press, national security analyst at CBS News, and host of the School of War podcast.
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The war with Iran is stalemated, in part due to a shortage of munitions available to the U.S. military. If this situation is not a full-blown crisis, it is certainly a scandal, and many observers have drawn the conclusion that these shortages would make deterring a potential Chinese effort to take control of Taiwan more difficult.
The deeper reality is even worse: The munitions shortfalls reveal that the United States was not prepared to deter China—let alone fight a war with it—even before the Iran war. If American stockpiles of defensive munitions, like Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAAD) and Patriot interceptors, and offensive weapons, like Tomahawk cruise missiles and the Army’s ballistic missiles, are running low after only five months of intermittent warfare of varying intensity with a middle power like Iran, what would happen in a broader and more intense campaign against the People’s Liberation Army?
If nothing else, the war against Iran reminds us that presumptively short wars have a tendency to run inconveniently long. Either our old war plans with China involved some magical thinking, or we simply were never serious about matching our resources to our strategic needs.
The United States is not the first nation, or even the first great power, to confront a munitions crisis. The history of modern warfare is replete with them. In recent years, Ukraine, Israel, and Russia have all faced critical shortfalls and addressed them through foreign suppliers (primarily the U.S. for Ukraine and Israel, and North Korea playing a key role for Russia) while ramping up domestic production. Israel was helped by the United States in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in yet another such crisis.
Buying help from other countries has some relevance for America’s concerns today, but the scale of our shortfalls is so big and our own economy is so large that domestic production and innovation are clearly the priority. So the most instructive historical example we might look to is the British munitions crisis during World War I called the Shell Scandal, which helped upend the government and ultimately propelled David Lloyd George to prime minister, where he led Great Britain to victory in the war.
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Some of the parallels are striking. Despite a succession of crises that made the threat of a general European war obvious to British leaders, most assumed that such a war would be short. The process for manufacturing and purchasing munitions was slow and bureaucratic. The kinds of artillery ammunition most readily available—shrapnel-producing shells—were ill-suited for the positional trench warfare that came to dominate the battlefield, which called for a vastly greater number of high explosive rounds. Once the war started, labor issues and other problems prevented the innovation and scale that might have helped keep up with the massive combat demands from across the English Channel.
By spring 1915, the shortages were having effects on the battlefield, and a press firestorm erupted after a failed attack at a place called Aubers Ridge in France. Winston Churchill’s favored offensive in the Dardanelles was failing at the same time, and the British government couldn’t survive the double blow.
But the differences between 1915 and today are also instructive. This crisis that destabilized the British government happened almost a year into a massive continental war. Today, we are still in the prewar period, and while the stalemate with Iran is bad, a failure to deter China—or, God forbid, to fight China and lose—would be much, much worse. Moreover, the man in charge of the British War Office at the start of World War I, the famous and aging Lord Kitchener, symbolized the traditional hidebound processes that were contributing to the crisis.
He was gradually sidelined in rounds of vicious cabinet infighting by the somewhat younger Lloyd George, who yoked his personal ambition to the campaign to solve the underlying supply issues. This involved going to war with industry, labor, the War Office, and his peers, though he generally enjoyed the support of more senior officials in the government, who agreed with Lloyd George’s diagnosis and sometimes radical prescriptions.
We have more time than the British did, and we have leadership in the Pentagon that sounds as though it is on top of the problem. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year that “we are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.” Hegseth’s deputy secretary, Steve Feinberg, comes from the world of finance and is not pre-bound by any particular bureaucratic demands.
The trendy buzzwords at the Pentagon—“magazine breadth” (we need not just more of the same expensive and exquisite weapons, but more diverse offerings and sources) and “high-low mix” (some of those offerings will need to be exquisite, but some only good enough for the mission at hand)—are very welcome.
Shortages have now constrained President Donald Trump’s options against Iran, and some people would argue that they should have constrained him from the start.
But as documented in a worthwhile series of reports from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, positive developments still exist more on paper than loaded into the nation’s magazines. Shortages have now constrained President Donald Trump’s options against Iran, and some people would argue that they should have constrained him from the start. That we are in this situation four years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine directed public attention on our munitions shortfalls is a failure of both political parties, the Defense Department, our private-sector defense firms, Congress, and our democracy.
The solutions required at this point are radical. Both how we fight and how we buy need to catch up with the competitive demands of cheap, autonomous systems and the digital revolution more broadly. Interestingly, it is in the U.S. military’s European commands, closest to the war with Ukraine, where the thinking has been most radical. Central Command made a big press splash with its use of cheaper autonomous weapons—knock-off Iranian drones and one-way attack surface drones—but there is scarce evidence that such weapons can yet be used at scale.
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Meanwhile, our combination of expensive systems that must survive (F-35s and destroyers, for example), attritable systems that we don’t want to lose but can if we must (MQ-9 Reapers), and consumable systems (one-way attack drones) is terribly out of balance. And the relative success of Iran against our air defenses suggests shortfalls in both counter-drone technology and data integration. The Ukrainians have better shared visibility of Russian forces than Americans did while fighting Iran.
This is not an exhaustive list of our problems. Each one is enormous in its own right. As we settle into something like a phony war of dueling blockades with Iran, we need to find the political will somewhere and to focus on solving these problems. We will know we are getting there when the number of monthly deliveries of critical weapons systems, whether fancy or homespun, matches the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration—and when we have the data architecture to use them and to learn from their production as though we are living in the 2020s, not the 1990s.
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Aaron MacLean
Aaron MacLean is a columnist at The Free Press, national security analyst at CBS News, and host of the School of War podcast.
Tags:
War
Foreign Policy
Iran
Pentagon
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