“Protecting our nation from those who would do us harm is the first and most important responsibility of government.” That’s from the website of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. But it could be any lawmaker, or any president, Democrat or Republican. Almost all proclaim it, and by their own standard, almost all are failing — as they have for years, with no end in sight.
The U.S. still maintains the world’s most powerful military. Those unmatched capabilities provide deterrence, global influence and economic prosperity. There’s just one problem: We’re running out of bullets. In Washington, D.C., the preferred parlance is “munitions shortage,” a development that some military analysts are calling a crisis. In plain English: Stockpiles of critical offensive and defensive missiles are severely depleted and shrinking, and our domestic industrial base is inadequate to the task of swift replenishment.
Worse than that, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are dithering, as is lawmakers’ habit when bipartisan cooperation and difficult votes are required. President Donald Trump, for his part, is insisting — predictably — that this issue is a fiction perpetrated and perpetuated by a “treasonous” media. This challenge is hardly the fault of this Congress, or this president, alone. But it does exist, and it is jeopardizing military readiness, limiting America’s strategic options and limiting — to borrow Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s favorite word — lethality.
“This is not a way for a global leader like the United States to treat a military it expects to be able to respond to crises anywhere at any time and fight and win without question,” former Defense Department comptroller Elaine McCusker told me. “The crises we face now come from years of decisions — across administrations and sessions of Congress.”
For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the Pentagon was given roughly $1 trillion. That’s not chump change, and no doubt some taxpayers might be interested to know where their money went, if not to restock dwindling munitions inventories. McCusker, who has studied and written about this issue extensively as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, explained that approximately 60% of the armed forces’ budget is prioritized for “must pay” bills related to operations, sustainment and personnel: salaries and benefits like healthcare; upkeep of military bases, which are languishing; as well as troop training and combat exercises.
That leaves about 40% for both weapons innovation and modernization and (theoretically) for refilling equipment and ordnance reserves. And as defense sources have emphasized to me during conversations over the past several weeks, there is even less cash available for those crucial priorities, because the military was ordered into battles neither Trump nor Congress had budgeted for, including continued action in the Caribbean and an Iran war now in its seventh month.
But the source of the problem long precedes the Iran war — and, for that matter, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The seeds of today’s munitions shortage were planted in our 1990s Cold War triumph over the Soviet Union.
Washington treated that victory as an opportunity to significantly reduce military spending, essentially forcing consolidation of the defense industry and related supply chains. In ensuing years, White Houses and Congresses under both political parties declined to update stockpiles that were slowly becoming outdated. Compounding the error, the government also allowed munitions manufacturing capacity to atrophy (to say nothing of military shipbuilding).
So, even if Congress and Trump flipped on the spending spigot tomorrow, fresh missile supplies wouldn’t roll off assembly lines for at least two years, likely longer.
There are several armaments on the dangerously deficient list, among them interceptors that shoot down enemy aircraft and incoming missiles, plus long-range precision missiles used by the Army and Navy in offensive operations. So, what’s the holdup? Partisan politics, naturally, not to mention lousy to nonexistent negotiating by the Trump administration.
The White House practically ignores Congress. Trump did not seek an authorization for use of force in Iran, and only belatedly sought supplemental legislation to fund a conflict he refuses to call a war. This stiff-arm approach has generally frustrated Republicans but has especially rankled Democrats and unnecessarily complicated military appropriations.
Yes, Republicans are sympathetic to Pentagon requests to boost military spending. But they often disagree among themselves over how much money to approve and how to spend it, a byproduct of the party’s threadbare majorities in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. Democrats, meanwhile, are philosophically less inclined than Republicans to approve trillion-dollar-plus military budgets. And as expected, they’re not in a hurry to do this or anything at Trump’s behest. But Democrats are lately more resistant than usual to greenlighting any amount of money, for any military purpose.
They fear doing so would function as a de facto supplemental funding bill for the Iran war that Congress has never signed off on. Voters, they worry, would view such legislation as tantamount to financing a conflict that is unpopular with voters broadly, and grassroots liberals specifically, when midterm elections are just around the corner.
The perilous irony is that this sort of incompetent government inaction is the surest way to invite another sort of unpopular war — the sort forced upon us by a hubristic adversary that we have no choice but to fight. History is watching; America’s enemies are, too.
