The Pentagon under War
Secretary Pete Hegseth is focused on deterring China and strengthening
America’s position in the Pacific, and it is working to rejuvenate the
sclerotic U.S. defense sector, which cannot currently produce the number
of munitions and ships that may be needed in a potential conflict with
the Chinese.
President Donald Trump has issued numerous executive orders aimed at fixing the flawed defense industrial base (DIB), and Hegseth recently announced a new acquisitions strategy aimed at revitalizing the DIB, but for now the U.S. faces strains on its stockpiles of missiles and is significantly overmatched by China in terms of how many ships each nation can build.
Campaigns take toll on stockpiles, armaments
The U.S. military’s air campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen, the U.S.’s years-long effort to supply a massive number of armaments to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders, and U.S. assistance in the defense of Israel against Iranian missile barrages have all eaten into the U.S. weapon supply. In addition, Taiwan is facing a possible invasion
by the Chinese, with the potential the U.S. would get involved in
defending the island nation against a near-peer and nuclear-armed
adversary.
It remains unclear whether the DIB would be able to
manufacture the number of weapons and ships needed to sustain a
long-term engagement against the People’s Liberation Army and the
Chinese navy.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released on Thursday, said deterring China was key.
"A favorable conventional military balance remains an
essential component of strategic competition. There is, rightly, much
focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor
production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the
Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two
distinct theaters. Given that one-third of global shipping passes
annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for
the U.S. economy,” the new strategy document declared. “Hence deterring a
conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a
priority.”
Achieving this goal will likely require producing far more munitions and ships than the U.S. currently churns out.
Pentagon officials say DoW is working to fix ship and missile shortages
Hung Cao, the Undersecretary of the Navy, told Just the News “yes” this week when asked about there being a shipbuilding crisis in the U.S.
“Shipbuilding is very important to the president of the
United States,” Cao said, adding that Navy Secretary John Phelan is
“very hyper-focused on shipbuilding.”
“I am focused on making sure that those ships, once we
build those ships, that we have the sailors to go on board them,” Cao
said, stating that, this year, the Navy surpassed its sailor recruitment
goal by almost 7,000 sailors — bringing in 44,096 new sailors — and
that continuing this trajectory would mean that captains don’t need to
minimally man the ships anymore.
“We have always been the underdog, but don’t tell us we
can’t do something — we are the United States Navy,” Cao said when asked
about the U.S. ship quantity deficit with the Chinese.
“Remember, we are a maritime nation. … We need not just
U.S. Navy ships, but we also need merchant marine ships,” Cao said. “The
ocean is a big place, especially the Pacific, and that’s why we need to
revitalize the industrial base and get Americans excited about working
and building something.”
Cao added: “Is 355 ships enough? I don’t know. We may need
more. But we get the American industrial base revitalized and we can
build anything. We are America — we can do anything. We put a man on the
Moon. We invented the aircraft. We can do anything.”
Dane Hughes, the assistant secretary of war for legislative affairs, told Just the News that “I think we’ve made a lot of headway as far as our acquisition reform initiatives that are being included” in the National Defense Authorization Act currently being debated in Congress.
“We’re real heavy on the procurement reform that we’re trying to do with initiatives on munitions stockpiles,” Hughes said.
Hughes also said “yeah” when agreeing that U.S. operations are straining with the munitions stockpiles it currently has.
“Now, with modern warfare, a lot of these systems are just
being used a lot more than they have in the past. You can look at the
Iran-Israel twelve-day war and get a good snapshot of how quickly both
sides burned through exquisite munitions as well as the use of UAS
[unmanned aerial systems] and counter-UAS systems,” Hughes said. “So I
think some of people’s calculations on what is required, the numbers
have changed based on lessons-learned from that and recent
lessons-learned from Ukraine-Russia over the last few years. Some of it
is readjusting what we think the threshold requirement is.”
Hughes said that “we have to be able to expand industrial
capacity” and that multi-year procurement for munitions “sends a strong
buy signal to the industrial base so manufacturers will invest capital
and expand capacity and they’ll put a little more skin in the game
knowing that there are long-term orders coming down the ride.”
Increased shipyard capacity needed
He stated that “shipbuilding is a harder problem to solve for than, say, the munitions issue.”
“The number of domestic shipyards that we have, we have got
to expand capacity there,” Hughes said. “There is a lot of
underinvestment in the existing shipyards. A lot of the technology being
used at those shipyards is 1980s technology.”
When asked if he sees a sense of urgency inside the
Pentagon when it comes to the threat posed by China and the problem of
munitions when it comes to a conflict like that, he replied, “100%. This
has been a top priority of the secretary” and all the top Pentagon
leaders and military service chiefs.
“China is still our pacing threat so we have not taken our
eye off that, so we are looking at it through that lens, and obviously
we’ve got a plethora of other risks and challenges to account for,”
Hughes said. “This is a near-term problem that we are actively solving.”
He added that “I think the message is the seriousness of
the Chinese threat and the growing Chinese capabilities, and being able
to contrast that to what capabilities we currently have and the gap our
adversary is trying to close.”
Michael Duffey, the undersecretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, told Just the News
that “it has been a central focus for me since I was confirmed for the
job… especially with respect to the munitions industrial base, where we
have focused and had regular conversations with industry to really
understand what is in the art of the possible in how much we can grow
the industrial base, specifically within the munitions sector.”
“The defense industry, for better or for worse, doesn’t
have natural incentives to modernize and optimize their production
capacity,” Duffey said. “We are kind of a low volume and limited growth
industry, or at least we have been recently. I think you’re going to see
tremendous growth.”
“We have the most advanced weapons system in the world, and
so these aren’t things that we can turn on a dime to triple in
production,” Duffey added.
He said they were “pushing the envelope as hard as we can” and “I think we are making great progress there.”
When asked if the ship shortage problem was tougher than
the munitions problem, Duffey replied, “Ship building is a challenge,
absolutely.”
When asked about China’s ship building capacity, Duffey
said, “Certainly they I think have an advantage in volume, but we still
have superiority in terms of the capability of our weapons systems. So
if we can catch up in volume — which has been our focus in terms of
rebuilding the military and really revitalizing the defense industrial
base — I feel confident we’re going to maintain a significant military
advantage. But they have found ways to produce at scale, and I think
it’s important both economically and militarily to make sure we are
keeping pace with that.”
Duffey said that the urgency of the China threat “motivates how much we are thinking about what military we need to rebuild to.”
Duffy: "Deliver more to the warfighter earlier"
“We are focused on munitions, we are focused on F-35s, we
are focused on ship building, and we are focused on a daily basis on how
we can continue to move that schedule to the left so that we can
deliver more to the warfighter earlier,” Duffey said.
Duffey argued that Trump has “really done a tremendous job”
of convincing allies “to increase their own spending and to buy
American weapons.”
“When we talk about how we want to expand the defense
industrial base, we are focused first of all on ensuring that the U.S.
is ready and prepared to go to war and to deter our adversaries,” Duffey
said. “But then once we’ve settled that we believe it is important to
arm our allies and partners so they can provide for their own self
defense — and there is no better weapon system than those that an
American company produces.”
Trump takes action on missiles and ships
Trump declared in an executive order
in April that “it is the policy of the United States Government to
accelerate defense procurement and revitalize the defense industrial
base to restore peace through strength.”
In that order, the president said that the U.S. “will
rapidly reform our antiquated defense acquisition processes with an
emphasis on speed, flexibility, and execution” and “will also modernize
the duties and composition of the defense acquisition workforce, as well
as incentivize and reward risk-taking and innovation from these
personnel.”
Trump also issued an executive order
that month arguing that “the commercial shipbuilding capacity and
maritime workforce of the United States has been weakened by decades of
Government neglect, leading to the decline of a once-strong industrial
base while simultaneously empowering our adversaries and eroding United
States national security.”
The president stressed that “it is the policy of the United
States to revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and
workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.”
Hegseth personally involved in efforts to revive defense industrial base
Just the News previously reported
about a late June closed-door meeting that Hegseth held with some of
the leaders of America’s largest military contractors, urging them to
ramp up the production of critically needed munitions amidst depleted
weapons stocks and a growing threat from China.
The main reason for Hegseth’s meeting with defense company
leaders — which included well-known firms such as Raytheon, Lockheed
Martin, and BAE Systems — was to seek to hold munitions manufacturers
accountable so that U.S. warfighters are equipped to face 21st century
threats.
Hegseth told the defense company leaders that the U.S.
faces unprecedented global threats and does not have years to wait for
the munitions needed to deter or even fight U.S. adversaries.
“As President Trump has stated, our policy is peace through
strength. That will require rescuing our stagnant defense industrial
base,” Hegseth told the House Appropriations Committee in June.
“Only by having the most powerful and lethal military in
the world — and focusing it where it is needed most to protect and
advance America’s interests — can we deter our nation’s adversaries and,
if necessary, prevail in any potential conflict,” he told the
lawmakers.
Hegseth also told Congress that “while the DIB remains
technologically advanced and essential to our warfighting capabilities,
decades of under-investment have left it strained, overly consolidated,
and at risk of not keeping pace with modern and near-peer threats,
especially in a protracted conflict.”
He added that “as foreign competition has hollowed out
American manufacturing, we have lost capacity and resilience in our
defense supply chain as well” while “Communist China has enjoyed
explosive growth in manufacturing capacity” at the same time.
The defense secretary testified that “reviving the defense industrial base is a key component of rebuilding the military.”
Hegseth in November announced
a new “Acquisition Transformation Strategy” on “Rebuilding the Arsenal
of Freedom.” The DoW said it is “rapidly transforming our antiquated
acquisition processes and revitalizing the atrophied Defense Industrial
Base by prioritizing speed, flexibility, and rigorous execution.”
Hegseth also released three new memos at the time on developing weapons acquisitions and defense production.
"Today, I'd like to talk to you about an adversary that
poses a threat — a very serious threat — to the United States of America
... It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy,” Hegseth said
at a speech at the National War College last month. "Our objective is
simple: transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime
footing, to rapidly accelerate the fielding of capabilities and focus on
results. Our objective is to build — rebuild — the arsenal of freedom."
Hegseth said that “this is a 1939 moment — or hopefully a 1981 moment.”
“Our adversaries are not sitting idly by. They are moving
fast, they are developing and delivering new capabilities at a rate that
should be sobering to every American — especially those working in the
Pentagon and the defense industrial base,” the war secretary warned. “We
mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational
risk. By taking greater calculated risk in how we build, buy, and
maintain our systems, we will gain speed to more quickly provide
capabilities to the battlefield. … Speed and a focus on outcomes are
fundamental to successful deterrence.”
Military officials warn about munitions shortages
Army General Christopher Cavoli, the Commander of U.S. European Command, told
the Senate in April that “Russia is not just reconstituting service
members but is also replacing combat vehicles and munitions at an
unprecedented pace.”
He said the Russian forces in Ukraine had lost 3,000 tanks,
9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and over 400 air
defense systems in just the last year, yet Russia “is on pace to replace
them all.”
Cavoli said Russia had expanded its military industrial
production and warned that “the Russian defense industrial base is
expected to roll out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles, and 200
Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles this year.” Comparatively, the
general said that the U.S. “only produces about 135 tanks per year and
no longer produces new Bradley Fighting Vehicles.”
Russia reportedly
has more than 1,950 strategic missiles of various types on hand,
including ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic Kinzhals, according to
Ukraine's Defense Intelligence.
Cavoli added that “we anticipate Russia to produce 250,000
artillery shells per month, which puts it on track to build a stockpile
three times greater than the United States and Europe combined.”
Phelan, the navy secretary, said
during a Senate hearing in June that "fully funding our munitions
industrial base is essential, both for the near-term and the future.”
"We are looking at a number of different avenues, including
other parties and different ways of making some of these munitions,”
Phelan said. “This is a huge priority from both the secretary of defense
and the president, and we are putting as much effort and time into this
as we are in shipbuilding. So it is critical.”
Kilby also told
the Senate committee in June that “Presidential Drawdowns and unplanned
combat expenditures over the past two years have strained Navy’s
inventories” and so “we must increase our investments to replenish
them.” The acting naval operations chief said that the Navy “remains
committed to working with industry to identify manufacturing challenges
and investment opportunities to streamline testing and onboard
non-traditional contractors” and that the Navy is also “investing in its
organic industrial base to ensure we can accelerate munitions
production in the immediate future.”
Leaders of the U.S. Army argued
to the House Armed Services Committee in June that they have been able
to increase munitions production to address the growing challenges, as a
top Pentagon official said the U.S. faces real shortfalls of multiple
important weapons systems.
“The recent simultaneous conflicts around the world have
highlighted the importance of the defense industrial base, especially
when it comes to munitions. The Army, in close partnership with
Congress, has been able to ramp up our current capacity not only to
support the Army’s needs, but that of our foreign partners,” Major
General John Reim, the commanding general of the Picatinny Arsenal,
Chris Grassano, the director of U.S. Army combat capabilities
development command armaments center, and Brigadier General Daniel
Duncan, the commander of joint munitions command, said in a joint statement to the House committee.
Steven Morani, the acting assistant secretary of defense for sustainment, warned
the House committee that the Pentagon “faces shortfalls of several
critical munitions. Years of inconsistent procurements and idle
production lines have negatively impacted the U.S. munitions industrial
base. The Department is at a juncture where increased demand,
modernization efforts, and foreign military sales are placing a strain
on the defense industrial base.”
"DoD must increase critical munitions stockpiles to address
capability gaps that have the potential to undermine U.S. national
security,” Morani said. “Current munitions inventories are depleted, and
current production capacity is not sized to keep pace with increased
demand. A robust and readily available inventory of munitions is
fundamental to reestablishing deterrence and to ensuring our warfighters
have the endurance to fight a protracted conflict. To address this
challenge, the Department is aggressively working to increase U.S.
munitions stocks as quickly as possible.”
Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of United States
Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), has been warning for months about the
shortage of munitions in his theater amidst an unprecedented Chinese
military buildup.
“Up to this year, where most of the employment of weapons
were really artillery pieces and short-ranged weapons, I had said not at
all,” Paparo told
the Brookings Institution last November when asked if defense
preparedness in the IndoPacom region had been impacted by the fighting
between Russia and Ukraine and between Iran and Israel.
“But now, with some of the Patriots that have been
employed, some of the air-to-air missiles that have been employed, it’s
now eating into stocks, you know, and to say otherwise would be
dishonest.”
The Navy commander said U.S. munitions stockpiles are
“fungible” across all the possible military theaters and that “none are
reserved for any particular theater, but any can move with alacrity to
any theater.” Paparo said of the movement of munitions out of the
Pacific that “inherently, it imposes costs on the readiness of America
to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing
theater for the quantity and quality of munitions, because the PRC is
the most capable potential adversary in the world.”
Paparo also spoke at the Honolulu Defense Forum in February where he again warned about the missile shortage.
“Our magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow
longer each month for every critical joint force element — Army, Navy,
Air Force, Marines, Space Force, Coast Guard. … We operate on
increasingly thin margins for error,” the IndoPacom leader warned.
“Our opponents see these gaps and they are moving aggressively to
exploit them. … Our precision-guided munitions stockpiles sit well below
our required levels.”
The IndoPacom leader told
the Senate Armed Services Committee in April that “the Indo-Pacific
remains the Department of Defense's priority theater” and that “China
continues to pursue unprecedented military modernization and
increasingly aggressive behavior that threatens the U.S. homeland, our
allies, and our partners.” He warned that “Beijing's aggressive
maneuvers around Taiwan are not just exercises — they are dress
rehearsals for forced unification.”
Paparo said that the Pacific Deterrence Initiative
was “designed to counter the China threat by investing in key readiness
and capability development initiatives” — which examples including
“hardened infrastructure, prepositioning of munitions and equipment,
enhanced rotational presence, and improved allied interoperability.”
The commander of IndoPacom spoke at the Land Forces Pacific Symposium in Hawaii in May where he said “Yes,
the region is named after oceans, but human beings live on the land […]
You think about all the assets and the infrastructure on this island
that have to be defended, and then you think about everything as you
move farther to the west that has to be defended, and there is a
significant place for the Army in a conflict in the Indo-Pacific,”
Paparo said.
U.S. military operations eat into limited munitions stockpiles
The U.S. involvement in fighting the Houthis, supplying the
Ukrainians, and helping to defend Israel has depleted U.S. munitions
stocks.
The DoW in late April released
some details in a press release referring to the "Operation Rough
Rider" campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, revealing U.S. Central
Command (CENTCOM) had “struck over 800 targets” and had “killed hundreds
of Houthi fighters and leaders, including senior Houthi missile and UAV
[unmanned aerial vehicle] officials.”
The hundreds of strikes also “destroyed multiple
command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, advanced weapons
manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations.” The
operation, which involved the deployment of the Harry S. Truman Carrier
Strike Group and the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group, inflicted heavy
damage on the Houthis, but also used up hundreds of critical U.S.
precision munitions.
The State Department in mid-March released its own figures
detailing the scale of the weaponry which the U.S. had provided Ukraine
up to that point since the Russian invasion in early 2022. The
department said that the U.S. had “provided $66.9 billion in military
assistance since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine” and
that the emergency presidential drawdown authority
had been used “on 55 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine
with military assistance totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD
stockpiles.”
The Wall Street Journal also reported
in June amidst the then-ongoing fighting between Israel and Iran that
the U.S. was “racing to reinforce Israel’s defenses, sending more
warships capable of shooting down ballistic missiles to the region as
Iranian attacks drain Israel’s stocks of interceptors.” The outlet added
that “the U.S. is facing its own concerns about supplies of
interceptors” because “supplies diverted to the conflict in the Middle
East are coming at the expense of those available in the event of a
bigger conflict with China.”
It was estimated by Military Watch Magazine
in June that the U.S. Army had “consumed 15-20% of all munitions for
its globally deployed arsenal” of THAAD long-range anti-missile systems
during the week-and-a-half-long high-intensity defense of Israel's
civilian population against Iranian ballistic missile attacks in June.
The outlet estimated that the “total expenditure of interceptors
amounted to approximately 60-80 interceptors during the eleven-day
conflict.”
Navy leaders themselves sounded the alarm in June about the
depletion of U.S. munitions, with Admiral James W. Kilby, the
then-acting chief of naval operations, telling
the Senate that U.S. missile defense systems were highly effective in
defending against Iranian ballistic missile barrages aimed at Israel —
but that U.S. weapons stores were also being burned up quickly.
Kilby told
the Senate Appropriations Committee in June that the U.S. was using
missile defense projectiles “at an alarming rate.” He added: “Those are
missiles procured by the Missile Defense Agency and then delivered to
the Navy for our use. And we are using them quite effectively in the
defense of Israel."
Phelan stressed
to the Senate in June that “continued engagements in the Red Sea have
sharpened my focus on our stockpile of munitions” and that “since
October 2023, Navy ships have engaged in combat operations against
Houthi rebels, expending many air defense munitions that we are working
with industry to replenish.”
“I will work to ensure that our Navy can grow its munition
stockpile in a timely, fiscally balanced way that does not degrade our
security,” the navy secretary said. “We cannot afford to run out of
ammunition during a fight.”
The weapons the U.S. has promised to provide to Taiwan have
also been slow in their delivery, leading to the Pacific island nation
waiting on a backlog of billions of dollars worth of weaponry.
The libertarian CATO Institute reported
in January that “the backlog of U.S. weapons that have been sold but
not delivered to Taiwan saw several changes in December 2024, the net
result being a $77 million reduction in the backlog, which now stands at
$21.87 billion.” The think tank said that “the third-largest arms sale
in the backlog, a July 2019 sale of 108 Abrams tanks valued at $2
billion, began delivery in December.”
A report by George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government said in October that “the topline dollar value of the backlog remains $21.54 billion.”
China holds a large shipbuilding advantage over the U.S.
China has also used its formidable military and commercial shipbuilding capacity to assemble the world’s largest naval force of more than 400 warships and support vessels, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization "dedicated to
advancing practical ideas to address the world’s greatest challenges."
The smaller U.S. fleet weighs in at around 296 warships and support vessels, despite the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan calling for a fleet of 381 battle force ships. U.S. ships represent less than 1% of the world's commercial ships afloat today, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis last December.
The PRC is capable of building warships at a rate more than 200 times greater than the U.S., according to an assessment from U.S. naval intelligence leaked to industry newsletter The War Zone.
The unclassified graphic that was leaked shows China’s shipyards have a
capacity of approximately 23.25 million compared to the U.S. capacity
of roughly just 100,000 tons.
The Government Accountability Office released a nearly 100-page report
in late February which detailed massive challenges facing the DoW and
the severe problems plaguing the Navy’s shipbuilding. The GAO reports
says those problems include billions of dollars in cost overruns,
repeated failures to meet naval shipbuilding expansion targets, a
potentially costly lack of coordination between the Navy and the Office
of the Secretary of Defense, and a lack of evidence that the money
increasingly being shoveled into shipbuilding is having the impact that
it should.
The GAO said that private industry delivered seven new
battle force ships in 2023, but that it would have to nearly double that
to an average of roughly 13 ships per year for thirty years to meet the
fleet size goal under the current shipbuilding plan.
The report noted that “the industrial base has yet to
demonstrate an ability to increase production in this manner” and that
“none of the shipbuilders are currently positioned to meet the Navy’s
delivery goals.”
In a bipartisan effort, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mi., the
chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party,
and ranking member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Il., assessed
in late February that “due to its aggressive non-market policies, the
People’s Republic of China controls over 50 percent of the world’s
shipbuilding, while the U.S. accounts for just 0.2 percent” and that
“for every large ocean-going vessel built in America each year, the PRC
builds 359.”
“The U.S. shipbuilding industry is challenged to produce
the quantity of ships at the rate required to effect lasting,
sustainable growth in the battle force inventory. On balance, cost and
schedule performance remain challenged; deliveries are approximately one
to three years late, and costs continue to rise faster than overall
inflation. The U.S. share of global shipbuilding — commercial and
military — and the number of naval vessels delivered per year are not
meeting the desired targets,” the joint statement from Brett Seidle,
acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, Vice Admiral James
Pitts, the deputy chief of naval operations, and Lt. Gen. Eric Austin,
the commanding general of the Marine Corps combat development command,
said.
It remains to be seen whether the Hegseth Pentagon’s
efforts to spur the production of more missiles and the building of more
ships will work — but the potential stakes in the Pacific are high.
