America Needs a Lot More Weapons

“With President Trump planning to request $1.5 trillion for defense, leaders in Congress and the Pentagon agree on one problem that must be addressed: The U.S. needs more weapons -- a lot more.

 

In a conflict with China, the U.S. would run out of critical munitions in days, according to the results of war games.

 

Recent events strengthen the case for weapons inventory. Ukraine expended a decade's worth of U.S.-produced antitank and antiaircraft weapons in months of combat against Russia in 2022.

 

 In a few days of air-defense operations against Iran last year, the U.S. fired one-fourth of its Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missiles -- billions of dollars of weapons that took years to produce.

 

America has a new missile gap. But why? And what to do about it? The answers aren't obvious, and if we get them wrong, we risk squandering Mr. Trump's historic budget increase.

 

The common refrain is that Washington has underinvested in weapons, and there is truth to this. Over a decade ago, as staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I pressed Obama administration officials on why their budget requests always shortchanged munitions. Not to worry, they argued: Limited resources were better spent on slow-to-produce ships, aircraft and other platforms; in a crisis, the U.S. could rapidly build more weapons.

 

Congress disagreed and increased budgets for weapons. Since fiscal 2015, annual spending on missiles and munitions has more than tripled.

 

The bigger problem is this increased spending, insufficient to begin with, hasn't led to commensurate increases in production.

 

Take two examples: the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Munition and the Standard Missile 6 -- critical munitions that would be in high demand in a major war. From fiscal 2016 to 2026, procurement spending has nearly doubled for JASSM and more than doubled for SM-6, but production has increased only 14% for JASSM and only 23% for SM-6. This increased procurement funding doesn't even include the additional billions the U.S. spent in the same decade on "research and development" for these weapons.

 

The story is the same with all major U.S. weapons programs: Increased spending hasn't led to proportionate increases in production. Funding has often been erratic and delayed, but the deeper problem is that our current weapons were never designed for mass production.

 

Our critical munitions were conceived decades ago when many assumed the U.S. could win any war so quickly that we'd never have to expend and regenerate large numbers of weapons through ramped-up production for months or years. Government and industry optimized our weapons to be ever more exquisite, expensive and scarce. They became the military equivalent of luxury goods -- their production constrained by rare materials, specialized labor, artisanal manufacturing, bespoke components, noncommercial supply chains and other limitations. This is a self-inflicted shortage of military power.

 

The Trump administration can be commended for trying to expand production, but money alone won't solve this problem. We need new and different weapons that are simpler, faster and cheaper to produce. They should be designed to be made in great numbers and by the largest possible workforce, using commercial manufacturing practices and supply chains.

 

Our weapons have become overly complex, seeking to meet every requirement within a single munition, which leads to weapons that are effectively unproducible and irreplaceable. We need a high-low mix: smaller numbers of exquisite, expensive weapons for our smaller numbers of high-end threats, alongside a more affordable, more producible class of weapons for our larger number of lower-end threats.

 

Consider a Patriot missile. Most of its cost goes toward achieving an exquisite fraction of its overall performance. We need that capability, but not in every weapon. So as we buy more Patriots, we should also create a new program to make large quantities of low-cost Patriots that deliver most of the same capability for much less money.

 

We should create similar kinds of low-cost complements for every other type of weapon in our inventory -- from cruise missiles and torpedoes to hypersonic munitions. This would enable us to conserve high-cost, hard-to-produce weapons while relying on lower-cost, higher-volume weapons for our many less-stressing needs. It would allow us to overwhelm our adversaries with large, affordable salvos of weapons that can be built and regenerated quickly.

 

If we spend more money only on old expensive weapons, we may be ready for the first day or week of a future war. But we will leave ourselves dangerously unprepared for day 30 or day 300, when we'll need an abundance of new and cheaper weapons. This is a crisis of our own making, but if we begin thinking and acting differently, we can create the order-of-magnitude increase in weapons of all kinds that America needs to close its missile gap.

 

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Mr. Brose is president and chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.” [1]

 

1. America Needs a Lot More Weapons. Brose, Christian.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 25 Feb 2026: A15.