The Pentagon's Amazon Prime Problem

There’s a certain tragicomic quality to watching the most powerful military in human history discover, in real time, on the world stage, it has run out of munitions.

Last week, The Donald summoned the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, and RTX (the military-industrial artist formerly known as Raytheon) to what I imagine was a dreadfully serious meeting with some serious coffee, at which he urged them to make more missiles. Faster, please. Lots of them.

The defense contractors nodded gravely. The president looked resolute. Everyone shook hands and understood the gravity of the situation.

Simultaneously, somewhere in one of the 31 autonomous provincial commands of Iran, a procurement officer had just ordered his 10,000th $800 kamikaze drone, and probably slept just fine that night.

Here’s the uncomfortable arithmetic nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: Iran has figured out that quantity has a quality all its own. Their strategy — swarm the skies with cheap, expendable drones, force the U.S. and Israel to shoot them down with multi-million-dollar interceptors — isn’t exactly Sun Tzu. It’s closer to someone throwing rocks at a Bentley. The rocks are free. The Bentley’s panels and paint job aren’t.

To be clear, the United States can finance this absurdity for a very long time. After all, America is a nation that treats debt ceilings the way a toddler treats bedtimes: loosely, and then not at all. Congress can run up the bill to the tens of billions without anyone in Washington losing a wink of sleep.

The problem isn’t the money. The problem is that you can’t swipe a credit card and receive a THAAD missile defense system by Monday.

The Harvest of Two Decades of Foolishness

Here is how we arrived at this predicament: For about 20 years, the United States made a series of entirely rational, fiscally responsible, strategically catastrophic decisions to let its military-industrial production capacity atrophy like a gym membership come February.

Obama-era defense budgets trimmed the fat. Biden-era procurement dawdled. And then, in an act of logistical generosity that would make any supply chain manager weep, the U.S. donated enormous quantities of its existing weapons stockpile to Ukraine (cruise missiles, 155mm artillery shells, drones) in a war that has now consumed materiel at a pace that would have alarmed procurement officers in 1944.

The result? The cupboard is bare. Or rather, the cupboard has things in it, but not enough of them, and the things it has are increasingly the kinds our adversaries have already figured out how to beat.

We are currently producing cruise missiles at roughly 1,000 per year. We need something in the neighborhood of 1,000 per month. Yes, that’s a 12x gap between current output and operational necessity.

The Art of the Impossible Ask

Back to that boardroom. Trump telling defense CEOs to speed up production is a bit like telling a master vintner to age the wine faster. The CEO of Lockheed Martin didn’t leave that meeting and suddenly discover a magic cabinet of pre-trained missile engineers and ready-to-operate robotic assembly lines.

New weapons systems are extraordinarily complex. My friend and colleague Jim Rickards said, “These systems are highly complex and rely on trained engineers, mechanics, and others in addition to robotic systems and set assembly lines. Those capacities cannot be expanded overnight.”

Even if we ramped up production tomorrow of the systems we currently build, we’d be making more copies of technology that Russia, China, and Iran are actively developing countermeasures against. There’s no glory in manufacturing large quantities of obsolete ordnance.

AI integration, new targeting systems, and next-generation guidance packages need to be developed, tested, replicated, and rolled into the production line while you’re desperately trying to increase its throughput. It’s like trying to renovate your kitchen while simultaneously feeding a large family during a dinner rush.

Consequences Nobody Wants to Mention

The missile shortage doesn’t just constrain our options against Iran. It radiates outward with the elegant destructive logic of a second-order problem.

China is watching. Any confrontation in the Taiwan Strait will require a staggering quantity of long-range precision munitions, and the current stockpiles are, to use the technical term, inadequate. The phrase “we’d run out within a week” has circulated in defense policy circles for years with the urgency of a politely ignored memo.

Ukraine and South Korea have already felt the coldness of this math. Political will won’t constrain new U.S. weapons deliveries. Empty warehouses will. The queue is long. The factory is slow. The address at the front of the line is currently somewhere in the Middle East.

(Kim Jong Un launching cruise missiles on Tuesday, just after the U.S. moved its South Korea THAAD missile defense installation to the Middle East, was a particularly petty “I told you so!” and a reminder of how comfortable he’s resting on his throne, thanks to his nuclear weapons.)

And through all of it, Iran keeps ordering drones. Cheap ones. By the thousands.

Wrap Up

Conservative estimates suggest it will take the better part of a decade — perhaps longer — to rebuild the industrial base, train the workforce, integrate the new technologies, and accumulate adequate stockpiles. Ten years, assuming sustained political commitment, sustained funding, and no further bleeding of existing inventories into active conflicts.

Ten years of vulnerability. 10 years of watching adversaries probe the gap between our boasts and the capacity to back them up. 10 years of telling allies “we’ve got you” while quietly hoping nobody calls the bluff too loudly. Or, worse, thinking you’ve got them covered when you don’t.

The meeting with defense CEOs wasn’t a strategy. It was a press release dressed up as a strategy. The actual strategy, if there is one, involves an unglamorous decade of investment, workforce development, industrial policy, and patience. None of which plays particularly well at a rally.

In the meantime, Iran’s procurement officer is putting in another order. Cash on delivery. No backlogs. Shipping in 48 hours.