Western Defense Industry Cannot Surge Munitions Production in a Crisis

The U.S. defense munitions industrial base has lost the ability to rapidly scale production in response to a crisis. A 2023 Army Science Board study found that the Army lacks surge capacity for several critical munitions systems, and that general capacity has declined over the past thirty years. CSIS analysis concluded bluntly that it is no longer a question of whether the U.S. industrial base is prepared to surge; it is clear that it is not. This inability to surge means that in a high-intensity conflict with a peer adversary, the U.S. and its allies would fight with whatever is already in stockpiles and on production lines. Once those are exhausted, there is no mechanism to rapidly replenish. The Ukraine war demonstrated this concretely: two years into the conflict, Western nations had depleted stockpiles to dangerous levels while production had barely tripled. A Pacific theater conflict would consume munitions at rates far exceeding Ukraine, with longer supply lines and fewer options for allied contribution. The workforce dimension compounds the problem. Key munitions manufacturers like Rheinmetall, General Dynamics, and Nammo are receiving multi-billion-dollar orders but cannot hire fast enough. The broader U.S. manufacturing sector faces 415,000 unfilled positions, and 26 percent of the existing workforce is approaching retirement. Munitions work requires specialized skills in energetics handling, quality assurance, and safety protocols that take years to develop. You cannot post a job listing and have a trained explosive ordnance worker in 90 days. The structural cause is the post-Cold War "peace dividend" and the shift to just-in-time, single-source contracting. The government closed, mothballed, or sold ammunition plants throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Over fifty mergers consolidated the industrial base. Remaining facilities were optimized for peacetime production rates with no contractual obligation or financial incentive to maintain warm surge lines. Rebuilding this capacity requires not just money but time: new ammunition plants take 3-7 years to build, permit, and qualify.