What if America Runs Out of Bombs?
Everyone knows the United States has the most powerful military in the world. No one else comes close to Washington’s ability to hunt down its enemies and quickly drop bombs on them from halfway across the world.
But what if America runs out of bombs?
The Ukrainian city of Avdiivka is a cautionary tale. On February 17, the city fell to a Russian assault because the defenders ran low on ammunition. Although Ukrainian authorities claimed they were overseeing an orderly withdrawal, the fighters faced a harrowing ordeal. One group of soldiers fled in a beat-up car, which limped to safety after a Russian rocket blew out a tire, French war correspondent Guillaume Ptak reported. Troops filmed themselves passing by an iconic landmark, a sign that reads “Avdiivka is Ukraine,” with Russian bombs falling around them.
U.S. foreign policy debates often focus on questions of money and political willpower, whether the American taxpayer has the patience to keep supporting overseas adventures. Less often than they should, those debates focus on the moral and ethical limits on American engagement overseas. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, however, have strained the physical limits of American power. The factories simply can’t make enough ammunition to keep up with all of Washington’s commitments, no matter how much money is thrown at them.
Previous Pentagon planners had not anticipated “the sort of lengthy, heavy fighting we’ve seen in Ukraine,” and the rate of fire has “well outstripped any sort of planning assumptions that [the U.S. Department of Defense] thought it would need for its own battles,” Josh Paul, a former U.S. State Department official who oversaw weapons exports, tells Reason.
The 155 mm artillery shell, a basic weapon of modern warfare, symbolizes this problem. The United States produced 28,000 shells in October 2023, a rate that comes out to 336,000 shells per year. In November 2023, different European officials gave different estimates of Europe’s combined production capacity, between 400,000 and 700,000 shells per year. Both regions have been increasing their production.
Yet the war in Ukraine is burning through 155 mm shells faster than everyone is making them. The United States sent more than 2 million rounds in a year and a half. The stockpiles that the United States may need to fight its own future wars are running dry. It would take about five years to replenish American 155 mm stockpiles to pre-2022 levels, according to a report published by the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in January 2023. Other weapons, such as Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank rockets, would take even longer to restock.
That was before the latest war in Gaza, which has eaten up gargantuan amounts of ammunition. The Biden administration, which has released specific lists of weapons being sent to Ukraine, has remained tight-lipped about the specifics of its munitions support for Israel. A list leaked to Bloomberg News shows, though, that the United States sent 57,000 artillery shells and hundreds of guided missiles to Israel in the first month of the war.
These proxy wars should be a wake-up call. Americans have gotten used to fighting in indefinite conflicts, “forever wars,” sustained by financial borrowing and bipartisan consensus. Now the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are showing that all the money and political willpower in the world cannot overcome physical constraints. Even if the money doesn’t run out, the bombs do.
“We are at a point with our munitions stockpile where everything regarding American foreign policy is an issue of ‘can’ and not ‘should,'” says Dan Caldwell, an Iraq War veteran and public policy adviser for Defense Priorities who has been writing about munitions shortages for years. “This is not a reality that can be rapidly overcome by spending tens of billions of dollars on the defense industrial base.”
Ukrainian Arms Shortages
Ukraine has faced arms shortages since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned reporters in November 2023 that “warehouses are empty” across Europe, and he mentioned the problem in his end-of-year speech the following month.
A few weeks later, Ukrainian Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov said during a video conference with foreign leaders the nation was facing a “very real and pressing” problem with ammunition. Around the same time, Ukrainian artillerymen gave a CNN news crew a tour of their dugout bunker near the front lines. The troops pointed to nearly empty shelves and claimed they were forced to fire smokescreen rounds in lieu of explosive shells.
Though the Ukrainians could have been playing up the shortages for dramatic effect, the numbers are harder to fudge. Ukraine went from firing 4,000 to 7,000 artillery shells per day in late 2023, according to European estimates cited by the Associated Press, to 2,000 rounds per day in January 2024, according to a letter from Umerov to his European counterparts.
Chet, an American volunteer fighting for the Ukrainian forces in Avdiivka, spoke about the issue on condition that his real name not be revealed. “Russia fires significantly more artillery, and this is felt on all areas of the front,” he said a few weeks before Avdiivka’s fall. Chet claimed that Russian forces were better able to launch attacks because of the artillery imbalance. Ukraine’s shortages, Chet warns, “are continuing to get worse.” After the fall of Avdiivka, he confirmed that ammunition shortages were a major reason for the Ukrainian retreat, as well as the Russian attackers’ ample air support.
Officials have often framed the problem as a lack of political willpower for Ukraine’s backers to spend money on the war. American funding for Ukraine ran dry at the end of 2023, and Congress spent months debating whether to send more. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander told reporters in January 2024 that Ukrainian “units do not have the stocks and stores of ammunition that they require” and the Pentagon wants Congress “to move forward on a decision to pass the supplemental” aid package. When Avdiivka fell, the White House again blamed “congressional inaction” for the ammunition shortages.
Most of the money in the supplemental aid package, however, “is going to go into munitions and arms contracts that will take years to fulfill,
Article from Reason.com
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