National Interest

by Can Kasapoglu

    By failing to rebuild its defense industrial base after the Cold War, the United States and its allies left themselves vulnerable to aggression.

    The West did not run short of missiles and interceptors because it fought too many wars. It ran short because, for three decades, it planned as though major war had become impossible. From the waters around Taiwan to the Persian Gulf and the black-earth plains of Ukraine, a single reality is beginning to govern the strategic balance: modern wars can consume precision munitions faster than democracies can produce them.

    It is now commonplace to see commentary portraying the US military’s empty magazines as a consequence of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. However, it would be more accurate to say that these conflicts exposed a structural weakness in US and allied armed forces. To blame contemporary American or European military engagements is therefore to mistake smoke for fire—and to turn the case for stronger deterrence into an argument for strategic retreat.

    The empirical record supports this distinction. A recent CSIS six-factor reconstruction of America’s munitions shortage identifies the campaign against Iran as only one cause. According to the report, arms transfers to Ukraine were generally a partial factor in the inventories most relevant to the war with Iran and a Western Pacific conflict scenario. Of the 102 categories of equipment supplied to Ukraine, only four—Patriot, ATACMS, HARM and Stinger—overlapped significantly with those requirements.

    Even among the hundreds of Patriot interceptors transferred to Ukraine, some came from European inventories or new production rather than directly from existing American stocks. Overall, the wars in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East have imposed real costs, but they did not design the system that proved unable to absorb them.

    The crisis’s origins lie in the brief and surreal strategic climate that followed the Cold War. Western governments naively mistook a fleeting peace dividend for a permanent world order. The documentary record is remarkably candid. NATO’s 1997 Founding Act declared that NATO and Russia no longer considered one another adversaries. In two years, the last generation of Soviet intelligence scorched Chechnya and seized power by offering then President Boris Yeltsin a safe retreat from power. The European Union’s 2003 Security Strategy later judged large-scale aggression against a member state “improbable.”

    In 2010, NATO’s then strategic concept downplayed the likelihood of conventional attack while portraying Russian and allied security as “intertwined.” America’s 2010 National Security Strategy announced that the major powers were at peace and that commerce had stitched their destinies together. The Euro-Atlantic area’s democratic nations had successfully imprisoned their strategic intelligence capabilities into a cage of strategic idealism that reached its apogee during the Obama era.

    These assumptions did not remain confined to conference halls and communiqués. They migrated into force structure, procurement and industrial policy—this is where things became dangerously tricky. Britain’s 2010 National Security Strategy relegated a conventional attack on a NATO or EU state to its third tier of risks. The accompanying Strategic Defense and Security Review reduced Challenger-2 main battle tank holdings by roughly 40 percent and heavy artillery by about 35 percent, reflecting the belief that precision could substitute for volume. NATO subsequently sought security at the lowest possible force level.

    The industrial consequences were measurable. The number of major American aerospace and defense prime contractors fell from 51 to five after the Cold War. The surviving industrial base was organized around efficient peacetime production rather than wartime surge capacity. In the meantime, revisionist powers retained a harder-edged realpolitik view of the world.

    The intelligence failure was not that the West could not see the threat. It was that it saw the threat and failed to act on what it knew. Before the nuclear agreement with Iran, the Defense Intelligence Agency was already warning about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ expanding ballistic-missile prowess and indigenous drone warfare programs. The deeper failure was one of net assessment: the inability of defense establishments to translate known adversary capabilities into force generation, magazine depth, industrial capacity and military policy.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech foreshadowed Russia’s invasion of Georgia a year later. Georgia, in turn, offered a warning of Crimea’s illegal annexation in 2014; Crimea foreshadowed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Yet Western policy remained slow to absorb the implications. In 2009, after the war in Georgia, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a symbolic “reset button”—an emblem of Washington’s misplaced faith that diplomatic engagement could restrain a Kremlin led by a former Soviet intelligence officer and his circle of Siloviki.

    Iran, again, offers perhaps the clearest example. The Obama era’s JCPOA isolated the nuclear file while leaving the clerical regime’s missile and proxy complex largely outside its binding architecture. Ballistic-missile provisions were relegated to weaker and time-limited UN language. The West negotiated over fissile material while the architecture of delivery, regional coercion and proxy warfare terrorism continued to expand. The result was an increasingly unfavorable offense-defense equation.

    Recent inventory estimates suggest the campaign against Iran consumed about half of the initial American stocks of Patriot and THAAD and roughly one-third of the available JASSM, Tomahawk and SM-2/3/6 families. Enough munitions nevertheless remain for plausible continuations of the Iran campaign. The principal risk lies in the window of vulnerability sparked for a possible conflict with China, Russia, or North Korea while production lines rebuild depleted stocks.

    The FY2027 munitions request increased planned procurement of PAC-3 MSE, THAAD and Tomahawk missiles, among others. Nonetheless, rebuilding the industrial base will take years. After decades of lullabies on the disappearance of interstate war, defense industries cannot instantly recover skilled labor, specialized tooling, or the institutional knowledge discarded during long years of strategic complacency.

    If munitions scarcity is the problem, the answer cannot be passivity either. Western magazines are not empty due to unnecessary wars. They are empty because the West’s political masters never saw the wars coming. The remedy must begin with the actual causes. Intelligence assessments must focus on adversary capabilities rather than preferred interpretations of adversary intentions. Long story short: peace is not preserved by wishing war away. It is preserved by making war too costly for the aggressor to contemplate.