Running on Empty
By 
I have a follow up to Cheryl’s post on munitions at 1945:
The economics of munitions stockpiles have always been fraught, and the increasing sophistication of missiles has made calculations even more difficult.
Missiles are not the same as 155mm artillery rounds, which are simple to mass-produce when infrastructure is available.
Patriot missiles, for example, can take more than two years to build, and other munitions can take even longer.
Ramping up from peacetime production can cut the time between order and delivery, but much work on capacity investment needed to happen yesterday, rather than today or tomorrow.
More fundamentally, munitions will always struggle against other priorities for the services and for the Department of War.
Munition stocks are lovely to have when a war has outlasted its welcome, but in peacetime they can be a liability.
Older weapons degrade without use, a phenomenon that is as true for the chemicals in artillery shells as it is for the advanced components in interceptor missiles.
Stockpiles must be organized, warehoused, and guarded, an unwelcome expense for both government and the corporate world.
Worst of all, munitions stockpiles risk becoming obsolete over time. When launchers are retired, older missiles become piles of unwanted junk.
The development of new countermeasures, or new tactics to achieve the same goal, can similarly turn a well-stocked military depot into an expensive recycling center in no time flat.
Both industry and government understand this, which is why they approach the stockpile issue with care.
CSIS has been doing good work on this.
That was as of April. The rate of usage has declined significantly since then, but replacing the stockpiles takes a long time.
Long story short… the Trump administration was fully aware that stockpiles of munitions were insufficient for even a fairly short war. It accelerated Biden-era efforts to rebuild stockpiles but those efforts need time to ripen. Nevertheless, Trump decided to initiate the war because he evidently believed it would end quickly. Now, we have a problem, because Iranians can read those charts just as easily as you can, and they understand leverage.