The Resilience Deficit: Rebuilding Surge Capacity in a Dangerous World

Commentary

The wars of the 2020s have delivered a sobering message: Modern conflict consumes weapons and munitions at rates few Western planners anticipated. In Ukraine, artillery shells are fired by the thousands daily. Israel has burned through interceptors, precision bombs, and ground munitions across multiple fronts.

Most starkly, the United States and its allies in the 2026 Iran campaign, Operation Epic Fury, expended thousands of high-end missiles—including more than 850 Tomahawks and 1,100 JASSM-ERs—in just weeks, burning through years of stockpiles for certain systems and reportedly depleting more than half the prewar inventory of key munitions in some categories.

For decades, the United States and its allies optimized their defense industrial bases for efficiency and higher profits. But this approach came with a hidden price: severely eroded surge capacity—the ability of a nation’s defense industrial base to rapidly scale production when war demands it.

What was once taken for granted—the ability to replenish stocks and replace losses at wartime tempo—now looks dangerously fragile.

The result is a strategic vulnerability: In a protracted conflict, the side that can sustain production may ultimately prevail, even if it starts with inferior technology.

All of this unfolds against the looming backdrop of a potential great-power conflict with China, in which a Taiwan or South China Sea scenario could demand sustained industrial output on an even larger scale.

China presents a picture of scale through military-civil fusion—more than 200 times that of the United States in some metrics. However, repeated purges of senior People’s Liberation Army leadership and underwhelming real-world performance (e.g., Venezuela, Iran) of exported systems reveal serious quality and corruption issues beneath the surface.

Cost of Efficiency Alone

After the Cold War, Western nations embraced a prolonged “peace dividend.” A defining moment arrived in July 1993 at the Pentagon’s “Last Supper” meeting. Defense Secretary Les Aspin and Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry hosted two dozen defense CEOs and warned that post-Cold War budget cuts meant that the industry could no longer sustain so many players, actively encouraging mergers and consolidation.

Within years, dozens of major companies shrank to just five dominant firms.

As defense budgets shrank and demand signals weakened, the defense industrial base was ruthlessly optimized for efficiency. Just-in-time manufacturing replaced stockpiles. Global supply chains chased the lowest costs, often landing in countries that might one day become adversaries.

The symptoms are now obvious. U.S. 155 mm artillery production, once at about 14,000 rounds per month pre-Ukraine, has struggled to reach 40,000 despite major efforts. Precision missiles and solid rocket motors face single-source bottlenecks. Most critically, modern weapons have become hyper-specialized: exquisite systems produced in small quantities with unique, low-volume components that defy rapid scaling and have expansive price tags.

Shipbuilding capacity has atrophied so severely that one Chinese yard exceeds all American naval shipyards combined. Even “attritable” (expendable) systems such as drones seem to require specialized electronics and energetics that cannot be spun up overnight.

World War II-style total mobilization—converting auto plants into tank and aircraft factories—remains possible in theory during a truly protracted conflict. Yet today’s constraints are far more severe: Overall manufacturing employment has fallen to roughly 8 percent of the workforce from 33 percent, weapons have grown vastly more complex, environmental and regulatory processes are slower, and supply chains are deeply internationalized.

The idle civilian capacity that once existed in the 1940s is simply no longer there to convert.

Warnings Ignored

Warnings came early and often. As far back as the 1990s, analysts and officials flagged the risks of shrinking capacity and lost surge potential.

Through the 2000s and 2010s, reports from CSIS, RAND, the Pentagon’s annual Industrial Capabilities assessments, and congressional testimonies repeatedly warned that aggressive industry consolidation, fragile supply chains, single-source suppliers, and declining competition were eroding the defense industrial base’s long-term health, innovation, and ability to respond to future surges in demand. These cautions were largely sidelined in favor of short-term budget savings and efficiency gains.

Israel, long optimized for short high-tech wars and heavily reliant on U.S. resupply, faced painful realities after October 2023. Political pauses on heavy bombs and competing U.S. priorities exposed the risks of dependence.

For years, Israeli defense analysts and some senior officials had cautioned that relying primarily on American Foreign Military Financing to purchase munitions—rather than investing in costly domestic high-volume production—created structural vulnerabilities for sustained high-intensity conflict.

Eternal Tension

At the heart of the problem lies the usual tension of efficiency versus resilience. Peacetime efficiencies deliver short-term savings and competitive edges, but this systematically erodes the slack, redundancy, and surge capacity needed for war.

Although resilience always carries an upfront cost, national security simply requires a different balance than recreational devices. Further, this is a dynamic tradeoff that must be actively managed.

But better balance is achievable without sacrificing the innovation that gives the West its technological edge. Practical tools already exist. Dual-use technologies allow civilian factories to pivot quickly to military needs.

Modular Open Systems Architectures (MOSA) enable components to be shared across platforms, reducing unique parts and speeding production.

Paid-for surge lines—government-funded extra capacity kept warm in peacetime—prevent factories from shrinking to the minimum efficient scale.

New agile entrants such as Anduril are proving that fresh competition can deliver faster, cheaper, and more scalable systems than traditional primes.

Friend-shoring of critical inputs (rare earths, energetics, chips) reduces dependence on potential adversaries.

Finally, honest fiscal trade-offs—prioritizing defense over other types of spending—are essential to fund these measures.

Role of Government

Directing national industry for defense is not a modern ideological invention. Kings and empires managed arsenals and mobilization for millennia. Even in the 20th century, democratic wartime efforts such as America’s World War II War Production Board and Britain’s Ministry of Supply coordinated private industry without full nationalization, converting auto plants into tank factories while preserving enterprise incentives.

The false binary—unfettered free markets on one side versus authoritarian control on the other—has distorted policy for decades. Democracies can and should exercise pragmatic stewardship through tools like the Defense Production Act (DPA), multiyear contracts, and strategic incentives, without sliding into central planning.

The United States is finally shifting course. Unlike the inconsistent, year-to-year procurement of previous decades, Washington is now making large-scale, multiyear commitments. The Fiscal Year 2027 budget requests nearly $30 billion for the DPA.

The Pentagon has awarded major new contracts, including a $20 billion enterprise deal with Anduril in 2026, and is actively funding facility modernizations, paid surge lines, and friend-shoring initiatives.

For the first time in decades, “rebuilding the defense industrial base” has become an explicit top priority in the National Defense Strategy.

Israel has launched an initiative aiming at 70 percent domestic munitions self-sufficiency within a decade while dramatically expanding local production lines.

Europe shows a mixed but determined revival. Germany’s Rheinmetall scaled artillery shell production to more than 1.1 million per year from 70,000. The UK is building multiple new munitions factories under its 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy. France is doubling down on sovereignty. Yet all still rely heavily on U.S. stocks in the interim.

Ultimately, success hinges on leadership. Leaders must read reality clearly, understand the practical steps needed, and summon the sustained will to execute across political cycles and budget pressures.

Free societies do not need to copy China’s authoritarian model. The Chinese Communist Party’s scale and military-civil fusion offer tactical lessons, but its purges, corruption, and brittle quality control show why total centralized control is no panacea.

Instead, the West can reclaim its classical form of industrial statecraft: pragmatic, limited, and rooted in its own strengths—open innovation, competitive markets, accountable government, and alliances. Free societies hold a real advantage—if they choose to use it.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.