Why America Is Out of Ammunition
thebignewsletter.com
thebignewsletter.com
> I have every confidence that America's industrial base will happily expand to fulfill any (funded) mandate—does Stoller seriously disagree?
I do not have that confidence and yes Stoller seriously disagrees with your belief (emphasis mine):
> Surges due to wars aren’t new, and there’s always some time lag between the build-up and the delivery. But today, the lengths of time are weirdly long. For instance, the Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years. Why? What is new is Wall Street’s role in weaponry. We used to have slack, and productive capacity, but then came private equity and mergers. And now we don’t. The government can’t actually solicit bids from multiple players for most major weapons systems, because there’s just one or two possible bidders. So that means there’s little incentive for firms to expand output, even if there’s more spending. Why not just raise price?
> But don’t take my word for it, take that of the Pentagon. In 2022, the DOD reported that “that consolidation of the industrial base reduces competition for DOD contracts and leads DOD to rely on a more limited number of suppliers. This lack of competition may in turn increase the risk of supply chain gaps, price increases, reduced innovation, and other adverse effects.” And that’s why, more than a year into the Ukraine conflict, the ramp-up is still not where it needs to be.
> ...it's not like these resources are going to waste, the war in Ukraine (we will elide the other conflicts) is very much worth the investment from NATO's perspective.
This point is orthogonal to the article.
The ammunition is not being "wasted" as it is splattering the bodies of men, young and old. A protracted war, which could well have been avoided, rages on, with Millions of refugees, a country's economy wrecked, and probably half a million people dead or wounded among Ukrainians, separatists and Russians. This talk of a "worthwhile investment" is abhorrent.
Would appeasing an aggressive dictator be better “investment”? That worked out so well in the past…
Contrast this with Russia, which increased it's production substantially after the start of the war in Ukraine. Most of the Russian defensive industry is run/owned by the government itself. Yes, there is obviously corruption there too but it's no where near the US defense industry. This is just another classical example of how privatization not only increases the size of the bureaucracy (you need more bureaucrats making sure contracts are adhered to) but also decreases capability and quality.
I think much of this has to do with the fact that the US defense industry is really a 'make works' program to provide a funnel for social spending without calling it that. Since the social system in the US is so weak and the political capital is so low that the only feasible way to funnel a lot of money into the private sector is via defense spending which both parties agree on.
In other words, the waste is the goal.
And I wouldn't take any lessons from Russia except what not to do.
[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-10-warthog-why-is-america-sti...
For all its faults and costs the US is able to field effective systems, proven in combat, at decent scale.
Russia has had to resort to importing artillery shells and other ammunition from North Korea and Kamikaze drones from Iran.
Despite placing the entire country on a war footing the production from its arms factories is still far below planned levels, and front line units keep reporting quality issues and non-deliveries.
The South Koreans are selling ammunition to US to give to Ukraine. The world hasn't seen a war on this scale for many decades.
The end-to-end corruption in the Russian defense establishment is much worse than in the US. Being run by the government doesn't help at all in Russia (unsurprisingly, since the government is pretty much a top-to-bottom kleptocracy); much of the corruption is in the military itself. Not sure its currently at the levels of, say, the first Chechen war where a serious problem was military quartermasters personally profiting from selling supplies under their control directly to the enemy, but its rather notoriously a problem effecting readiness, planning, and operations for decades.
Also, the US and other NATO allies have increased ammunition production and other defense production substantially since the war began, as well, even without moving the overall economy to anything even approximating a general war footing (e.g., US production of 155mm artillery shells had doubled from 6-8 months prior by September of this year, as part of an upswing targeting another quadrupling by 2025.)
> Since the social system in the US is so weak and the political capital is so low that the only feasible way to funnel a lot of money into the private sector is via defense spending
The US "funnels" a lot more money through direct, overt social spending than through defense spending, this argument is common, but absolutely disconnected from reality.
I know next to nothing about this, but my guess is because the ammunition factories are busy making the military ammunition.
Yes, at the beginning of a panic it seems like you're clever because there's still .25-06 and .17 HMR on store shelves, but the secret is that these cartridges are always more expensive than their more standard counterparts. And during a sustained shortage (like what happened during covid), the ammo plants focus on their highest volume products which they sell to civilian, law enforcement, and government.
When you stick to .22LR, .223/5.56, 9x19, .308/7.62x51 NATO, and 12 gauge, you're taking advantage of the economy of scale that comes with these cartridges. So just buy those while they're cheap and wait out shortages like this one.
I do have .22LR but the only .22 rifle I have is a Ruger K10/22 and I am probably going to sell it. I am not a fan of their firing mechanism and I don't really like auto-loaders. About 98% of my shooting is the .22 winmag due to the length of my fields. I reserve the 30-O6 for protecting the horses and family from anything big that comes around but that is thankfully very rare.
It's a little bit of an oddity in the modern JIT supply-chain era but this is effectively still an industry that runs on a large buffered inventory. Or at least, relies on customers to buffer inventory sufficient to their needs when it's actually available.
> Yes, at the beginning of a panic it seems like you're clever because there's still .25-06 and .17 HMR on store shelves, but the secret is that these cartridges are always more expensive than their more standard counterparts.
I will disagree with this slightly because it's all a question of how fast demand spikes and how quickly you burn through the inventory buffers. We actually saw during the pandemic that sometimes less popular calibers are cheaper than the in-demand ones (eg: 38sp/357 Mag/sometimes even 44 Mag could be cheaper than 9mm), but it's only because there just isn't much demand for them. Once that buffer burns through, it's done, and they won't be making more for a while, and it will come in at a much higher price.
There are a few calibers that ride the line, 40 S+W is an interesting one because there is a fairly decent constant level of demand for it from LEO usage (it is, famously, the FBI caliber), so it gets produced, but there's also not a lot of retail demand for it. Sometimes this means it crosses over and is cheaper than 9mm.
A lot of guns can swap between 9mm and 40S+W if you change the barrel (and sometimes different mags), and often you can get police-surplus 40S+W guns significantly cheaper than the 9mm equivalents. The price difference often means you can get a used 40S+W Glock or SIG, plus a replacement 9mm barrel, for roughly the same price of the used 9mm version of the gun. Nice little bit of market inefficiency there. But that's a pro purchase for shortages because 40S+W really doesn't get hit bad like 9mm does, you can pretty much always find it and sometimes it will indeed be cheaper than 9mm.
38sp and 357 can have the same thing, although not as often or as much. The other wildcard used to be 7.62x39, during shortages you could always rely on Brown Bear or Wolf being churned out by the case-load, but, obviously Russia being a belligerent here (and Ukraine having a decent amount of AKs and other combloc weapons) has changed the math. Probably permanently, unfortunately - can't really see the US racing to open up imports of russian ammo even after things settle down.
Actually all Russian ammo plants were sanctioned in late 2021 already, though existing import contracts were honored. So the inexpensive Russian steel cased ammo which served as the price floor for many different cartridges is likely gone forever (for understandable geopolitical reasons).
Also, other shooters will shoot the common rounds like .223, when it's cost goes up or it's unavailable, they move to these other rounds increasing their costs.
Because many gun owners own multiple guns. (especially the ones who consume the most ammo) If they're short on ammo to shoot their AR-15 at the range this weekend, they're not going to just sit at home. They'll go to the range and shoot 30-06, .357, 9mm, etc.
Retailers know the score and can preemptively raise prices on their non-NATO rounds before they run out because they know their customers are going to be less price sensitive due to the shortage in NATO alternatives.
(in economic parlance, the different rounds are still "substitute goods" despite not working in the same firearms, so it would actually be pretty surprising if their prices WEREN'T correlated)
Ah yes, bullets, famous for not being intended for use in small arms.
> In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police.
...
As for the article, it focuses on mergers and the free reign of finance capital over this field. The notion of production of goods within the sphere of (modern, financialized) marketplace is unceremoniously dismissed:
> the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending ... the consequence ... are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output.
So, apparently the author wants the US government to reign in private capital in favor of stronger state control of the economy - so that the US can prevent Taiwan from being integrated into a state where private capital is strongly reigned in by state control of the economy.
Similarly, he want the government to reign in Wall Street for winning the war in Ukraine, after which Wall Street will run roughshod there in the reconstruction bonanza.
The US has not factually been drawn into either of those wars, though it is sending money and supplies to the people who have been.
> Surges due to wars aren’t new, and there’s always some time lag between the build-up and the delivery. But today, the lengths of time are weirdly long. For instance, the Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years. Why?
Because the Stinger hasn't been manufactured for twenty years; there have been upgrades that involve modifying existing Stingers from stores, but not no new units, so there's no production line, and no supply chain, and most of the bill of materials is components that can't be sourced anymore, so much of the system will need to be redesigned to use currently-available components, and a new supply chain built for it. In fact, the new contract is referred to in much coverage not as a contract for new Stingers, but as a contract to competitively develop a replacement system for the Stinger, which is compatible with existing systems built to use the Stinger. [0][1]
A big part of that is that the Stinger simply aren't needed in very large numbers in the kinds of wars the US fights and expects to fight, where the world's first (US Air Force), second (US Army Aviation), third (US Naval Aviation), and seventh (US Marine Corps Aviation) largest aviation services will be used to secure air superiority and destroy enemy aircraft in the air and on the ground, though they still have some important uses.
(They are, OTOH, much more useful in wars where the US isn't fighting but another great power is fighting on the other side.)
The author wants to blame "Wall Street" and "mergers", but its not Wall Street and mergers that mad the Stinger not a priority for US defense planners, not something that has been needed to be produced for twenty years, and not something for which the supply chain exists.
[0] see, e.g., https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/06/raytheon-calls-r...
[1] https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2023/10/09/us...
Is like, oh no demand for a thing went up and supply didn’t preexist… if for some reason supply does absolutely nothing, we’ll be in real trouble many years down the road!
You see the same thing with minerals (lithium for batteries, rare earths for magnets) and all sorts of things. Yes, indeed demand changes for things and supply doesn’t respond immediately. Come back when there’s actually a reason to be worried.
It’s the department of defense, if there was actually a shortage that would have an impact, it would be fixed quite quickly.
2. TFA specifically addresses your point about supply & demand. It's not that supply is lagging demand it's that it's lagging demand by a large amount. The article uses the (slightly wrong[1]) example of orders for the Stinger missile replacements estimated to take 5 years.
3. The general thesis of BIG is that the level of M&As we have now are anti-competitive and harmful to workers, consumers, and the US Economy as a whole, but in the post-Regan era the government has been either supportive or complacent. This article is an attempt to show further evidence of this, using the GAO's authority as an example of the first half and the DOD's response as an example of the second.
1: The linked article is about replacing the Stinger missile with a new short-range SAM, not about just building more Stinger missiles as the sentence linking it implies. It is true, however, that in the interim we have no new stock of either Stingers or their proposed replacement.
This is a hard problem and the executive branch (under both parties) and the pentagon have proactively made it worse from the 90s to today.
I do too, I don't see how you get air supremacy with what the US had built by June of 1943.
Maybe earlier in 1944, but certainly not a year earlier.
> The Pentagon’s head-in-the-sand approach is why Lockheed now has a chokehold on nuclear missile modernization, since it bought the key supplier of rocket engines and denies those engines to rivals bidding for the contract to upgrade what is known as the nuclear triad.
There are multiple suppliers for rocket engines, both solid fuel and liquid fueled rockets.
Furthermore, many rocket engine companies would love to build new rocket designs on fat, fully funded defense time & materials contracts coming up with alternative designs to fit specific form factors or new requirements (ICBMs, interceptors, etc). The newer companies like SpaceX, Rocketlabs, and Blue Origin are particularly hungry, and they are willing to compete against the legacy Defense firms if they are given an opportunity.
Now, if the RFPs were written in such a way as to prevent all these new upstarts from competing, well, that is a different problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Squad_Weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM7_rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM250
Every time any well known brand is taken over by private equity, it goes to shit. But somehow it is blaspemy against the free market to point out the problem.
We spend 21 times more on defence than Russia does, but cannot outproduce it in basic ammunition. And some people are mad enough to contemplate conflict with China. They have 20x Russia's manufacturing capacity.
Russia can’t even reach Kyiv 150 miles away - maybe they should have spent more
Demand for large-caliber ammo is low in peacetime, and huge in wartime. This is why the Army owns ammo plants. There are at least three large Army plants making artillery ammo. But they're old. Most date back to WWII. Production of 155mm rounds has doubled in the past year, and should double over the next year, but it's still below the expenditure rate in Ukraine.[1] The observation from past wars is that at the two year mark, production has caught up. The WWII experience was that at 4 years, there were overwhelming amounts of supplies.
The US isn't the only supplier to Ukraine. Ukraine makes ammo itself. There are several European makers.[2] Norway and Finland are rather active in the ammo industry. So is Poland. For good reasons.
The biggest US bottlenecks seem to be in "smart weapons", which cost too much and are produced in too-small quantities. The Javelin is a 1980s design. But there's a new version out, the "Javelin Lightweight Command Launch Unit". The specs reads like a cellphone ad.[3] "5 megapixel color camera. Picture in picture". The original Javelin is from the 1980s, when it was exotic technology. Now it's cell phone parts.
"What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?"
"To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop IF GOD GAVE THE HAND, LET NOT MAN WITHHOLD THE SWORD. The second wrote up ALL HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: NONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO JUDGE. The third wrote up TO MAN THE WEAPON: TO HEAVEN THE VICTORY. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up PEACE SHALL NOT PREVAIL SAVE WITH A SWORD IN HER HAND. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, UNASHAMED." - George Bernard Shaw
[1] https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/09/15/production-o...
[3] https://www.overtdefense.com/2022/08/05/how-do-javelin-light...
In DoD purchasing lingo, small arms means anything less than 30mm in diameter. Most people would consider that to be big stuff. But not them.
This is how the UN defines it:
For the purposes of this instrument, “small arms and light weapons” will mean any manportable lethal weapon that expels or launches, is designed to expel or launch, or may be readily converted to expel or launch a shot, bullet or projectile by the action of an explosive, excluding antique small arms and light weapons or their replicas. Antique small arms and light weapons and their replicas will be defined in accordance with domestic law. In no case will antique small arms and light weapons include those manufactured after 1899:
(a) “Small arms” are, broadly speaking, weapons designed for individual use. They include, inter alia, revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles and carbines, sub-machine guns, assault rifles and light machine guns;
(b) “Light weapons” are, broadly speaking, weapons designed for use by two or three persons serving as a crew, although some may be carried and used by a single person. They include, inter alia, heavy machine guns, hand-held under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft guns, portable anti-tank guns, recoilless rifles, portable launchers of anti-tank missile and rocket systems, portable launchers of anti-aircraft missile systems, and mortars of a calibre of less than 100 millimetres. [0]
Others like Small Arms Survey choose 20mm as a cut off, but that's as arbitrary as 30mm.[1]
[0] https://www.un.org/events/smallarms2006/pdf/international_in...
[1] https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/default/files/resource...
Under the terms of the management contract Winchester may sell the excess capability of the facility, outside what the military orders in any given year, on the civilian market. However the contract also states that military orders take priority and if there’s a big new order placed then those civilian sales contracts need to be paused or cancelled. This is done to preserve the large production lines outside of large US military orders.
So the article is still wrong to include it, because it’s confusing two very different things: There’s no shortage of small arms ammunition, and what’s happening at Lake City is the system working as intended. There are also many facilities that can produce those calibres. It's easy.
The issue with production is with large ammunition, like 155mm artillery shells, anti-tank missiles, etc that's much more difficult to produce than small arms ammunition and for which it takes much longer to spin up more capacity. Lake City is irrelevant in that context.
There are of course responsible gun owners in the US, but there’s also a ton of easily led, highly political, irrational, and paranoid ones.
Lake City makes just 30% of the US’s supply of 5.56mm, so that calibre will still be available to buy but will just be more expensive for a bit. It’ll also only affect people who own AR-15s and similar rifles and who are a minority of gun owners.
America could start an Operation Warp Speed for 155mm shells and Stinger missiles, but there isn't yet the political will to do it. The DoD are still deeply entrenched in their leaden bureaucracy, they're still doing procurement in their usual way, their processes are still oriented around providing pork barrel jobs in key constituencies.
America isn't at war, but if it wants to remain a global superpower in an increasingly volatile world, it needs to adopt a wartime mindset when it comes to industrial strategy. You have the steel mills, you have the forging presses, you have the CNC lathes, but you don't have the sense of urgency to actually use them. That doesn't require legislation or a fundamental restructuring of the economy, it just requires a bit of creative thinking about procurement. With the stroke of a pen, your president could set the wheels in motion to rapidly replenish your arsenal and resume your role as the armoury of the free world.
For the sake of Ukraine, for the sake of Israel, for the sake of all of us, write to your representatives.
I know you’re using this as as example. It has me curious though:
I feel like this wasn’t a failure, but also could have been a lot more successful. This is just a gut feel, has there been any good quantitative retrospectives on operation warp speed?
What would normally have taken years took less than one- from research to production of hundreds of millions of units.
I'd assumed there was something specific that you felt wasn't done well.
For my money's worth, I would have preferred that government officials were more honest- especially fauci.
The whole escalation of what percentage was needed for herd immunity (they knew the initial numbers they talked about were too low), the threats that Grandma would die at Thanksgiving if you didn't get it (despite it not actually preventing spread) and the assertion that it was totally safe (despite causing myocarditis in young men, about 50% or more with permanent heart damage according to a new study).
Yes, COVID was terrible, and people needed to take steps to avoid getting it. The dishonesty surrounding what those steps were (and what we did vs did not know) made making informed decisions impossible.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.123.0...
100% effective missiles that no one wants to shoot, don't require thorough testing, launch in unpredictable directions, and when they detonate have surprise effects depending on the target?
Sometimes they explode!
Other times, maybe deliver a nice cup of tea, or a burst of roses.
Small arms ammunition manufacturing is controlled by a very small number of players that are incentivized to keep production capacity low.
There is enough production to meet government demand, but law enforcement and civilian markets are seen as a pure profit center since ammo is an at-any-price purchase. Shortages fuel increased demand and higher prices, while production costs stay flat.
China has the oldest population in the world. The highest youth unemployment rate in the developed world. Millions more men than young women to marry them to. A leader that "disappears" anyone who tells him something he doesn't want to hear.
They're done for and they've been done for, for some time. They have no chance to turn around their situation because the Chinese people are stridently - hilariously - racist and xenophobic. How could they not be? They're bombarded with propaganda nonstop from the CCP. Buying all the real estate in America they can, loading up on US Government bonds, and stealing all the IP in the world can't save them - because they don't have enough young people to keep it all going.
Top 10 manufacturing countries in the world
China – 28.4% Global
United States – 16.6% Global Manufacturing Output
Japan – 7.5% Global Manufacturing Output
Germany – 5.8% Global
Furthermore, the life expectancy in the US is nosediving. It has massive internal problems not only on the health of its people but political coherence, which needs to be fixed before the US can get back to the growth track.
This is actually the most worrisome part for me. A bunch of young unemployed men who have no prospect of marriage and no real stake in society. That's the kind of thing that leads to some guy declaring himself Jesus's brother and starting a nasty civil war that kills 10 of millions, especially if it spills over into neighboring countries.
Source for this? Monaco and Japan have the highest median age in the world, at 55.4 and 47.3 years, respectively; the United States is 62nd at 38.5 years, with China just below at 38.4. What do you mean when you say China has the oldest population in the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/250753/number-of-people-...
If you like problem solving, yeah blue collar work can fill that void in spades...but so can sitting on a laptop in your living room spinning code and getting paid way more.
Doves of undergrads applying to YC get funded for SaaS apps, but only a few startups building hardware.
The money isn’t there from investment or returns.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...
We can look at steel production volumes to get an idea of the size of the productive industry in US. According to official data, US produced 6.8 million metric tons of steel in June this year https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/us-steel-executive-...
This is comparable to Russia, which produced 5.8 million metric tons https://www.statista.com/statistics/1079878/russia-steel-pro...
US might be the most industrialized western economy, but turns out it’s steel production is only slightly higher than in Russia. And it’s important to keep in mind that Russia has a much smaller population, so per capita production is actually higher than in US.
Meanwhile, China where 90 million metric tons of steel is produced in a month https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/china-june-crude-steel-...
China’s productive industry is a whole order of magnitude larger than US. This shows just how absurd the notion that US is in some sort of meaningful competition with China. It's like an ant by comparison.
However, it's also absolutely laughable to think that US could actually blockade China effectively. Every single war game that the Pentagon ran against China they lost decisively.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-finalising-po...
It's not clear how US plans to block oil supply going forward here. Also, worth noting that unlike the west, China is taking alternative energy seriously. China is far ahead in terms of using renewable energy
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-widens-ren...
They're also massively investing in nuclear https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
So, China's reliance on fossil fuels is going to keep decreasing going forward, and that will make it that much easier to fill the gap from friendly countries where US can't interfere.
Finally, it's kind of silly to think that this is a one way street. If US ever did decide to try and blockade China, it's obvious that China would retaliate. We're already seeing this with the whole chip war right now where China has stopped export of Germanium and Gallium. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/china-export-curbs-...
Given how dependent US economy is on China, the blowback from any sort of blockade of China would do incredible damage domestically in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/CHN
In other words, Russian pipelines supply very little of China's energy needs, and that's not going to change anytime soon. The only thing that could really change that is global warming enabling Russia to ship fossil fuels from its north coast to China.
Aside from that, do you have an explanation, outside of mergers, that accounts for the drop in capacity, output and cost? Aren't those things that should constantly improve in a properly functioning market? If they aren't, what's the issue, then? What _should_ we do to improve this?
1. Our survival is not at stake
2. No one trusts the economy or current administration to invest in it
3. The complete destruction in national identity, social cohesion, and any call whatsoever to a higher power.
This leads to the natural outcomes of
1. Complacency and coasting
2. High risk for little perceivable gain
3. A society that doesn't believe what we have is even worth protecting