From American Affairs Journal, Winter 2025 / Volume IX, Number 4:
[The economy] is the cornerstone of our military security. Consequently, when we say “strength,” when we are building up the security and the military strength of the United States we are talking also about the strength of the economy.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, 19581
The early Cold Warriors used a phrase to talk about the long competition with the Soviet Union: “security and solvency.” The tagline appeared on the 1952 Republican platform and was interspersed throughout President Eisenhower’s speeches over the course of the decade.2 An elegant, pithy phrase, it is shorthand for a foundational idea of American statecraft: the measure of our ability to deter (and if necessary) win wars is inextricably bound up with American economic dynamism and productive capacity.
This was an idea not discovered in a lecture hall or corporate boardroom, but a hard-won fact of American life. When Eisenhower planted his boots on the Normandy sand as supreme allied commander, he did so with an “overwhelming superiority” in war materiel brought forth by American industry.3 The battlefields of Europe proved beyond any remonstration that the fate of the free world rested upon that same free world’s capacity to create, build, and make anew.
Those days are far behind us. Production in this country is harder than it has ever been. At the peak of World War II, the United States had built ninety-nine shipyards to help its fleet stay at sea.4 Nearly 1 percent of the U.S. population was part of that workforce.5 Today, that number is roughly a dozen yards while the attrition rate for first-year shipbuilders is about 50 percent.6 In just a few years of wartime production, the United States built orders of magnitude more vessels than our principal naval foe, the Imperial Japanese Navy, ever had at their peak. Now, the average U.S. warship is nineteen years old.7 All nine U.S. Navy shipbuilding programs are running far behind schedule.8 And most alarmingly: China is outbuilding the United States in warships at a 3.3-to-1 ratio, while the Office of Naval Intelligence assesses that China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.9 We’ve essentially traded multiple Liberty ships per day for a handful of long-range munitions per year.
Undoubtedly, this is an especially acute vertical of military-industrial decline, but few better demonstrate the relationship between America’s capacity to build things and our ability to drive the strategic outcomes that we want. Over the past thirty years, deliberate policy choices have surrendered Eisenhower’s “solvency” in the industrial context. Now we must deal with the consequences for our security.
So, what does this mean? A prevailing observation from current conflicts is that magazine size rules the battlefield. A state’s capacity to outproduce its foe is—to a degree not seen in decades—determinant to victory or defeat. This has been called a new dimension of “strategic depth”: a classical concept of war in which a country can leverage its characteristics to buy itself time and flexibility in how it organizes its defenses.10
With the rise of techno-industrial warfare and far-reaching hypersonic missiles, it is increasingly argued that strategic depth is not just confined to terrain or the geography of a map.11 It is our ability to achieve self-sustainment in a protracted conflict. And it is increasingly an area where allied strength is at risk. Russia in recent years managed to build 4.5 million artillery rounds, of 152 and 155mm vintage, on an annual basis.12 By contrast, last year saw projections that the United States and Europe produced just 1.3 million, about three times less than Moscow.13 In the domain of drones, American analysts suggest that China has the ability to direct its commercial drone industry to retool for the production of one billion weaponized platforms annually without slowing its economy; one Department of War estimate assesses that the United States today only has the capacity to build 100,000 drones per year.14
It is obvious that by this yardstick, U.S. strategic depth is rapidly shallowing. In fact, it’s as shallow as it has ever been. The inability of the U.S. industrial base to even marginally scale up defense production is well documented; less widely known or appreciated is the basic inability of American economic and government actors to construct entirely new loci of manufacturing. A thicket of defense acquisition bureaucracy, a precarious regulatory environment, insufficient extant infrastructure, and fragile supply chains have the combined effect of almost prohibiting the United States from creating anything altogether new.
Struggles to build new things are only exacerbated by the federal government’s entrenchment in anachronistic weapons-buying practices (and, of course, buying anachronistic weapons themselves). Long-running assumptions about the character of the next war—that it would be short, sharp, and dominated through American technological overmatch—have hindered our Pentagon planners from investing in the kinds of mass-producible-by-design weapons that we need. Industry has responded logically to this by consolidating and underinvesting in its own research and development, leading to critical points of failure.
In the last thirty years, the United States has gone from fifty-one major defense companies to just six.15 We have two major shipbuilding companies, two major torpedo providers, and just three tactical missile companies which dominate the market.16 Less than 1 percent of the annual defense budget in 2024, by contrast, went to defense technology companies.17
Doubling down on buying the same things in the same way that we have been doing for decades increasingly comes with profound supply-chain vulnerabilities. Bending steel and creating high explosive components is no longer a solely “made-in-America” proposition. There’s a Chinese chokehold on these vital parts of our supply chain. Beijing controls 55 percent of the world’s steel, 38 percent of the world’s gallium (an element used in advanced electronics), 88 percent of rare earths, and 59 percent of synthetic graphite supply.18 The extent of economic leverage that China wields today is completely different from anything the United States has ever faced in its previous contests with strategic rivals. Consider that during the Cold War, the CIA could afford to source titanium for our Blackbird jets because the preponderance of other equipment could be easily assembled in a domestic setting.19 The United States is simply not in a position to do such a thing in the current competition with Beijing. Recovering the capacity to build sophisticated systems will demand a total divorce from adversarial supply chains.
Finally, there is the question of time as it relates to our defense preparedness problem. American strategic depth hinges on the ability to buy time. Our adversaries, conversely, are looking to run the clock in their favor. The unfortunate reality is that the dynamics of deterrence increasingly favor the latter.
It is now Beltway consensus that China appears to be preparing for an attack on Taiwan by 2027. The so-called window of maximum danger, the time at which the United States will be retiring large numbers of Reagan-era weapons systems while their modern replacements remain on order, begins in the next few years and lasts through the early 2030s.20 It’s not just successor weapons that are slow, either. The average time to take a given weapons system from development to deployment is now over twelve years, which is about four times as long as it took to do the same in 1950.21
Twelve years is simply a time horizon we do not have the luxury of accepting. Take the words of usindopacom commander Admiral Samuel Paparo for additional caution: “the closer we get to 2027, the less relevant that date becomes . . . we must be ready today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and onward.”22
We are not ready. Far from it. Conventional wargaming of a Sino-American conflict since the early 2020s have largely assessed that the United States would run out of precision munitions in a matter of days or weeks; that fact has not yet meaningfully changed. The arms backlog to Taiwan, which is again coterminous with our inability to even provision our own forces, is now the rough cost equivalent of an aircraft carrier-and-a-half or nearly a half-dozen nuclear attack submarines.23 Some munitions that Taiwan ordered in 2015 did not arrive until nearly a decade later, at the end of 2024. None of these data points fare well when putting them up against the vast scale and sophistication of Xi Jinping’s war machine, which his generals boast is built to “win future wars.”24....
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