Pentagon rushes to fix challenges in deterring China, including shortage of ships and missiles

The Pentagon under War Secretary Pete Hegseth is focused on deterring China and strengthening America’s position in the Pacific, and it is working to rejuvenate the sclerotic U.S. defense sector, which cannot currently produce the number of munitions and ships that may be needed in a potential conflict with the Chinese.

President Donald Trump has issued numerous executive orders aimed at fixing the flawed defense industrial base (DIB), and Hegseth recently announced a new acquisitions strategy aimed at revitalizing the DIB, but for now the U.S. faces strains on its stockpiles of missiles and is significantly overmatched by China in terms of how many ships each nation can build.

Campaigns take toll on stockpiles, armaments

The U.S. military’s air campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen, the U.S.’s years-long effort to supply a massive number of armaments to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders, and U.S. assistance in the defense of Israel against Iranian missile barrages have all eaten into the U.S. weapon supply.  In addition, Taiwan is facing a possible invasion by the Chinese, with the potential the U.S. would get involved in defending the island nation against a near-peer and nuclear-armed adversary.

It remains unclear whether the DIB would be able to manufacture the number of weapons and ships needed to sustain a long-term engagement against the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese navy.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released on Thursday, said deterring China was key.

"A favorable conventional military balance remains an essential component of strategic competition. There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters. Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the U.S. economy,” the new strategy document declared. “Hence deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”

Achieving this goal will likely require producing far more munitions and ships than the U.S. currently churns out.

Pentagon officials say DoW is working to fix ship and missile shortages

Hung Cao, the Undersecretary of the Navy, told Just the News “yes” this week when asked about there being a shipbuilding crisis in the U.S.

“Shipbuilding is very important to the president of the United States,” Cao said, adding that Navy Secretary John Phelan is “very hyper-focused on shipbuilding.”

“I am focused on making sure that those ships, once we build those ships, that we have the sailors to go on board them,” Cao said, stating that, this year, the Navy surpassed its sailor recruitment goal by almost 7,000 sailors — bringing in 44,096 new sailors — and that continuing this trajectory would mean that captains don’t need to minimally man the ships anymore. 

“We have always been the underdog, but don’t tell us we can’t do something — we are the United States Navy,” Cao said when asked about the U.S. ship quantity deficit with the Chinese.

“Remember, we are a maritime nation. … We need not just U.S. Navy ships, but we also need merchant marine ships,” Cao said. “The ocean is a big place, especially the Pacific, and that’s why we need to revitalize the industrial base and get Americans excited about working and building something.”

Cao added: “Is 355 ships enough? I don’t know. We may need more. But we get the American industrial base revitalized and we can build anything. We are America — we can do anything. We put a man on the Moon. We invented the aircraft. We can do anything.”

Dane Hughes, the assistant secretary of war for legislative affairs, told Just the News that “I think we’ve made a lot of headway as far as our acquisition reform initiatives that are being included” in the National Defense Authorization Act currently being debated in Congress.

“We’re real heavy on the procurement reform that we’re trying to do with initiatives on munitions stockpiles,” Hughes said.

Hughes also said “yeah” when agreeing that U.S. operations are straining with the munitions stockpiles it currently has.

“Now, with modern warfare, a lot of these systems are just being used a lot more than they have in the past. You can look at the Iran-Israel twelve-day war and get a good snapshot of how quickly both sides burned through exquisite munitions as well as the use of UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and counter-UAS systems,” Hughes said. “So I think some of people’s calculations on what is required, the numbers have changed based on lessons-learned from that and recent lessons-learned from Ukraine-Russia over the last few years. Some of it is readjusting what we think the threshold requirement is.”

Hughes said that “we have to be able to expand industrial capacity” and that multi-year procurement for munitions “sends a strong buy signal to the industrial base so manufacturers will invest capital and expand capacity and they’ll put a little more skin in the game knowing that there are long-term orders coming down the ride.”

Increased shipyard capacity needed

He stated that “shipbuilding is a harder problem to solve for than, say, the munitions issue.”

“The number of domestic shipyards that we have, we have got to expand capacity there,” Hughes said. “There is a lot of underinvestment in the existing shipyards. A lot of the technology being used at those shipyards is 1980s technology.”

When asked if he sees a sense of urgency inside the Pentagon when it comes to the threat posed by China and the problem of munitions when it comes to a conflict like that, he replied, “100%. This has been a top priority of the secretary” and all the top Pentagon leaders and military service chiefs.

“China is still our pacing threat so we have not taken our eye off that, so we are looking at it through that lens, and obviously we’ve got a plethora of other risks and challenges to account for,” Hughes said. “This is a near-term problem that we are actively solving.”

He added that “I think the message is the seriousness of the Chinese threat and the growing Chinese capabilities, and being able to contrast that to what capabilities we currently have and the gap our adversary is trying to close.”

Michael Duffey, the undersecretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, told Just the News that “it has been a central focus for me since I was confirmed for the job… especially with respect to the munitions industrial base, where we have focused and had regular conversations with industry to really understand what is in the art of the possible in how much we can grow the industrial base, specifically within the munitions sector.”

“The defense industry, for better or for worse, doesn’t have natural incentives to modernize and optimize their production capacity,” Duffey said. “We are kind of a low volume and limited growth industry, or at least we have been recently. I think you’re going to see tremendous growth.”

“We have the most advanced weapons system in the world, and so these aren’t things that we can turn on a dime to triple in production,” Duffey added.

He said they were “pushing the envelope as hard as we can” and “I think we are making great progress there.”

When asked if the ship shortage problem was tougher than the munitions problem, Duffey replied, “Ship building is a challenge, absolutely.” 

When asked about China’s ship building capacity, Duffey said, “Certainly they I think have an advantage in volume, but we still have superiority in terms of the capability of our weapons systems. So if we can catch up in volume — which has been our focus in terms of rebuilding the military and really revitalizing the defense industrial base — I feel confident we’re going to maintain a significant military advantage. But they have found ways to produce at scale, and I think it’s important both economically and militarily to make sure we are keeping pace with that.”

Duffey said that the urgency of the China threat “motivates how much we are thinking about what military we need to rebuild to.”

Duffy: "Deliver more to the warfighter earlier"

“We are focused on munitions, we are focused on F-35s, we are focused on ship building, and we are focused on a daily basis on how we can continue to move that schedule to the left so that we can deliver more to the warfighter earlier,” Duffey said.

Duffey argued that Trump has “really done a tremendous job” of convincing allies “to increase their own spending and to buy American weapons.”

“When we talk about how we want to expand the defense industrial base, we are focused first of all on ensuring that the U.S. is ready and prepared to go to war and to deter our adversaries,” Duffey said. “But then once we’ve settled that we believe it is important to arm our allies and partners so they can provide for their own self defense — and there is no better weapon system than those that an American company produces.”

Trump takes action on missiles and ships

Trump declared in an executive order in April that “it is the policy of the United States Government to accelerate defense procurement and revitalize the defense industrial base to restore peace through strength.” 

In that order, the president said that the U.S. “will rapidly reform our antiquated defense acquisition processes with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, and execution” and “will also modernize the duties and composition of the defense acquisition workforce, as well as incentivize and reward risk-taking and innovation from these personnel.”

Trump also issued an executive order that month arguing that “the commercial shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce of the United States has been weakened by decades of Government neglect, leading to the decline of a once-strong industrial base while simultaneously empowering our adversaries and eroding United States national security.”

The president stressed that “it is the policy of the United States to revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.”

Hegseth personally involved in efforts to revive defense industrial base

Just the News previously reported about a late June closed-door meeting that Hegseth held with some of the leaders of America’s largest military contractors, urging them to ramp up the production of critically needed munitions amidst depleted weapons stocks and a growing threat from China.

The main reason for Hegseth’s meeting with defense company leaders — which included well-known firms such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems — was to seek to hold munitions manufacturers accountable so that U.S. warfighters are equipped to face 21st century threats.

Hegseth told the defense company leaders that the U.S. faces unprecedented global threats and does not have years to wait for the munitions needed to deter or even fight U.S. adversaries.

“As President Trump has stated, our policy is peace through strength. That will require rescuing our stagnant defense industrial base,” Hegseth told the House Appropriations Committee in June. 

“Only by having the most powerful and lethal military in the world — and focusing it where it is needed most to protect and advance America’s interests — can we deter our nation’s adversaries and, if necessary, prevail in any potential conflict,” he told the lawmakers.

Hegseth also told Congress that “while the DIB remains technologically advanced and essential to our warfighting capabilities, decades of under-investment have left it strained, overly consolidated, and at risk of not keeping pace with modern and near-peer threats, especially in a protracted conflict.” 

He added that “as foreign competition has hollowed out American manufacturing, we have lost capacity and resilience in our defense supply chain as well” while “Communist China has enjoyed explosive growth in manufacturing capacity” at the same time.

The defense secretary testified that “reviving the defense industrial base is a key component of rebuilding the military.”

Hegseth in November announced a new “Acquisition Transformation Strategy” on “Rebuilding the Arsenal of Freedom.” The DoW said it is “rapidly transforming our antiquated acquisition processes and revitalizing the atrophied Defense Industrial Base by prioritizing speed, flexibility, and rigorous execution.” Hegseth also released three new memos at the time on developing weapons acquisitions and defense production.

"Today, I'd like to talk to you about an adversary that poses a threat — a very serious threat — to the United States of America ... It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy,” Hegseth said at a speech at the National War College last month. "Our objective is simple: transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing, to rapidly accelerate the fielding of capabilities and focus on results. Our objective is to build — rebuild — the arsenal of freedom."

Hegseth said that “this is a 1939 moment — or hopefully a 1981 moment.”

“Our adversaries are not sitting idly by. They are moving fast, they are developing and delivering new capabilities at a rate that should be sobering to every American — especially those working in the Pentagon and the defense industrial base,” the war secretary warned. “We mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk. By taking greater calculated risk in how we build, buy, and maintain our systems, we will gain speed to more quickly provide capabilities to the battlefield. … Speed and a focus on outcomes are fundamental to successful deterrence.”

Military officials warn about munitions shortages

Army General Christopher Cavoli, the Commander of U.S. European Command, told the Senate in April that “Russia is not just reconstituting service members but is also replacing combat vehicles and munitions at an unprecedented pace.” 

He said the Russian forces in Ukraine had lost 3,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and over 400 air defense systems in just the last year, yet Russia “is on pace to replace them all.” 

Cavoli said Russia had expanded its military industrial production and warned that “the Russian defense industrial base is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles, and 200 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles this year.” Comparatively, the general said that the U.S. “only produces about 135 tanks per year and no longer produces new Bradley Fighting Vehicles.”

Russia reportedly has more than 1,950 strategic missiles of various types on hand, including ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic Kinzhals, according to Ukraine's Defense Intelligence.

Cavoli added that “we anticipate Russia to produce 250,000 artillery shells per month, which puts it on track to build a stockpile three times greater than the United States and Europe combined.” 

Phelan, the navy secretary, said during a Senate hearing in June that "fully funding our munitions industrial base is essential, both for the near-term and the future.”

"We are looking at a number of different avenues, including other parties and different ways of making some of these munitions,” Phelan said. “This is a huge priority from both the secretary of defense and the president, and we are putting as much effort and time into this as we are in shipbuilding. So it is critical.”

Kilby also told the Senate committee in June that “Presidential Drawdowns and unplanned combat expenditures over the past two years have strained Navy’s inventories” and so “we must increase our investments to replenish them.” The acting naval operations chief said that the Navy “remains committed to working with industry to identify manufacturing challenges and investment opportunities to streamline testing and onboard non-traditional contractors” and that the Navy is also “investing in its organic industrial base to ensure we can accelerate munitions production in the immediate future.”

Leaders of the U.S. Army argued to the House Armed Services Committee in June that they have been able to increase munitions production to address the growing challenges, as a top Pentagon official said the U.S. faces real shortfalls of multiple important weapons systems.

“The recent simultaneous conflicts around the world have highlighted the importance of the defense industrial base, especially when it comes to munitions. The Army, in close partnership with Congress, has been able to ramp up our current capacity not only to support the Army’s needs, but that of our foreign partners,” Major General John Reim, the commanding general of the Picatinny Arsenal, Chris Grassano, the director of U.S. Army combat capabilities development command armaments center, and Brigadier General Daniel Duncan, the commander of joint munitions command, said in a joint statement to the House committee.

Steven Morani, the acting assistant secretary of defense for sustainment, warned the House committee that the Pentagon “faces shortfalls of several critical munitions. Years of inconsistent procurements and idle production lines have negatively impacted the U.S. munitions industrial base. The Department is at a juncture where increased demand, modernization efforts, and foreign military sales are placing a strain on the defense industrial base.”

"DoD must increase critical munitions stockpiles to address capability gaps that have the potential to undermine U.S. national security,” Morani said. “Current munitions inventories are depleted, and current production capacity is not sized to keep pace with increased demand. A robust and readily available inventory of munitions is fundamental to reestablishing deterrence and to ensuring our warfighters have the endurance to fight a protracted conflict. To address this challenge, the Department is aggressively working to increase U.S. munitions stocks as quickly as possible.”

Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), has been warning for months about the shortage of munitions in his theater amidst an unprecedented Chinese military buildup.

“Up to this year, where most of the employment of weapons were really artillery pieces and short-ranged weapons, I had said not at all,” Paparo told the Brookings Institution last November when asked if defense preparedness in the IndoPacom region had been impacted by the fighting between Russia and Ukraine and between Iran and Israel. 

“But now, with some of the Patriots that have been employed, some of the air-to-air missiles that have been employed, it’s now eating into stocks, you know, and to say otherwise would be dishonest.”

The Navy commander said U.S. munitions stockpiles are “fungible” across all the possible military theaters and that “none are reserved for any particular theater, but any can move with alacrity to any theater.” Paparo said of the movement of munitions out of the Pacific that “inherently, it imposes costs on the readiness of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing theater for the quantity and quality of munitions, because the PRC is the most capable potential adversary in the world.”

Paparo also spoke at the Honolulu Defense Forum in February where he again warned about the missile shortage.

“Our magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month for every critical joint force element — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, Coast Guard. … We operate on increasingly thin margins for error,” the IndoPacom leader warned. “Our opponents see these gaps and they are moving aggressively to exploit them. … Our precision-guided munitions stockpiles sit well below our required levels.”

The IndoPacom leader told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April that “the Indo-Pacific remains the Department of Defense's priority theater” and that “China continues to pursue unprecedented military modernization and increasingly aggressive behavior that threatens the U.S. homeland, our allies, and our partners.” He warned that “Beijing's aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan are not just exercises — they are dress rehearsals for forced unification.”

Paparo said that the Pacific Deterrence Initiative was “designed to counter the China threat by investing in key readiness and capability development initiatives” — which examples including “hardened infrastructure, prepositioning of munitions and equipment, enhanced rotational presence, and improved allied interoperability.”

The commander of IndoPacom spoke at the Land Forces Pacific Symposium in Hawaii in May where he said “Yes, the region is named after oceans, but human beings live on the land […] You think about all the assets and the infrastructure on this island that have to be defended, and then you think about everything as you move farther to the west that has to be defended, and there is a significant place for the Army in a conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” Paparo said.

U.S. military operations eat into limited munitions stockpiles

The U.S. involvement in fighting the Houthis, supplying the Ukrainians, and helping to defend Israel has depleted U.S. munitions stocks.

The DoW in late April released some details in a press release referring to the "Operation Rough Rider" campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, revealing U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had “struck over 800 targets” and had “killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and leaders, including senior Houthi missile and UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] officials.” 

The hundreds of strikes also “destroyed multiple command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, advanced weapons manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations.” The operation, which involved the deployment of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group and the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group, inflicted heavy damage on the Houthis, but also used up hundreds of critical U.S. precision munitions.

The State Department in mid-March released its own figures detailing the scale of the weaponry which the U.S. had provided Ukraine up to that point since the Russian invasion in early 2022. The department said that the U.S. had “provided $66.9 billion in military assistance since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine” and that the emergency presidential drawdown authority had been used “on 55 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine with military assistance totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD stockpiles.”

The Wall Street Journal also reported in June amidst the then-ongoing fighting between Israel and Iran that the U.S. was “racing to reinforce Israel’s defenses, sending more warships capable of shooting down ballistic missiles to the region as Iranian attacks drain Israel’s stocks of interceptors.” The outlet added that “the U.S. is facing its own concerns about supplies of interceptors” because “supplies diverted to the conflict in the Middle East are coming at the expense of those available in the event of a bigger conflict with China.”

It was estimated by Military Watch Magazine in June that the U.S. Army had “consumed 15-20% of all munitions for its globally deployed arsenal” of THAAD long-range anti-missile systems during the week-and-a-half-long high-intensity defense of Israel's civilian population against Iranian ballistic missile attacks in June. The outlet estimated that the “total expenditure of interceptors amounted to approximately 60-80 interceptors during the eleven-day conflict.”

Navy leaders themselves sounded the alarm in June about the depletion of U.S. munitions, with Admiral James W. Kilby, the then-acting chief of naval operations, telling the Senate that U.S. missile defense systems were highly effective in defending against Iranian ballistic missile barrages aimed at Israel — but that U.S. weapons stores were also being burned up quickly.

Kilby told the Senate Appropriations Committee in June that the U.S. was using missile defense projectiles “at an alarming rate.” He added: “Those are missiles procured by the Missile Defense Agency and then delivered to the Navy for our use. And we are using them quite effectively in the defense of Israel."

Phelan stressed to the Senate in June that “continued engagements in the Red Sea have sharpened my focus on our stockpile of munitions” and that “since October 2023, Navy ships have engaged in combat operations against Houthi rebels, expending many air defense munitions that we are working with industry to replenish.”

“I will work to ensure that our Navy can grow its munition stockpile in a timely, fiscally balanced way that does not degrade our security,” the navy secretary said. “We cannot afford to run out of ammunition during a fight.”

The weapons the U.S. has promised to provide to Taiwan have also been slow in their delivery, leading to the Pacific island nation waiting on a backlog of billions of dollars worth of weaponry.

The libertarian CATO Institute reported in January that “the backlog of U.S. weapons that have been sold but not delivered to Taiwan saw several changes in December 2024, the net result being a $77 million reduction in the backlog, which now stands at $21.87 billion.” The think tank said that “the third-largest arms sale in the backlog, a July 2019 sale of 108 Abrams tanks valued at $2 billion, began delivery in December.”

A report by George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government said in October that “the topline dollar value of the backlog remains $21.54 billion.”

China holds a large shipbuilding advantage over the U.S.

China has also used its formidable military and commercial shipbuilding capacity to assemble the world’s largest naval force of more than 400 warships and support vessels, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization "dedicated to advancing practical ideas to address the world’s greatest challenges."

The smaller U.S. fleet weighs in at around 296 warships and support vessels, despite the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan calling for a fleet of 381 battle force ships. U.S. ships represent less than 1% of the world's commercial ships afloat today, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis last December.

The PRC is capable of building warships at a rate more than 200 times greater than the U.S., according to an assessment from U.S. naval intelligence leaked to industry newsletter The War Zone. The unclassified graphic that was leaked shows China’s shipyards have a capacity of approximately 23.25 million compared to the U.S. capacity of roughly just 100,000 tons.

The Government Accountability Office released a nearly 100-page report in late February which detailed massive challenges facing the DoW and the severe problems plaguing the Navy’s shipbuilding. The GAO reports says those problems include billions of dollars in cost overruns, repeated failures to meet naval shipbuilding expansion targets, a potentially costly lack of coordination between the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a lack of evidence that the money increasingly being shoveled into shipbuilding is having the impact that it should.

The GAO said that private industry delivered seven new battle force ships in 2023, but that it would have to nearly double that to an average of roughly 13 ships per year for thirty years to meet the fleet size goal under the current shipbuilding plan.

The report noted that “the industrial base has yet to demonstrate an ability to increase production in this manner” and that “none of the shipbuilders are currently positioned to meet the Navy’s delivery goals.” 

In a bipartisan effort, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mi., the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and ranking member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Il., assessed in late February that “due to its aggressive non-market policies, the People’s Republic of China controls over 50 percent of the world’s shipbuilding, while the U.S. accounts for just 0.2 percent” and that “for every large ocean-going vessel built in America each year, the PRC builds 359.”

“The U.S. shipbuilding industry is challenged to produce the quantity of ships at the rate required to effect lasting, sustainable growth in the battle force inventory. On balance, cost and schedule performance remain challenged; deliveries are approximately one to three years late, and costs continue to rise faster than overall inflation. The U.S. share of global shipbuilding — commercial and military — and the number of naval vessels delivered per year are not meeting the desired targets,” the joint statement from Brett Seidle, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, Vice Admiral James Pitts, the deputy chief of naval operations, and Lt. Gen. Eric Austin, the commanding general of the Marine Corps combat development command, said.

It remains to be seen whether the Hegseth Pentagon’s efforts to spur the production of more missiles and the building of more ships will work — but the potential stakes in the Pacific are high.