Dazzling U.S. precision weapons in the Gulf War 32 years ago encouraged a theory that was dangerous because it was soothing: The era of industrialized wars – those in which the mass manufacturing capacities of the combatant nations would be decisive – had ended. This theory has been slain by a fact: Russia’s war to erase Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression has revealed something astonishing to him – the myriad defects of his conventional armed forces. It has, however, awakened the United States to something alarming: Europe’s largest conflict since World War II has shown that the U.S. defense industrial base, which manufactured the materiel that produced victory in 1945, is inadequate for the world almost eight decades later.

The U.S. defense workforce is one-third what it was in 1985, during the Reagan era buildup, when defense spending was 5.7% of gross domestic product.
It is 3.1% today. The National Defense Industrial Association says that in the past five years the “defense ecosystem” has lost a net 17,045 companies.

This is partly because many small businesses recoil from the unpredictable cash flows from a government that cannot budget: The government has operated under continuing resolutions in parts of 13 of the past 14 years.

Politico’s Michael Hirsh reports that many components of munitions, planes and ships (including shell casings, fuses, parts of rocket motors and precursor elements of propellants and explosives) are made overseas, including in China.

China has up to 50% of global shipbuilding; the United States has less than 1%. A surge capacity for defense production does not exist. Hirsh quotes Christian Brose, a former senior policy adviser to Sen. John McCain: “We could throw a trillion dollars a year at the defense budget now, and we’re not going to get a meaningful increase in traditional military capabilities in the next five years.” The fiscal 2024 defense budget is $842 billion.

As a senior U.S. military officer at NATO says, “Every war, after five or six days, becomes about logistics.” The Wall Street Journal reports that in a war with either Russia or China, “stocks of precision weaponry could be used up in hours or days.” The calculating men in Beijing know the impediments to what Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chair of the House Select Committee on China, considers most urgent: the manufacture and deployment of huge numbers of missiles and other high-tech munitions to East Asia.

U.S. aid to Ukraine, the cost of which has amounted to a negligible sliver (0.33%) of GDP, has included 2 million 155mm artillery rounds, of which Ukraine uses 6,000 to 8,000 a day. Joe Biden says, “The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.” Gosh, he should notify the president.

Herewith a modest proposal concerning war materials: Make more of them. Time was, a nimble and determined America did such things quickly.

In 1939, the U.S. Army was the world’s 39th largest, with horses pulling the artillery.

In 1940, the U.S. manufactured fewer than 13,000 aircraft; by 1944, it built more than 96,000 in a year. In 1941, the auto industry produced 3 million vehicles; until the war’s end, only 139 more were made.

At Ford’s Willow Run auto plant, where the average car produced had 15,000 parts, a B-24 bomber with more than 1.5 million parts came off the assembly line every 63 minutes. By August 1945, having produced 6 million tons of bombs, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition for 20 million rifles and small arms, 100,000 tanks and armored vehicles, 1,500 vessels for the Navy and 5,600 merchant ships, U.S. GDP had doubled and more than half the world’s industrial production happened here.

Today, the U.S. population is almost triple that of 1941, and real GDP 13 times larger than in 1941. We can afford to keep Ukraine supplied with ammunition.

Some Americans would choose not to. Donald Trump says that as president he would end the war in “24 hours.” Perhaps – let’s be fanciful – he has been reading George Orwell, who said: “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

Other than another Trump presidency, the worst outcome would be a protracted loss by Ukraine that could be explained by Douglas MacArthur’s dictum: All military disasters can be explained with two words – “Too late.” Too late to discern danger, too late to respond.

Retired Air Force Gen. David Deptula calls the years since 9/11 “the era of the Great Distraction,” when we lost focus on the Chinese and Russian threats. Time will tell – soon – whether we have refocused too late.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.