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Factory capacity is the deterrent
Stockpiles drained fast
Three years' worth of missile inventory went to Ukraine, and the Ukrainians blew through it in six weeks. The same drain followed with support for Israel and with Iran, and now allies are asking where their weapons are.
The Tomahawk math
The United States buys about 100 Tomahawks a year from Raytheon, and about 850 were shot in a single day in Iran. At that purchasing pace, replacing them alone would take more than eight years, before counting submarines and drones.
What closing the gap takes
Everything comes down to manufacturing capacity, and at the end of the day that is a skilled labor issue. Closing the gap takes capital deployment in the 200 to 300 billion dollar range over the next five years, and workforce training on the same scale.
Why can't missile makers just build faster?
Missiles depend on specialized parts such as rocket motors, guidance electronics, and seekers, and each comes from a small number of qualified suppliers. Adding capacity means qualifying new suppliers and tooling new lines, which takes years rather than months. Peacetime production lines are sized to steady annual orders, so they have little slack for a sudden surge. The Pentagon's 2018 report on the manufacturing and defense industrial base flagged single-source suppliers as a recurring weak point.
Why do long wars favor the bigger producer?
Historian Phillips O'Brien argues in How the War Was Won (2015) that Allied superiority in aircraft and ship production, more than any single battle, decided World War II. In a prolonged conflict, each side's losses are replaced from factories, so the side that replaces faster compounds its advantage. Strategists call this attrition. The United States alone built roughly 300,000 military aircraft during the war.
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