PBS News Hour - Full Show - America's depleted arsenal and military readiness concerns

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

America's military uses the world's most advanced and sought-after weapons. But months of war with Iran have diminished the stockpile, limiting options and the ability to defend allies. Could America's adversaries exploit this moment? Compass Points moderator Nick Schifrin discusses what the military's new limitations mean for readiness with Bill LaPlante, Randy Schriver and Celeste Wallander. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

The U.S. is depleted arsenal. America's military uses the world's most advanced and sought after weapons, but months of war with Iran have diminished the stockpile, limiting the U.S. options and ability to defend global allies. Tonight, could America's adversaries exploit this moment and what the military's new limitations mean for readiness? Coming up on compasses. Hello and welcome to compass points.

The war in Iran has drained the U.S. arsenal of weapons highlighting a problem decades in the making. simply does not have enough weapons. Today, the most notable shortage is air defense. Before the war, the U.S. had about 2,330 Patriot Interceptors, and today it has 800 of the missiles the U.S. needs to defend its own troops and allies from ballistic missiles. That's according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies,

which tracks U.S. inventories. And CSIS estimates the U.S. has used the vast majority of its long-range attack weapons fired from the ground before the war. It had as many as 900 missiles. Now, since the war was on ceasefire, it has as few as 220 left. A U.S. official tells me these numbers are largely accurate. This does not mean the U.S. can't escalate war in Iran today, but it does mean the U.S. could be challenged to defend all its allies and be prepared to fight a future war, perhaps against China. So to talk about all this, I'm joined by Bill Aplan, who was the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition of the U.S.

sustainment during the Biden administration. Randy Shriver was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security during the First Trump administration. He's the chairman of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security today. And Celeste Wallander was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Biden administration and is now the executive director of Penn Washington. Thanks very much.

Really appreciate you all being here. Bill LaPlante, let me start with you and this kind of obvious big question. The Pentagon's budget this year is more than $800 billion. The Trump administration is asking for $1.5 trillion in part in order to get at this munitions shortfall. But if we are spending so much money on the Pentagon, why is there even a weapon shortage? Well, I guess the way to think about this whole situation goes back to really the end of the Cold War. It was a conscious decision by the government, by both parties, to downsize, to do the peace dividend, And many remember, and there was a famous meeting called The Last Supper, where the man your

companies are brought together and saying, there's going to be much less of you, merge. And basically, the defense infrastructure was downsized significantly. As part of all that time, manufacturing and production was dialed down to the minimum. And so that's more or less been the situation. I think Ukraine in 22, 23, kind of as a laboratory, exposed to this. That volume was really, really important. And we started moving in a different direction, and the current team is continuing that. But it's going to take a while to get completely where we need to be.

And part of the other problem is, as one analyst puts it to me, we have been making Faberger eggs and not Ford trucks, with all due respect to Ford. Explain that. Well, they're the best weapons in the world. And certainly, if you take Patriot, which I know you're going to talk about, it is the best. In air defense. It is the best in the world. it can take in the best.

But they're very exquisite, very good sensors, rocket motors. And the other piece to think about it, air defenses particularly, it's only been in the last, say, decade, that the volume has become really a clear issue in air defense because some of these systems were designed when it was more rogue nations that were being protected. And that's part of the point, right? We do have a lot of weapons in general,

but air defense in particular is a challenge. It's a challenge. But I remind people, Patriot is only one of many different air defense systems that operate. there's a layer defense. So let's talk about how this all affects U.S. policy. And I want to begin by showing a map, and this goes to U.S. obligations around the world. The U.S. is obligated to defend countries around the world, what we call our treaty allies.

You see there in Asia, it's about half a dozen countries. Then there is all of NATO, the 30 countries of Europe as well as Canada. And then there's also nearly 18 countries across Latin America. That's a lot of obligations. So let's talk about policy options, given a munition shortage. So let's why don't you start. Are we restricted in what we, the United States, can do around the world? Well, the way this works in the U.S. military is that combatant commanders for each of those regions

have their approved war plans. They work these war plans from their perspective with the joint staff, and they identify the requirements to fulfill those war plans. And so across the globe, those stocks, those requirements are reserved for the combatant commanders. So the bigger question that is sparked by this current concern about restricted numbers is, does that mean that those combatant commanders do not have enough weapons, interceptors, air defense, ammunition, the whole host of capabilities to meet those war plans? And so that's the key question that Americans need to understand.

So, Randy, is that the key question when it comes to Asia? Do you think? And what's the answer if you're the Indo-Pacific combatant commander today? Well, I think we're postured to respond to aggression. We could initiate aggression. The question is, if it's an extended conflict, how well are we positioned and postured? And I would say not very well. That's where you run into these concerns about...

So why not? Why aren't we well positioned? Well, beyond the operational plans that were mentioned, the confidence in, is there more to come if this is extended beyond the period that I've planned for, that's a real concern. And I think the depletion rates, but really the replenishment rates, contribute to this concern. And I think our adversaries understand that. We look at the Chinese language, open source materials, and they're writing about our challenges related to munitions. So this is all factoring into how they might think about their own actions.

Let me ask for Xi Jinping specifically in a second, but I want you to explain a little bit more about that. So I was talking to a former commander in the Pacific, and this is how the commander puts it. that basically to me that, look, I believe that I have enough weapons for those war plans, those first X days. But I'm worried about the day after, right? And that's when I would go to the Pentagon and say, are you going to have stuff on the shelf? But also that map that I showed, this commander said, I'm worried about having to defend. In this case, countries like Japan and South Korea and Thailand and Australia that I'm contractually

obligated to defend. So that's what you're talking about, right? Yes. And, you know, those treaties, in many cases, there's optionality. We're not, in some instances, the same as Article 5 of NATO. So that's where it creates uncertainty on the part of our allies. If they're facing aggression, it kicks in a consultative mechanism, and we say, sorry, we don't have what we need to do this for more than two weeks.

That's a real credibility issue and could force some uncomfortable tradeoffs for our allies. So you mentioned you've been reading Chinese open source. What do we know about how closely Xi Jinping and the Chinese government follows what we're talking about or not? Very closely, and we know that they have ambitions. We know that they have some history of opportunistic aggression. And, you know, it's also part of a broader landscape. We haven't talked about redeploying a carrier outside the region. So the back story there.

So the United States has just redeployed the George Washington to the Middle East to backfill another carrier that's leaving to great fanfare or not. And this is a time when the Pacific has no carriers right now. It's not unprecedented, but it's rare. Well, you know, an occasional flooding of your basement is still bad. So if this happens every once in a while, it's still not a good thing. And I think it creates the impression of a say-do gap. I mean, we're saying the Pacific is the priority theater.

We're saying China's the pacing element. We're saying we have a first island change denial strategy, but it looks like we're diverting all our resources, not only our attention, but our true capabilities to respond to aggression. So it is going to create some uncertainty for our allies. Celeste, how closely does Vladimir Putin and the Russian government follow all this? Well, the United States is considered by the Kremlin to be their number one adversary and determined to bring down the Russian leadership and the Russian Federation. So you can imagine they follow it pretty closely and track it pretty closely.

And the public discussion about this is not the source of their information, but it's certainly is heightening the sense of urgency in the United States and therefore the attention that the Kremlin pays to that. Meaning Russia knows that we're short on patriots, that's bottom line, right? Well, you know, part of the joy and the challenge of working on Europe is you're working with 30 democracies and Ukraine, which is also a democracy and talks a lot in public about war plans and how the war is going.

And so the Kremlin doesn't really need very sensitive intelligence resources to understand, for example, that Ukraine is running out of patriots. And we've seen just in the last week very deliberate mass missile attacks by the Russians on Kyiv to both test the numbers that Ukraine will use of their patriots and interceptors, but also to get Ukraine to find that its stores are depleted. And it's allowing the Kremlin to persist and continue in their objectives, their war objectives, Ukraine. And is it not only about Ukraine, though, is there a point that Putin that the Kremlin is making

that, hey, we can launch ballistic missiles and you can't stop them while we're all talking about whether the world, the United States, has enough patriots? It is definitely the case that the, while at the same time that the Russians are fighting the war against Ukraine, they're assessing what their lessons learned in Ukraine, how that translates for thinking about a future conflict with NATO. And so they will be looking at the issues of the production capacity of the American defense industrial base. Questions about whether the United States can resource combatant commanders in Europe, in the Middle

East and in Indo-PACOM all at the same time. I don't think that there is an urgent risk that there will be some bolt from a blue attack on NATO countries. The Kremlin is busy, unfortunately, fighting the war in Ukraine. And the Kremlin needs to, needs several years to reconciling. its capabilities to be willing to even consider that temptation. But the Kremlin has a long time frame in thinking about pushing back against American power and influence, and so that would feed into that timeframe.

And so knowing our challenges when it comes to production manufacturing will feed into the long-term thinking of Russia. Well, and you're also seeing the Russian learning lessons of the need for expanding production, defense production and lessons. The Russians are relying or had been relying on Iran for production of UAVs. They are relying now on North Korea for support on missile defense availability and possibly production. And since the Ukraine war has begun, they've been relying on China for getting around sanctions

and export limitations to be able to fuel their defense industrial base. So even as we talk about learning lessons from the conflict in Ukraine and from resourcing Ukraine watching what's happening in the Middle East, the Russians. You know, remind everybody, the Russian military is a learning organization as well. And Randy, it's not like we can separate these theaters anymore like we used to, right? Absolutely not. And, you know, we're not really talking about the implications of a growing axis of authoritarian countries, but certainly it goes beyond lessons learned.

The North Koreans are getting battlefield experience. The Chinese are watching this laboratory unfold as they harvest their own lessons learned for potential contingencies against Taiwan or the South China Sea. So all of this plays into the sort of same calculus that Xi Jinping makes every day he gets up in the morning as today the day is this the time we act out on our ambitions. And is the U.S. ability to deter Beijing today affected by even this conversation about whether the U.S. has enough weapons? Well, I take the Chinese at their word. And I think what they're writing and what they're saying publicly is that the U.S. is in a diminished position because of these ongoing conflicts. So let's go back to Ukraine for a second because I want to play the president's criticism recently about why, in his opinion, we are at where we are, why he says the U.S. doesn't have enough weapons.

Biden gave numbers away that were just crazy. You know, when I left, pre-Biden, I left the cupboards were totally full. He emptied the cupboards, largely. Biden gave so much of it away to Ukraine, but we're rebuilding it fast. We have plenty. Bill, what's your response to that? Yeah, the way I would think about this is that every conflict is quite different and predicting ahead of time what's going to be the favored weapon is very hard to do.

But if you think about Ukraine and it changed in the phases when we were there, it was largely and is largely a ground conflict. It's an army conflict. It's not necessarily much in space, not much in air, other than that it's largely a ground conflict. the UAS is the drones. And so the type of systems that were really, we were providing to the Ukrainians were anti-arm or anti-tank systems,

man pads for taking down helicopters, and obviously things like the Gimlers and the High Mars. The long range. Yeah, the place that's overlapping sort of everywhere around the world, whether it's the Middle East or whatever, are increasingly air defenses. Because as missiles proliferate and drones proliferate

around the world, you're finding, it's hard to find a scenario where air defenses aren't important. And so do you think that ultimately the criticism about patriots specifically? I mean, you know, you guys, both of you were on this team that sent patriots to Ukraine. I mean, the world needs more patriots, right? Yes, the way I think about it is rather than talk about what the number is today or what it might be today, besides it being classified and not going to talk about that,

a different way to think about it is more of the replenishment rate. That's what really matters. And so if you're talking about the replenishment rate, you quickly get too many. manufacturing rate. And what was just recently announced over the last six months, we started it with getting up to, I think, 600 in a multi-year per year. But the current administration, to their credit, have announced a framework contract to get to 2000. And it's a long-term contract, so the demand signals there. That's a recognition that this is with us, going to be with us for some time. So you've made the segue for me. So here's what the Trump administration is trying to do,

ramping up production, assigning seven-year agreements, right? That's that long-term that you just said, with the defense industrial base trying to ramp up production. You had a tripling of patriot production. That's the number you just said. From about 600 a year to more than 2,000 a year quadrupling the production rate of another air defense system. This week, you had a $22 billion contract signed to produce more Tomahawk missiles. Sounds like what you're saying, those are the right steps. They're absolutely right. And you were on them as well. Well, yeah, but Tomahawks is an interesting example.

I know that very closely throughout my career. The production line for Tomahawk since 2003 has been on fumes. It almost shut down every year. And it's both parties. And so it's been- When you say both parties, I think it's important. You're talking about the United States government and the private company or companies that make it.

Yeah, it's largely made by Raytheon in the Tucson area. And the Block 4, which is the main one that they used, it just sort of had. It's been almost every year has been this close to shutting down. And so by doing this, if we can implement this, if Congress passes the money, we can permanently fix that problem. Because what industry has always said is we need more guarantee, right? Factories are expensive, training expensive. We want five years, seven years long as you can give. And that's been the challenge.

Congress hasn't approved it. Well, it's been a totally different change of thought, as I said at the beginning from when the Cold War ended. munitions were bought one year at a time. They were traditionally treated as the bill payer. And so what industry was saying, right at the beginning of Ukraine, saying we need a demand signal, what they meant was, how can you assure us that you're not going to do what's been happening for the last 20 years,

which is in a crisis, ramp up the production, and then next year cut the money. So what they're doing... What was the answer? When they asked that? The answer was, when I met with them, well, we're going to try to start doing multi-year contracts. And now, so yours were five, and Trump administration are trying to do seven.

And they're continuing that, and it's the right thing to do. And the other part of what the Trump administration is doing now, what you were trying to do, is building cheaper munitions. Right? So you have the Lucas system, especially on drones. This is a system the U.S. admits is a rip-off of the Iranian Shahed, literally a rip-off. I mean, we took the design. There's lower-cost cruise missiles.

and the U.S. is now going to newer, smaller weapons manufacturers to do this. How important is that effort? That whole effort of lower cost, let's say long-range fires or strike munitions and defense and effectors is really, really important. And that works as been starting. It needs to accelerate. The challenge is going to be, as these companies start producing these, will we able to get the price point where we want them?

We want the price point to be certainly below $30,000 or $50,000, if we can. And that's where this needs to go. The more exquisite you make the weapon, the more you make it anti-jam, the more you make it do stealth and other things, the more expensive it gets. And I guess back to Celeste, you and Ukraine, that's perhaps one of the key lessons from Ukraine, is that they have taken, we have used very expensive systems in the past. They have created cheaper systems, and that's much more sustainable and something that the U.S. and its allies need to learn. It is much more sustainable, and it's much more attuned to the kind of battle they're fighting in Ukraine.

That said, there's a caveat, which is that more exquisite high-end capability is necessary for that persistent, precision, long-range strike capability, which the Ukrainians do not have. drones are fabulous. The Ukrainians have developed them at scale and at a good cost, but they can only carry so much of a payload, and while they've been able to harass, and in many instances take out of service, a Russian logistics site, that sort of thing, they haven't had the kind of effect on Russian strike capabilities that the kind of higher-end exquisite capabilities can. So you need both. You need to expand. for the kind of mass and volume and innovation cycle. But you also have to keep in mind that a war between Ukraine and Russia doesn't look the same

as a war between Russia and NATO would look, and I'm guessing, between China and the United States. Randy, jump in, it does not at all look like the war between the U.S. and its allies in China, right? I think that's right. But another thing to remember is the Chinese have a pretty significant head start when it comes to the production of ballistic and cruise missiles. Because they lacked strategic amphibious lift, because they lacked lift in terms of air power,

they started to develop ballistic and cruise missiles at alarming rates as far back as the bin 90s. So they have tens of thousands. If you're thinking of a Taiwan contingency or something in the southwest island chain of Japan, they are really well positioned to continue to strike over and over and over again and exhaust whatever resources we have. So given these new problems related to... to the depletion of munitions,

the Chinese are feeling pretty confident, and they write about that, and they talk about even the plans that are coming online like Hellscape. They said, we can- Housecape is the word that Admiral Paparo, the current Pacific commander used to describe his war plans, basically.

Yes, and it's highly aspirational. We don't have all those systems yet in those capabilities, but even as they forecast ahead, they look at where they're postured and the munitions that they have, and they say, we can wait this out and we can exhaust the US. And so if Beijing is confident,

You know, Bill and I were talking about some of the Trump administration solutions, the efforts that we're making both to ramp up total production of the expensive systems, make cheaper systems. Is that the answer when it comes to the Pacific and the U.S. to try and deter China? It is, but, you know, there's the humorist Will Rogers saying, even if you're on the right track, you can still get run over if you're not going fast enough. We need to move out with urgency and a sense of purpose and really ramp this up. I think there's another theme that's been going through this conversation, which is production. production itself manufacturing is a deterrent. It's more of a deterrent. You can make announcements, you can do press things, state policies, but you really know

what people are looking at is a number of factors. Meaning literally the image of people making weapons. The fact of people making the weapons and the numbers. I'll give an example of hypersonics. Hypersonics is a fascinating technology and it's important technology in multiple countries, including the United States. If you do a hypersonics test, me and my friends that come from that community are looking at it and saying that's really interesting.

We see you manufacturing hypersonics at some high degree of number, then you get the attention. And Celeste, jump in on that. Is that what Putin is deterred by, this notion that we're making stuff, or is it different in Europe? You know, it is baked into Russian military doctrine that the biggest problem they have isn't day one of the war. You know, you can invade. you can take some territory.

It's day 60 of the war, because the United States has shown itself capable of conducting operations on a global scale for months and even years. And it's that staying power of the American industrial base of the Pentagon. The organization, you know, it's kind of boring, but the power of the United States...

It's not boring, is it? The power of the United States lies a lot in that incredibly capable, massive. organization with all of these pieces that knows how to ramp up and put together the puzzle of how to sustain those kinds of global operations. And Americans think of Afghanistan and Iraq as regrettable forever wars. The Kremlin is afraid of a forever war against the United States because they lose. And so that itself is the kind of deterrent that Bill is talking about.

So Randy, last word just in the last 30 seconds, is that how Xi Jinping sees it? Is that what we have to do in Asia as well? They're very aware of some of the shortcomings we have. And they look at us always playing in a way game. I mean, we're a Pacific power, but not fully resident in the Western Pacific. And so they're very conscious of their advantages. And so in terms of what we need to be doing, do you see the challenges of deterring China in the same context of what Celeste was saying about deterring Russia?

Yeah, I think it was said well earlier. This is part of deterrence, is how we can produce, how we can build, and, you know, how we can operate in a contested environment for logistics and maintenance. All of that as part of the deterrence equation when you look at it through Chinese eyes. Randy Shriver, Celeste Wallinger, and Bill of Plant. Thank you very much to all of you guys. And that's all the time we have for now. Thank you for joining us at home.

I'm Nick Schiffran. We'll see you here again next week on Compass Points.