Between June 2025 and February 2026, the United States consumed precision munitions across threemilitary operations at rates unseen since 2003 — none of them in the Pacific. During the same period,the European Union failed to meet its own artillery-ammunition targets for Ukraine, delivering barelyhalf its pledged one million rounds on time. These are not separate crises. They are expressions of asingle structural problem: the Western alliance’s defence-industrial base cannot sustain simultaneousdeterrence of Russia and China because both theatres draw from the same production lines, the sameraw-material supply chains, and the same bottleneck components. This article demonstrates thatconsumption in one theatre directly degrades deterrence in the other — that every THAAD interceptorfired at an Iranian missile competes with Patriot production for NATO’s eastern flank, and every155mm shell diverted to Ukraine competes with propellant supply for the JASSM missiles thatIndo-Pacific contingency plans require. Drawing on the precedent of NATO’s ammunition-supplyfailure in Ukraine, it argues that replenishment timelines for precision-guided munitions will bemeasured not in years but in the better part of a decade — far exceeding the windows within whichboth Russia and China could test allied deterrence. Allied production capacity outside American andEuropean bottlenecks represents the only mechanism operating on strategically relevant timelines.
Franny Philos Sophia (Sun,) studied this question.