Robert Greenway, Jim Fein, Richard Stern, Wilson Beaver, Madison Marino Doan, Rachel Greszler, Jordan Embree, Robert Peters
Summary
During World War II and throughout the Cold War, America’s defense industrial base (DIB) was immensely capable, achieving extraordinary output and providing impressive innovation. It was known—and for good reason—as “the Arsenal of Democracy.” America’s defense industrial base produced 17 aircraft carriers, 300,000 planes, and roughly 50,000 Sherman tanks from 1942 to 1945 alone.REF
Today, however, the United States cannot meet its own peacetime needs despite facing the most hostile threat environment it has seen since the Second World War, with adversaries that include Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Iran, and China. First and foremost, a rising China is threatening the United States and her interests through a massive military buildup backed by an economy roughly two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy.REF As then-Senator J.D. Vance wrote in April 2024, “[f]undamentally, [the U.S.] lack[s] the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.”REF If the U.S. lacks the capacity to produce just part of what the Ukrainian military needs to fend off Russia, which has an economy less than a tenth as large as that of the United States,REF it certainly cannot match China’s ability to sustain a war through production.
As noted, the United States produced 300,000 planes from 1942 to 1945;REF today, the maximum production capacity for the F-35 fighter is approximately 150 planes per year—a number that is not currently expected to increase.REF
This degradation of the defense industrial base did not happen overnight. The increased complexity of the most modern, high-end weapon systems is partially to blame for reduced output. Producing a P-38 is not the same as producing an F-35, and producing a Sherman is not the same as producing an Abrams with its depleted uranium armor. Nor can commercial firms aid in production to the same extent as in World War II when Ford, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/strategy-revitalize-the-defense-industrial-base-the-21st-century