The single most important number in the United States defense industrial base story is the production rate of 155mm artillery shells. In early 2022, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, U.S. industry produced approximately 14,000 155mm shells per month, almost entirely at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant and the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant. By the end of 2025, that rate had climbed to roughly 70,000 per month, with a stated goal of 100,000 monthly by FY2026 (U.S. Army, 2025). It is the largest sustained munitions production increase the U.S. industrial base has executed since the Vietnam War. And it is still not enough.
The arithmetic problem behind the munitions restock is straightforward and uncomfortable: peer-conflict consumption rates exceed peacetime production rates by ten- to twenty-fold across multiple critical munitions categories. Ukraine has, on multiple occasions, expended in a week what the U.S. produces in a month. A Taiwan contingency planning baseline projects PAC-3 expenditure in the first 30 days at multiples of total inventory. The industrial base is racing to close gaps that were not adequately sized for the conflict environment it now faces.
155mm: The Test Case
The 155mm story is the cleanest demonstration of what 'restocking the arsenal' actually requires when the question is asked seriously. The Army has invested more than $3.5 billion in modernizing Iowa AAP, Scranton AAP, and adding new shell-forging capacity at General Dynamics OTS in Wilkes-Barre and elsewhere (Congressional Research Service, 2024). Mesquite, Texas and Garland, Texas have come online as new shell-forging facilities.
What is striking about the ramp is what it required: rebuilding domestic nitrocellulose and explosive fill capacity. Nitrocellulose — the propellant binder — has been overwhelmingly produced in Canada and Europe for decades. The U.S. is now standing up a new nitrocellulose plant in Stamford, Texas, funded jointly by the Army and the DPA Title III program (U.S. Army Materiel Command, 2025). TNT and Composition B fill capacity at Holston AAP is similarly being expanded.
PAC-3: A Different Constraint
Patriot PAC-3 MSE production at Lockheed Martin's Camden, Arkansas facility has climbed from 350 missiles per year in 2022 to a stated production rate target of 650 by FY2026 (Lockheed Martin, 2025). Compared to 155mm, this is fast — PAC-3 is a sophisticated multi-mode missile with a long supplier tail.
The constraints are different too. PAC-3's bottlenecks live in solid rocket motors (Aerojet Rocketdyne, now L3Harris, and Northrop Grumman's Bacchus Works), seeker focal-plane arrays, and the inertial measurement units that are common to multiple guided weapon programs. The same IMU shortage that delays PAC-3 delays Tomahawk Block V, JASSM-XR, and LRASM.
Solid Rocket Motors: The Cross-Program Bottleneck
The solid rocket motor industrial base is the single most cross-cutting bottleneck in tactical and strategic munitions. L3Harris' acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2023 consolidated a meaningfully diminished supplier base into two players (L3Harris and Northrop Grumman). The DoD has poured more than $1.2 billion through DPA Title III and IBAS into solid rocket motor capacity expansions at both companies, including the Camden, Arkansas SRM facility, Promontory, Utah, and the Bacchus Works (U.S. Department of Defense, 2025).
The Hard Cases: AIM-120 and Tomahawk
Some restock stories are harder. AIM-120 AMRAAM production at Raytheon's Tucson facility has steadily climbed, but the program is racing to replace seeker components and propulsion sub-assemblies that were single-sourced for decades. Tomahawk Block V production has been deliberately constrained by Navy budget choices as much as industrial capacity — the FY26 budget request meaningfully increased Tomahawk procurement after multi-year underbuying (DoD budget materials, 2025).
The Taiwan Stress Test
Multiple unclassified wargame summaries — from CSIS, RAND, and the Hudson Institute — have surfaced consistent findings: a Taiwan Strait contingency consumes munitions at rates that exhaust current U.S. inventories of LRASM, JASSM-ER, Harpoon, SM-6, and PAC-3 within the first 30 days of high-intensity conflict (CSIS wargame report, 2023). The industrial base ramp is racing those depletion curves.
What FY2026 Actually Funded
The FY2026 munitions budget represents a substantial increase over FY2024, with multi-year procurement authority for PAC-3, LRASM, JASSM, SM-6, AIM-120, AIM-9X, and Stinger. Multi-year procurement is the single most important demand signal industry can receive — it justifies the capital expansion that a one-year procurement does not. The FY2026 build also funded continued capacity expansion at Iowa AAP, Scranton AAP, and the new shell-forging facilities.
What Tier-2 Munitions Suppliers Should Do Now
Pursue multi-year contracts aggressively: the Pentagon's appetite for multi-year procurement is at its highest in two decades. Suppliers with stable production rate visibility can finance capacity expansion that one-year contracts will not support.
Qualify on common sub-assemblies: IMUs, focal-plane arrays, solid rocket motors, and certain electronics are common across multiple munitions programs. Qualification on cross-program parts maximizes demand stability.
Invest in nitrocellulose, TNT, and propellant supply visibility: the explosive-fill supply chain is being rebuilt. Suppliers need credible feedstock visibility, not just downstream contracts.
Stand up second-source production lines: the Army's appetite for second-sourcing has returned. Lone Star, GD-OTS, and the regional shell-forging plants are the model — be willing to qualify in parallel with an incumbent.
Stinger and Javelin: Resurrected Lines
Few munitions stories better illustrate the post-2022 industrial reality than Stinger and Javelin. Stinger production lines at Raytheon's Tucson facility had effectively wound down two decades earlier; the U.S. military took delivery of no new-production Stingers for nearly twenty years before the Ukraine drawdowns. Ukraine's consumption of Stinger and donations from U.S. inventories required Raytheon to restart cold lines, re-qualify suppliers, and recover institutional knowledge that had partially atrophied. Production restarted under a $624 million replenishment contract awarded in 2022, with the Tucson line ramping toward roughly 60 missiles per month and now expected to run through at least 2029 (FlightGlobal, 2025).
Javelin's story is similar but compressed: the Lockheed Martin-Raytheon joint venture had been operating Javelin lines continuously but at a single-shift cadence. Multi-shift operations resumed in 2023 and have been sustained since. The bottleneck in Javelin throughput is not the missile itself but the Command Launch Unit electronics, which depend on a microelectronics supply chain that shares parts with other guided weapon programs. Rebuilding throughput requires solving for multiple cross-program supplier shortages simultaneously.
Allied and Co-Production Capacity
U.S. munitions strategy has shifted to incorporate allied co-production in ways that were politically and contractually difficult before 2022. Lockheed Martin and Diehl have moved toward GMLRS co-production for European customers. PAC-3 co-production discussions with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan have advanced. NAMMO in Norway, MBDA across Europe, and Hanwha in South Korea are each playing larger co-production and license-production roles in supplying U.S. and allied magazine depth (NATO Support and Procurement Agency, 2025).
Co-production is not free. ITAR licensing, technology transfer agreements, and quality-control oversight add cost and complexity. But the alternative — a purely domestic production base sized for peer-conflict demand — is meaningfully more expensive. The bipartisan congressional appetite for sustained allied co-production has solidified in a way that creates durable industrial-base planning assumptions.
Energetics: The Quietest Bottleneck
Behind almost every munition is a small number of qualified energetics: nitrocellulose, TNT, RDX, HMX, IMX-101, and the specialty propellants for guided weapons. The U.S. domestic production base for these compounds is among the most concentrated in any industrial category. The Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Tennessee, operated by BAE Systems, remains the sole U.S. producer of RDX and HMX for military applications. Modernization at Holston is funded but multi-year (U.S. Army Materiel Command, 2025).
Nitrocellulose, the propellant binder underlying nearly every conventional and guided weapon, is being expanded through the new Stamford, Texas facility and through capacity additions at Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia. The pace of these expansions is the pace of the broader munitions ramp. There is no scaling 155mm production faster than the nitrocellulose supply that backs it.
When the Math Doesn't Add Up
The munitions restock story is the most concrete test of whether the U.S. industrial base can return to wartime production cadence on a peacetime budget. The 155mm ramp is genuinely impressive. The PAC-3 ramp is impressive but exposes structural single-points-of-failure in seekers and IMUs. The AIM-120, Tomahawk, and SM-6 stories remain unfinished. None of these stories will be told quickly. The decisions made in the FY2026 and FY2027 budgets — multi-year procurement, capacity awards, second-source qualification — will determine whether the United States enters its next major contingency with magazine depth or with a shortfall. The math today does not add up. The math in 2028 might. Whether it does is the most important industrial-base question on the table.
