As Russian paratroopers descended on Kyiv and attempted to seize Antonov Airport, U.S. officials offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a lifeline. Western leaders could guarantee him safe passage if he fled immediately.
Zelenskyy famously retorted that he needed ammunition, “not a ride.”
In the 15 months since, the United States has spent tens of billions of dollars giving Zelenskyy and embattled Ukraine just that. Now, officials say, the nation has depleted its own stores of critical munitions so severely that it would likely be incapable of fighting a major war.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth has said that the United States’ munitions production capacity is pushed to the “absolute edge.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley has said that the nation “has a long ways to go” to replenish its sorely depleted stockpiles.
One unnamed Pentagon official allegedly told the Wall Street Journal that the nation’s stores of critical artillery rounds were “uncomfortably low” as early as August of last year.
The Pentagon declined to provide an update to the Epoch Times on the status of its current munition stockpiles, with one spokesperson saying that providing any specifics on the matter could jeopardize “operational security.”
The spokesperson suggested, however, that the United States was making great strides in rebuilding what had been lost.
“Of note, the department has enabled a rapid increase in 155mm ammo production, from approximately 14,000 a month in February 2022 to over 20,000 a month more recently, with plans to produce more than 70,000 a month in 2025,” the spokesperson told the Epoch Times.
“This represents a 500 percent increase.”
There’s just one problem with the Pentagon’s rosy outlook on its quickly dwindling stockpiles: Even with a 500 percent increase in production by 2027, the nation would still only be halfway to keeping afloat.
That’s because, by the end of August of last year, the United States had already sent just over 800,000 155mm artillery rounds to Ukraine. That number has since increased to more than two million, according to a fact sheet provided to the Epoch Times by the Pentagon.
That’s a rate of more than 130,000 rounds per month. Nearly twice as much as the proposed production rate of 70,000 that the Pentagon hopes to achieve in five years.
US Struggles to Produce Enough Munitions
To be sure, the Pentagon has taken steps to stop the hemorrhaging of its critical munitions stocks. Most notably, it has taken to trying wherever possible to purchase ammunition for Ukraine from other countries rather than strip its own stores bare.
How long it can keep the current balance up is open for debate. Allied stockpiles are not infinite either, after all, and already some partners are thinking of their own security concerns.
Key ally South Korea, for example, has already refused requests to sell the munitions to the United States, citing fears of North Korean aggression.
Now, the U.S. is going so far as to pull equipment from units stationed in Israel and South Korea in order to adequately supply Ukraine without emptying its stockpiles.
Likewise, the U.S. Army is now seeking $18 billion from Congress to expand and modernize its munitions production capabilities over the course of the next 15 years. According to Secretary Wormuth, the effort will help to replenish the more than $20 billion in lethal aid already delivered to Ukraine directly from U.S. stockpiles.
Even that may not be enough, however.
“My sense is we’re going to need to do more,” Wormuth said during a March 30 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“One thing the war in Ukraine has shown us is that the estimates we’ve made for the munitions [required] for future conflicts are low.”
The Army’s first tranche of investments, worth $1.5 billion, is included in the Pentagon’s budget request for fiscal year 2024.
That amount is expected to help the Army expand and modernize the nation’s ammunition production facilities, arsenals, and depots, many of which date to World War II.
Despite the stoic facade presented by policymakers, the idea that it will take 15 years to modernize the United States’ munitions production capability has some lawmakers worried. Particularly so for those dedicated to stopping a Chinese communist invasion of Taiwan.
US Stockpiles, Systems Insufficient to Deter Taiwan Invasion
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tasked with overseeing the nation’s strategic competition with China’s communist regime. A key part of that competition is deterring a CCP invasion of Taiwan, which many believe the regime intends to be able to launch by 2027.
In order to prevent that from happening, the United States needs ammo to arm Taiwan with and, potentially, to use in a war defending Taiwan’s de facto independence.
It is thus no small surprise that Select Committee Chair Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) expressed dismay when told Wormuth’s plan for modernizing the U.S. arsenal would take 15 long years.
“Fifteen years is too late,” Gallagher told the Epoch Times.
“I think that five years is too late.”
To that end, Gallagher referred to a tranche of ten policy recommendations that the panel adopted on May 24; Policies that it says will help deter the CCP from invading Taiwan if adopted by Congress.
Gallagher said the report, titled “Ten for Taiwan” (pdf), underscores that the United States has just two years, not 15, to rebuild its arsenal and arm Taiwan if it is to avoid a catastrophic conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
“If you look at our recommendations, it’s what we can do in the next two years to really meaningfully enhance our deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific,” Gallagher said.
“If we want to have a hope of stopping World War III, we need to arm Taiwan to the teeth right now.”
Gallagher is well aware of the problem, of course, that one cannot arm Taiwan if one does not have the munitions to begin with. To overcome that hurdle, he said, the United States would need to field aging or otherwise obsolete ammunition to new effect.
“That’s why you see some creative recommendations in [our report] on taking certain missile systems that we were going to put into deep storage and potentially MacGyvering those and giving those to the Taiwanese,” Gallagher said.
“It’s why you see a request for multi-year appropriation for critical munition systems, which I think is absolutely essential.”
In other words, until the United States can rebuild its critically depleted stores of munitions, it will have to get creative with what it has.
Above all, he said, the Department of Defense (DoD) will need to seriously convince the private firms responsible for manufacturing its precision munitions that it needs them, and will need them for years to come.
“More than anything, we just need to get the demand signal for DoD [right],” Gallagher said.
“We want to test the limits of what industry is capable of.”
Even then there are bound to be difficulties, however. Ensuring that the United States continuously invest in and deliver new munitions on time over the course of years will be difficult. Particularly so given a deeply divided Congress willing to haggle over just about any part of the federal budget.
“It’s worse for critical munitions because critical munitions always get shortchanged for other items,” Gallagher said.
“They’re not as sexy sometimes as ships and planes and things like that. But, I think if you had the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense saying hey, we are going to rebuild our arsenal of deterrence … I think you could really start to increase production.”
US Lacks Industrial Capacity for One Week of War with China
The CCP claims that Taiwan is part of its territory, though the regime has never actually controlled the island. CCP leadership has likewise vowed to unite Taiwan with the mainland, by force if necessary, and its frequent acts of military intimidation against the democratic island have drawn international condemnation.
Thus, it is vital to understand that the United States’ ongoing shortages of munitions, and its inadequate capacity to manufacture them at scale, is not limited to artillery rounds, but also include those munitions likely to be used heavily in an amphibious war.
According to a Pentagon fact sheet obtained by the Epoch Times, the United States has delivered 1,600 Stingers surface-to-air systems and 38 HIMARS rocket launchers to Ukraine, both of which would be vital to maintaining Taiwan’s defense should the U.S. join the fray.
Beyond that, there is also the deeper issue of the nation’s current inability to actually produce the munitions it would need, with many systems requiring years of advance notice before acquisition.
To that end, a report released in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank found that the United States would quickly run out of critical munitions during a war with China over the future of Taiwan.
“The U.S. defense industrial base lacks adequate surge capacity for a major war,” the report said.
While the United States has ample amounts of small arms ammunition, low stockpiles, and slow acquisition and manufacturing processes would likely lead to a shortage of critical munitions like long-range anti-ship missiles (LRASMs) in less than one week of war, the report found.
“The U.S. defense industrial base is not adequately prepared for the competitive security environment that now exists,” the report reads.
“In a major regional conflict—such as a war with China in the Taiwan Strait—the U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense, leading to a problem of ‘empty bins.’”
That finding has since been replicated in another wargame conducted by none other than the Select Committee on the CCP.
Conducted in May, the panel’s wargame quickly devolved into “catastrophic results,” with the U.S. side (played by Select Committee members) quickly running out of munitions and being rendered incapable of resupplying Taiwan with the weapons it needed to defend itself.
“I know the members of this committee will dig into the lessons we can learn from what may be some sobering outcomes of this game,” Gallagher said at the time.
“Deterring war is the only path to peace and stability, and it is incumbent upon elected officials to take decisive action to do so before it’s too late.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.