Having long dominated the airspace of war zones, Western countries have underinvested in longer-range ground-to-air weapons of the kind Ukraine is pleading for
AS LONDON WAS being bombed during the Blitz, Franklin Roosevelt delivered a “fireside chat” over the radio on December 29th 1940 that still resonates today. America, the president said, had to become “the great arsenal of democracy”, both to help those fighting the Nazis and to protect itself. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour a year later, America’s factories went into full wartime production.
America has been by far Ukraine’s biggest armourer. Since 2018 it has sold or donated 7,000-odd Javelin anti-tank missiles. America has sent 14,000 other anti-armour systems, 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, 700 Switchblade loitering munitions, 90 howitzers with 183,000 155mm shells, 16 Mi-17 helicopters, 200 armoured personnel carriers and more. And it has marshalled allies to provide military equipment, often of ex-Soviet vintage.
The production of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles is tighter still. They entered service in 1981, and America bought its last batch in 2003. The American production line closed last year, but reopened for a foreign customer . Its maker, Raytheon, says it has only a limited stock of parts. “Some of the components are no longer commercially available,” Raytheon’s boss, Gregory Hayes, told investors.
Precision weapons, packed with chips and sensors, are hard and expensive to make. Planners tend to focus on “platforms”—tanks, ships, planes—and save money on the bombs and missiles, notes Bradley Martin of the RAND Corporation, a think-tank supported by the American air force. “A risk is being assumed based on a belief that, if a war were to occur, we would be able to ramp up production,” says Mr Martin. “That’s a bad assumption.
Kathleen Hicks, deputy defence secretary, says the Pentagon is trying to clear bottlenecks at weekly meetings with the bosses of defence firms. It is helping them locate alternative suppliers for hard-to-find parts or, in the case of the Stinger, the tools with which to make them. In the longer term the government is trying to boost domestic semiconductor production.
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