Why the Pentagon Is Quadrupling Missile Production, and Why It Still Won't Be Enough

David KowalskiMissile Systems & Air Defense ContributorDavid Kowalski writes about missile systems, air defense networks, and the technology behind precision strike warfare. His work examines how offensive and defensive missile capabilities shape the balance of power between nations.Here is a number worth sitting with: at peak consumption during the early months of support to Ukraine, the United States was shipping Javelin anti-tank missiles faster than Lockheed Martin could build them. Within ten months, the Stinger man-portable air defense inventory, a weapon system that took decades to accumulate, was functionally depleted. Over 7,000 Javelins, roughly one-third of the entire U.S. stockpile, were transferred before the Pentagon paused shipments to protect its own readiness.That was a proxy conflict. The missiles were not being fired by American forces. And yet the drawdown was severe enough to trigger what has become the largest guided-munitions production expansion since the Cold War.On March 25, 2026, the Department of Defense announced a sweeping set of production agreements with Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Honeywell, deals designed to quadruple output of some of America's most critical missile systems over the next seven years. Earlier, on February 4, RTX (formerly Raytheon) had signed five separate agreements to dramatically scale Tomahawk and SM-6 production. The combined effort represents tens of billions in investment and a fundamental restructuring of the defense industrial base.The ambition is real. The question is whether it is remotely sufficient.You Might Also LikeThe Numbers Behind the SurgeThe production targets announced in March 2026 are striking in their scale. Lockheed Martin will ramp PrSM, the Army's next-generation precision strike missile, which replaces ATACMS, from a baseline of roughly 45 to 152 units per year up to 550 per year under a seven-year framework contract. THAAD interceptors, the high-altitude missile defense system that protects against ballistic missile threats, will increase from 96 per year to 400, a fourfold jump that BAE Systems will support by manufacturing the interceptor's seeker heads.The RTX agreements signed in February target even more dramatic scaling. Tomahawk cruise missile production, which had languished at approximately 90 units per year, is slated to exceed 1,000 annually.

The defense industrial base that must actually build these weapons has been hollowing out for three decades.Since the post-Cold War drawdown of the 1990s, the U.S. missile production ecosystem has lost approximately 40 percent of its small business suppliers. These are not the prime contractors whose logos appear in press releases. These are the second-, third-, and fourth-tier companies that manufacture circuit boards, rocket motor casings, seeker lenses, guidance fins, thermal batteries, and the thousands of other specialized components that make a guided missile function. When a small supplier with 50 employees closes its doors because defense contracts dried up, the institutional knowledge, the tooling, the quality certifications, the workforce expertise, disappears with it.Rebuilding that base is not simply a matter of writing larger checks. A new solid rocket motor production line takes three to five years to qualify. Training a technician to hand-solder connections inside a missile seeker, work that cannot be automated because of the precision and variability involved, takes 18 to 24 months. The workforce that performed this work during the Reagan-era buildup has largely retired, and the pipeline of replacements has not kept pace.Then there is the materials problem. Critical minerals, gallium, germanium, rare earth elements, are essential inputs for the semiconductors, infrared detectors, and electronic warfare components inside modern missiles. China controls a dominant share of global processing for many of these materials. In 2023, Beijing imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, a direct signal that these supply chains are vulnerable to disruption precisely when demand spikes. Honeywell's $500 million investment in navigation and EW component production is partly an attempt to build buffer capacity, but reshoring an entire mineral processing chain is a decade-long project at minimum.What Ukraine RevealedA Patriot missile launches during an air defense exercise. PAC-3 MSE production is targeted to more than triple, from 600 to 2,000 interceptors per year.The Ukraine conflict served as a stress test for the Western munitions industrial base, and the results were alarming. The drawdown of U.S. stockpiles was rapid and deep, not because the quantities shipped were enormous by historical standards, but because the production capacity to replace them was so limited.The 7,000 Javelins transferred represented roughly one-third of the total inventory.

Javelin production at the time was approximately 2,100 units per year. Even dedicating the entire production run exclusively to replenishment, shipping zero Javelins to any other ally, selling none through foreign military sales, retaining none for training, rebuilding the stockpile would have taken over three years.Stinger was worse. The production line had been effectively dormant, and restarting it required requalifying suppliers, sourcing obsolete components, and retraining workers. The ten-month depletion timeline versus the multi-year restart timeline exposed a fundamental asymmetry: modern missile inventories can be consumed in months but require years to rebuild.This asymmetry is baked into the physics of the problem. A PrSM round contains an advanced seeker, inertial navigation, GPS receivers, a solid rocket motor with precisely cast propellant, flight control surfaces with actuators, thermal batteries, and onboard processing. Each subsystem has its own supply chain, its own production constraints, and its own bottleneck potential. Scaling the final assembly line means nothing if the seeker vendor cannot scale in parallel.The Pacific CalculusA B-1B Lancer carries JASSM cruise missiles over Edwards AFB. In a Pacific contingency, air-launched standoff weapons would be expended at rates that would stress any production capacity.Everything discussed so far concerns relatively modest consumption scenarios, a proxy conflict in Europe, limited strike operations, peacetime attrition through training and testing. The scenario that keeps Pentagon planners awake is the one where consumption rates make Ukraine look like a rounding error: a conflict in the Western Pacific.Wargames conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the RAND Corporation, and the Pentagon's own Joint Staff have consistently produced the same finding. In a Taiwan Strait contingency, the United States would expend the majority of its long-range precision munitions, JASSM, LRASM, Tomahawk, SM-6 in anti-ship mode, within the first two to three weeks. The distances are vast, the threat density is extreme, and the targets, amphibious fleets, air bases, missile batteries, logistics nodes, number in the thousands.CSIS's 2023 wargame estimated that the U.S. would fire over 5,000 long-range missiles in the first three weeks of a Pacific conflict. At current production rates across all relevant systems, replacing that expenditure would take roughly four to five years.