The Atlantic [gift article]: “The U.S. failed to produce weapons and ammunition fast enough to supply Ukraine. Could it equip its own armed forces in the event of war?…”America itself lacks stockpiles of the necessary components. A massive rebuilding effort is now under way, the largest in almost a century, but it will not—cannot—happen fast. And even the expanded capacity would not come close to meeting requests the size of Ukraine’s, much less restore our own depleted reserves. Take drones, for instance. In December 2023, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called for the domestic production of 1 million annually to meet war needs—and Ukraine has met that goal. In the meantime, the supply of drones provided by the U.S. to Ukraine has numbered in the thousands, and many of those have not fared as well on the battlefield as Ukraine’s homemade, often jerry-rigged models and off-the-shelf Chinese drones. Other allies have stepped up with materiel of many kinds—artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft—but fighters in Ukraine are still coping with disabling shortages. “It’s a miracle the U.S. military has anything that blows up, ever.” At stake here is more than the fate of Ukraine. As a new administration prepares to take power—led by a man, Donald Trump, who has been hostile to Zelensky and his country’s cause, and who admires Russia and Vladimir Putin—the future of American aid to Ukraine is at best uncertain. It could very well diminish or even come to an end. But the obstacles the U.S. has faced in trying to supply Ukraine during the past two years have revealed a systemic, gaping national-security weakness. It is a weakness that afflicts the U.S. military at all levels, and about which the public is largely unaware. The vaunted American war machine is in disarray and disrepair.”