The US must urgently replenish its ammunition stockpiles to prepare for a possible conflict with China, said experts from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Rush Doshi, Erin D. Dumbacher, William Henagan and Michael K. Horowitz in an article for the organization.
“The risk of a Chinese military offensive is high enough to require the United States to significantly improve its industrial readiness for conflict in the next two years,“ the experts said. Although the US military still has an advantage over China in certain capabilities, the initiatives of the Biden and Trump administrations to strengthen the US defense industrial base will only bear fruit in years or decades, they said.
In general, experts say the US needs to scale up production of precision systems in large quantities, including drones, sensors and advanced systems that can be produced cheaply and deployed quickly.
They say excessive caution in spending and conducting operations is slowing the defence industry's ability to expand and modernise both new and existing military systems. To overcome this problem, the government and companies must stop insisting on perfect solutions and instead adopt ones that can be delivered more quickly, even if they come with some manageable risks.
Some progress has been made in increasing the mass production of precision systems, but experts have expressed doubt whether it is enough to successfully deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. They noted that the executive order “Deploying American Drone Dominance,” signed in June 2025, aims to remove regulatory obstacles and supports the Pentagon’s drone dominance program.
The experts said that changes are also being made to speed up and facilitate the development, procurement and deployment of precision systems in large quantities. On June 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a directive to appoint a special director for unmanned systems.
The second Trump administration has also accelerated several initiatives, experts said. These include efforts to deploy containerized cruise missiles, the U.S. Air Force's Affordable Missile Family program for mass production, and the U.S. Navy's low-cost cruise missile - the Multi-mission Affordable Capacity Effector (MACE), which is being developed as a hypersonic strike weapon. However, they say these efforts alone are not enough.
The experts stressed that “to increase its capabilities to a scale that allows it to deter or defeat China within two years, the Pentagon will need to move to a more risk-tolerant, portfolio-based approach to acquisition that prioritizes speed, scale, and overall capability over the unique characteristics of individual systems.”
The Pentagon must also send a clear signal of strong demand to the defense industry, backed by large budgets to develop more capabilities, they added.