When I spoke to Ekateryna Derkach over a videoconference call on May 25, she looked bleary-eyed. The night before, according to Ukraine’s Air Force, Russian forces had launched 36 Iranian-designed Shahed drones toward key infrastructure and military targets in western regions of the country. In their apartment roughly 15 miles outside Kyiv, roused by the off-and-on whine of air raid alarms through the night, Ekateryna, her husband, Andrey, and her 6 and 12-year-old boys took cover in a hallway corridor and in the bathroom.
Russia’s aerial bombardments of Ukraine’s cities have left people in a state of constant high alert. “We cannot sleep at night, we are all very tired,” says Derkach, a 36-year-old press manager for a US-based IT company with an R&D office in Kyiv. “They start these missiles at 12 o’clock, [or] at three o’clock, when it’s really hard.” But thankfully casualties from these attacks are increasingly rare, at least in Kyiv, which sits under a defensive umbrella of anti-aircraft systems, including US-made Patriot missile batteries, which in May were credited with shooting down 13 Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, some of the most sophisticated weapons in Russia’s arsenal.
But that air defense—and other core elements of Ukraine’s war effort—rely on shrinking US and NATO supplies of weapons. In the southeast, the Ukrainian armed forces have begun their long-awaited counteroffensive, expending huge quantities of matériel—laser-guided rockets, artillery shells, howitzer ammunition, and of course, drones, which are in some ways the defining weapon of the conflict. The war’s demands have strained the country’s supply chain and those of US and European allies. Stockpiles of rockets and missiles and the parts needed to build them—from titanium castings, ball bearings, and explosives for ammunition to solid rocket motors, ruggedized microchips, integrated circuits, and optical sensors—are reaching dangerously low levels. The US has already stopped transferring Javelins, the long-range, portable anti-tank missiles pivotal to stopping Russia’s offensive early in the conflict.
“We’re at the point, where, with some things like artillery, if we wanted to give the Ukranians more, we’d have to take them away from some of our units of the National Guard,” says Marc Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “We’re already at the point where [US defense officials] are not comfortable. The question is whether they’re getting even more uncomfortable.”
The war in Ukraine, in short, has exposed the challenges of keeping a modern army supplied in a prolonged conflict, and it has prompted calls for the US to rethink the funding and structure of its military supply chains, which have long relied on a small number of enormous manufacturers, century-old factories, and Cold War–era thinking. The future of the military-industrial complex may be far more decentralized, several military analysts say, with small shops, tech startups, and mom-and-pop manufacturers feeding into the defense base. It is, in many ways, a model that resembles Ukraine’s own defense industry, which has by necessity become a small-scale, hyper-flexible one, with drones and other devices being designed and built, often on the fly, in workshops and garages.
The United States has allocated more than $48 billion in supplemental appropriations for security assistance for Ukraine since the war began in February 2022. On top of that, as reported in The New York Times, the recently approved $858 billion national military budget includes a 55 percent jump in Army funding to buy missiles, a 47 percent increase in the Navy’s weapons purchases, and expanded authorization for the Defense Department to make multiyear spending commitments.
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