The United States (US) is not running out of military power. It is running out of something almost as important: the ability to replace some of its most sophisticated weapons as quickly as modern wars can consume them. That distinction should concern every American ally, including Canada.Consider one extraordinary number. During the first four weeks of the American campaign against Iran, US forces reportedly fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, the largest expenditure of Tomahawks in a single military campaign. Recent American procurement had averaged roughly 79 Tomahawks annually, although production is now being accelerated.The arithmetic should command our attention. It does not mean America requires ten years to replace those missiles, because production can and will increase. It does mean that a few weeks of high-intensity warfare can consume years of peacetime procurement.None of this will be lost on Beijing. Chinese military planners do not need the US to become weak, because it plainly is not. They need only ask whether America could sustain a major Pacific war while simultaneously supporting Ukraine, defending allies in the Middle East, and maintaining military commitments around the world.The problem extends beyond Tomahawks. More than 1,000 Patriot and THAAD air-defence interceptors were reportedly fired during roughly the first month of the Iran campaign, while analysts have estimated that American inventories of these sophisticated defensive missiles have been substantially depleted. These are enormously complicated weapons requiring specialized electronics, explosives, rocket motors, skilled workers, and supply chains that cannot simply be switched on overnight.Lockheed Martin delivered a record 620 PAC-3 MSE Patriot interceptors in 2025 and is working toward substantially greater production. That expansion is welcome, and America's enormous industrial capacity should never be underestimated. But factories that were optimized for peacetime procurement cannot instantly transform themselves into wartime arsenals..During more than four decades of military service, one lesson became obvious to me: a military capability that cannot be sustained is eventually a capability that cannot be relied upon. Governments understandably focus on purchasing ships, aircraft, and weapons systems because those are visible symbols of military power. The less glamorous requirements, ammunition, spare parts, maintenance, trained personnel, and industrial capacity, determine how long that power can actually be employed.For thirty years, much of the West behaved as though industrial warfare had become obsolete. Ukraine proved otherwise, as artillery shells, drones, missiles, and air defence interceptors were consumed on a scale few Western governments anticipated. The Middle East is reinforcing the same lesson, and a war in the Pacific could demonstrate it on a scale not experienced since 1945.That is because Ukraine, Iran, and a potential conflict with China may be geographically separate wars, but they compete for overlapping American resources. Precision missiles, air-defence interceptors, explosives, rocket motors, electronics, and production capacity cannot always be neatly allocated to separate theatres. Every sophisticated weapon expended today eventually has to be replaced.China has spent decades preparing for precisely this problem. Beijing has accumulated an enormous land-based missile arsenal designed to threaten American ships, airfields, logistics facilities, and bases throughout the western Pacific. Its objective does not necessarily have to be defeating the US outright; it can instead make American intervention so costly and difficult that Washington hesitates to undertake it.Imagine, then, that a Taiwan crisis begins tomorrow. Washington cannot go back five years and manufacture the missiles it wishes it had ordered. Nor can Canada suddenly build ammunition plants, train skilled workers, or accumulate strategic reserves that governments decided were unnecessary during peacetime.This is not an argument that China has achieved military superiority over the US. America remains overwhelmingly the world's most capable military power, with unmatched global logistics, alliances, submarines, aircraft, intelligence capabilities, and technological sophistication. Predictions of imminent American military exhaustion are as misguided as the complacency that assumes its resources are unlimited..The real vulnerability is industrial endurance. Modern warfare is demonstrating that advanced weapons can be consumed in weeks but may require months or years to replace. Deterrence therefore depends not merely upon how many missiles sit in magazines today, but upon how rapidly factories can replenish them tomorrow.The Pentagon understands this and is pushing industry toward much higher production rates and longer-term contracts. America is rediscovering something our grandparents understood instinctively during the Second World War: industrial capacity is itself a weapon. A country that can replace ships, aircraft, ammunition, and missiles faster than its adversary possesses an enormous strategic advantage.Canada must rediscover the same principle. For decades, we have effectively assumed that American military capacity was unlimited and that, whatever happened in the world, the US would provide the strategic depth, intelligence, logistics, and sophisticated weapons necessary to defend North America and the Western alliance. That assumption is no longer reasonable.Canada therefore faces an apparent paradox. If we want the US to remain the principal guarantor of Western security, we must become less dependent upon the US for our own security. Every credible military capability Canada and America's other allies provide reduces the demands placed upon finite American forces.There are encouraging signs. Ottawa announced $1.4 billion this year to expand domestic ammunition production, including Canadian capacity for 155mm artillery components, explosives, propellants, and completed ammunition. Yet only about 30% of Canadian Armed Forces ammunition is currently sourced domestically, demonstrating how far we still have to go..Canada cannot replicate the American defence-industrial base, nor should we try. But there is no reason a G7 country with our natural resources, industrial capabilities, technological expertise, and proximity to the US should not become indispensable to it. Canada should aim to become an arsenal for the northern part of the Western alliance.That means building strategic reserves of ammunition and critical components based upon wartime consumption rather than peacetime training. It means long-term procurement contracts that allow Canadian manufacturers to invest confidently in factories, machinery, and skilled workers. It means concentrating on areas where Canada can excel: ammunition, explosives, propellants, drones, sensors, Arctic surveillance, critical minerals, and selected components of sophisticated weapons systems.Our European and Asian allies face the same responsibility. NATO countries, Japan, South Korea, and Australia cannot structure their defence policies around the assumption that Washington can provide unlimited quantities of sophisticated weapons during every crisis. A stronger alliance is one in which America's allies possess enough military and industrial capacity to carry substantially more of the burden themselves.This is not an argument for American retreat. It is an argument for preserving American leadership by ensuring the US does not exhaust itself compensating for decades of inadequate defence investment by its allies. A stronger Canada makes America stronger as well.Deterrence is ultimately an argument about arithmetic. An adversary must believe not only that you can fight, but that you can keep fighting longer than he can. China is doing that arithmetic; America is relearning it; and Canada had better start.
