Weaponizing the Missile Shortage

Chess players have a word for what happens when a game is too far gone, and every choice is actually no choice at all, each leading painfully to the same outcome: losing. That word is zugzwang, a mash-up of two German words––zug meaning “move,” zwang meaning “compulsion,” a favorite of Freud, who wrote often about various kinds of zwang––that came together sometime in the 19th century to mean something like a “forced move.” After chess players and psychoanalysts, military experts have since borrowed the idea to describe scenarios where one power has no good strategic options left and is forced to make concessions. The Iran war, which has been called “unwinnable” by everyone from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to Tucker Carlson, has been fertile ground for the analogy.

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That had been clear enough amid months of rolling oil shocks and protracted haggling over how much Iran should expect to make in “user fees” charged to commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. But the picture came into sharper focus this week, as military sources spilled to Reuters that the U.S. has now wasted “virtually all” of its long-range and defensive missile stockpile, launching strikes and downing Iranian drone attacks on regional bases and allies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded on social media, saying, “We don’t hate the Fake News media enough,” after CNN picked up the story. The week hasn’t much improved since then for the defense secretary. Yesterday, the Pentagon held what NBC News described as a “crisis meeting” about the issue, and this morning The Washington Post followed up with a scoop about President Trump lacing into Hegseth last Friday at a Camp David meeting over the missile shortage, even while Trump derided the claims of a shortage as fake news and added that “leakers” of the information will be “hunted down.” Across Washington, it seems, there’s plenty of zugzwang to go around.

Congress, though, may be facing the worst of it. Last month, Democratic senators nixed a vote on the Trump administration’s $1.15 trillion military spending request, which, combined with a separate $350 billion package proposed by the White House through reconciliation, would eclipse last year’s defense budget to become the largest in the country’s history, while opening up contracting rules to fast-track acquisitions, and potentially quadrupling missile production. Talk of a shortage may make that opposition impossible to sustain, forcing lawmakers to sign a blank check for an aggressive war they never authorized and for future campaigns they may have no say in, all to stave off an actual crisis.

“The administration is manufacturing false urgency around the missile shortage to build political will for more defense spending, which is what the president wanted long before he started this war,” said Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. “It’s all part and parcel of a broader effort to lean increasingly on rapid acquisition pathways, which have fewer requirements around cost and pricing data, around competition, and therefore are less accountable, and hinder congressional oversight.”

In testimony to the House Oversight Committee earlier this summer, Gledhill highlighted some of the structural problems in defense contracting that may allow the administration to run wild with discretionary spending on weapons, should it be granted 50 percent more budget to do so. The main culprit is an exception to ordinary contracting rules known as “Other Transaction Authority,” or an OTA. It was designed as a way for the federal government to bypass standard competition and cost comparison regulations and quickly develop and buy new technology. In recent years, the Pentagon has leaned on OTAs more and more, multiplying its expenditure through the contracting vehicle tenfold between 2016 and 2024, according to Gledhill, up to $18 billion in 2024.

The Trump administration has signaled it intends to take OTA spending to new heights. Last year, the president issued an executive order outlining the administration’s “general preference” for OTAs and shelled out $3.2 billion through them just for space-based missile interceptors to be developed under the Golden Dome for America project, the Pentagon’s planned multitrillion-dollar air defense system modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome. And this week, the Defense Department announced the signing of new multibillion-dollar nonbinding “framework agreements” with defense contracting heavyweights Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to produce more missile interceptors.

The “pinky promise” deals are just paper until Congress appropriates funds for them, says Gledhill, but they add to the administration’s pressure campaign to get the funding done to “triple or quadruple production.” Having refused over and over to limit the administration’s war or force it to abide by its own cease-fires, Congress may have no good moves left between dangerously depleted stockpiles and carte blanche for a war with no endgame.