By Lukas Reinhard

GENEVA, Switzerland: The war in Ukraine has peeled back the veneer of Western military supremacy, exposing a steady and self-inflicted process of demilitarisation. 

What was once the arsenal of democracy has become an arsenal of dependency, struggling to replace even the most basic munitions, much less sustain a prolonged high-intensity conflict.

Two years into the fighting, the collective West has found itself running short of artillery shells, anti-tank missiles, air defense interceptors, and precision-guided munitions. 

What was expected to be a rapid demonstration of industrial and technological dominance has instead revealed systemic decay. 

Western defense industries, hollowed out by decades of deindustrialization and excessive financialization, are incapable of mass production. 

Even nations like the U.S., long believed to possess near-limitless military output, are now admitting to capacity constraints measured in mere thousands of shells per month, a fraction of what a modern war demands.

The underlying causes of this collapse run deep. The post–Cold War era of globalization encouraged Western economies to prioritize services, finance, and consumption while outsourcing heavy industry and raw material extraction to the very nations they now call rivals. 

The result is a defense industrial base that depends on fragile supply chains for critical materials like rare earths, permanent magnets, high-grade steel, and even guncotton — a key component in propellants and explosives. Much of this supply originates from China, a geopolitical adversary, creating an absurd paradox: the West needs its rival to arm itself against that same rival.

In Europe, defense production was allowed to wither under the assumption that wars of attrition belonged to the past. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all cut defense budgets, consolidated production, and favored boutique, high-cost platforms over robust, scalable systems. 

When war returned to Europe, Western planners discovered that their factories could not adapt quickly: their workers had retired, their machines had rusted, and their industrial ecosystems had shifted to peacetime luxuries instead of wartime necessities.

Meanwhile, the United States, despite its enormous military budget, has struggled to ramp up production. Defense firms optimized for profit margins and shareholder returns, not strategic depth. 

The focus on complex, over-engineered systems like the F-35 or the Patriot missile battery has created weapons that are technologically advanced but logistically unsustainable. 

Even the production of simple munitions like the Javelin anti-tank missile or the Stinger MANPADS has become a bottleneck, with waiting times stretching into years.

This material scarcity has forced the West into a dangerous strategic corner. Unable to win wars of attrition with conventional arms, and increasingly dependent on dwindling stockpiles of sophisticated systems, Western powers may turn once again to their nuclear deterrents as a last resort to preserve great power status. 

Already, there are rumblings within policy circles about the need to “reassert” nuclear credibility whether through tests, modernization programs, or revised doctrines that lower the threshold for use.

This trajectory is deeply destabilising. A civilization that cannot produce its own weapons but can still launch thousands of nuclear warheads is one standing at the edge of a moral and strategic abyss. 

The decline of Western industrial capacity, combined with political hubris and a refusal to accept multipolar realities, risks creating a future where nuclear brinkmanship becomes the only remaining expression of power.

Unless the West reindustrializes, reorients its economies toward strategic resilience, and sheds the illusion of endless technological superiority, its decline will continue not with a bang, but with the quiet erosion of its means to fight. 

And when that erosion is complete, the temptation to reach for the nuclear option may prove too great to resist.

*Lukas Reinhard is a geopolitical observer based in the formerly neutral territory of Switzerland.*