U.S. Air Force General Laments U.S. Dangerously Low on Munitions, and Delivery Logistics

July 14, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Gen. James Hecker, Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, bluntly warned at an air chiefs conference in London yesterday that the U.S. is short of not just all kinds of munitions, but the means to deliver them as well. “If you look at the U.S. itself—and let’s not just talk about the munitions we recently have given away to Ukraine—but we’re [at] roughly half the number of fighter squadrons that we were when we did Desert Storm,” Hecker said, pointing to a similar decline in fighter strength for the U.K., reported Breaking Defense newsletter on July 12. “So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War.

“Now you add that we’re giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians—which I think is exactly what we need to do—but now we’re getting dangerously low and sometimes, in some cases even too low, that we don’t have enough. And we need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going.”

Hecker went on, “[All NATO nations] need to start, because we’re dreadfully below where we need to be. And it’s probably not going to get better—well, it’s not in the short term—but we’ve got to make sure in the long term we have the industrial base that can increase what we have.”