Just two weeks ago the British Ministry of Defence placed contracts with 22 companies to plan a new generation of explosives factories, with feasibility studies due by the end of September and construction meant to begin before the end of the year. The goal is at least six new plants producing energetic materials: the explosives, propellants, and pyrotechnics that go inside every shell, bomb, and missile a military fires. Military chiefs are racing to break ground because Britain's stockpiles, drawn down by donations to Ukraine, cannot be rebuilt without them. It is the most instructive defense industrial story in the world right now, and Washington should be taking notes.
Start with why explosives, of all things. Modern debate about the arsenal fixates on the glamorous end of the supply chain: missiles, drones, hypersonics. But every one of those weapons rests on a chemical industrial base that the West quietly dismantled after the Cold War. The Telegraph reports that a single factory in Poland is now the only major producer in Europe of the TNT needed for NATO standard 155mm artillery shells. Shell casings can be forged in many places. The energetic fill is the true chokepoint, and Ukraine's consumption rates exposed it. Britain has concluded that no quantity of finished weapons purchases can substitute for sovereign capacity to make what goes inside them.
The mechanics of the British program deserve as much attention as its ambition. The government identified at least 13 candidate sites across England, Scotland, and Wales last November, including brownfield industrial land such as the recently closed oil refinery at Grangemouth. It is funding nearly two dozen firms, from chemical majors to small businesses, at up to 300,000 pounds each to compete on speed, with the strongest proposals advancing to engineering design contracts worth up to five million pounds. It has attached its investment concierge service to fast track the winners through planning and regulation, historically the slowest step in building anything in Britain. And the money sits inside a larger commitment: a 1.5 billion pound program from last year's Strategic Defence Review to create what London calls an always on munitions production capacity, backed by 11.1 billion pounds for munitions and weapons in the broader defense investment plan. The design principle is the important part. Always on means the factories run in peacetime at sustainable rates and surge in crisis, rather than being built in an emergency and scrapped afterward.
Britain has run this experiment before, which is what makes the moment resonant. In the late 1930s, facing rearmament with a hollowed industrial base, London built shadow factories: government funded plants run by private firms, kept warm in peacetime so they could surge in war. The scheme was late, improvised, and barely adequate, and it still helped save the country. The lesson British planners drew then, and are acting on now, is that industrial capacity is a weapon system with the longest lead time of all, and that a democracy which waits for the emergency to build it has waited too long.
Honesty requires the caveats. Feasibility studies are not factories. Britain has announced defense industrial revivals before that died in planning inquiries and spending reviews, and the end of year groundbreaking target is the test that matters. Skilled chemical workers cannot be contracted into existence at 300,000 pounds a study. And six plants in Britain will not by themselves close the alliance's magazine gap.
But the direction is right, and the American application is direct. The United States has spent two years relearning that its own munitions lines cannot replace what a single regional war consumes, and that replenishment timelines stretch into years. The deepest constraint sits in the same place as Britain's: energetic materials, solid rocket motors, and the chemical precursors beneath them, produced by a handful of aging facilities. The British model offers three ideas worth copying. Fund competition on speed, not just capability, and let small firms race the primes. Attach the permitting fast track to the money because a factory approved in five years is a factory that does not exist. And design for always on production, so the capacity survives the next peace. Allies should also plan these investments as one portfolio: British explosives, American rocket motors, and shared precursor supply chains would make every NATO weapon cheaper and every stockpile deeper than national programs pursued alone.
The last time Britain built explosives factories at this scale, it was 1938 and the government hoped never to need them. Two years later they were the margin of survival. London appears to have remembered. The question is whether Washington, watching its own magazines drain, remembers too.
Christopher Carroll is a shipbuilding policy analyst for Systems Planning and Analysis, his views are his own. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, w His writing has appeared in Allsides, National Interest, RealClearDefense and the publications of the American Society of Naval Engineers.
image: This image from video provided by U.S. Central Command shows a missile being launched from a U.S. Navy ship in support of Operation Epic Fury on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (U.S. Central Command via AP)