The commander of Ukraine's land forces posted a video purporting to show the liberation of Andriivka.

Daniel Burke, from Manchester, had been fighting for Ukraine in the war against Russia since 2022.

The thunder of war in Ukraine drowns out a lot of other news from Russia. A few days ago, however, the Russian foreign intelligence service quietly did something rather odd. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR (the Russian version of the CIA), unveiled a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police.

At first sight, this seems another sign of President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet repression, when an aspiring young secret policeman could live a comfortable life by intimidating his neighbors and tormenting his fellow citizens. But the reappearance of a monument to this hated figure in Soviet history might be related more to Russia’s elite politics than to Putin’s nostalgia.

Before we get into the modern Kremlinology, let’s look back at the early days of the Soviet intelligence services.

Dzerzhinsky was a Polish national with a long history of revolutionary activity. He joined the Russian Bolsheviks, and shortly after the 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin put him in charge of creating a secret-police organization. (The czars had one, of course; the Bolsheviks wanted their own.) He became the director of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known by the Russian initials VChK, soon abbreviated to its last two letters, pronounced “che” and “ka,” which is why the secret police were called “the Cheka.” To this day, Russia’s spooks proudly call themselves “Chekists”—as do their enemies, pejoratively.

[Read: How to repurpose a bad statue]

Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 after gaining a reputation as a ruthless, incorruptible fanatic and setting the tone for his successors in the secret police. Over the years, the Cheka mutated into various Soviet government entities, some of them famous in Cold War lore (such as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the dreaded NKVD). For a time, Joseph Stalin split the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies into two ministries. As with many countries’ intelligence organizations, something of a rivalry existed between the cops who did internal security and the secret agents who operated against the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad. The Soviet military, too, had its own spy service, the coldly brutal GRU, which still exists today. To put this in American terms, think of the traditional tensions among the FBI, the CIA, and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (minus any democratic oversight).

In 1954, the Soviets decided to combine all of these organizations into a giant interagency group called the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, or KGB—an acronym well known to Americans during the Cold War and the organization that Putin joined in 1975. The foreign spies and the domestic goons were in different departments, and worked in different buildings, but they were all under one director.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., in 1991, the new (and short-lived) Russian democracy decided to weaken the Soviet-era police-state monolith by once again splitting up the foreign and domestic services. The foreign spy agency became the SVR and remained in its modernist digs out in the southern reaches of the Russian capital, in Moscow’s Yasenevo neighborhood. The domestic service—the thugs whom Russians fear on a daily basis—became the Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and it stayed in the old KGB building in central Moscow.

[Read: Is Stalin making a comeback in Russia?]

Here’s where the story of the new statue gets interesting. The original monument—at 15 tons, a hunk of metal so large that Muscovites attached Derzhinsky’s nickname, “Iron Feliks,” to the statue itself—was erected in front of the downtown KGB headquarters in 1958. (The imposing building in Lubyanka Square was also across the way from a big Soviet toy store called Child World, and Soviet citizens would joke darkly that someone in trouble with the authorities had “gone to Child World.”) After the 1991 coup attempt against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the statue was torn down on the demand of Moscow’s citizens.

So when I read the first reports that a new statue was being raised, I thought it was an aggressive message from Putin to the people of the capital. In 2021, the Moscow city government had scheduled a vote on whether to bring Iron Feliks back to the downtown location or to erect a new statue in its place of the 13th-century Russian saint and hero Alexander Nevsky. The city’s mayor, citing “deep divisions,” canceled the popular poll. To return Iron Feliks to his place of honor in front of Moscow’s most notorious stronghold of repression would have been heavy-handed symbolism even from Putin.

But Feliks isn’t back in his old neighborhood; he’s out in Yasenevo. (He’s also not as tall or as heavy as he used to be; the new statue is a replica of the original, but smaller.) So what’s going on? And who is this stunt’s intended audience?

One clue might be found in the remarks that the SVR’s director, Sergey Naryshkin, made at the unveiling. Instead of celebrating Dzerzhinsky’s harsh legacy, Naryshkin praised his honesty and dedication, and gushed that Dzerzhinsky “remained faithful to his ideals to the end—the ideals of goodness and justice.” He then noted that the statue was facing toward the NATO members neighboring Russia—Poland and the Baltic states—which he identified as the source of foreign threats:

The erected monument is an exact, somewhat scaled-down copy of the famous monument of an outstanding Soviet sculptor, and that’s why we simply didn’t have the right to change the direction of the view of the monument’s hero. And the fact is that threats remain to our country, to our citizens, from the northwest—yes, this is obvious.

Dzerzhinsky is a progenitor of sorts of the foreign intelligence agency, but this bit of theater is strange—something akin to the CIA erecting a statue of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in front of its headquarters and extolling Hoover’s noble struggles against the Soviet enemy. (In case you’re wondering, a statue already stands outside the agency’s Langley front door—of America’s first spy, Nathan Hale, from the Revolutionary War era.) You could argue, I suppose, that Hoover did his part by setting the bureau’s agents on Soviet spies in America, but looking east and facing down the Reds is not really how we remember him.

[Read or listen: How Putin thinks]

Without getting too in the weeds, other clues about what’s going on may lie in recent machinations within the Russian government.

In a February 2020 meeting just days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin humiliated Naryshkin on national television when the SVR chief seemed caught off guard by Putin’s questions during an audience with the president. The FSB, at that moment, was riding high; its spies were supposed to have paved the way for the collapse of Kyiv that Putin expected in the first days of the war.

We all know how that went, and Putin turned his fury on the incompetent agents in Lubyanka Square who had promised much and delivered nothing. Possibly, then, Naryshkin is now making a play for the SVR to eclipse the FSB as Russia’s premier intelligence service. Or he might be signaling his agency’s commitment to opposing NATO as part of fighting the war in Ukraine. Or maybe he’s just reminding everyone that he hasn’t forgotten that his job, regardless of the Ukraine war, is to combat Western spies. Either way, Naryshkin may be doing a bit of “managing up.”

Who knows, though? Perhaps the SVR had a spare copy of the Iron Feliks statue sitting in the basement and just decided to make a day of it. (Or perhaps Dzerzhinsky’s admirers hope it’s less likely to be vandalized out in Yasenevo.)

One thing is certain: Neither Naryshkin nor Putin—nor indeed the FSB’s chief, Alexander Bortnikov, who remains close to Putin despite his agency’s colossal screwup over Ukraine—risked putting Iron Feliks up in central Moscow. Putin’s power is not limitless, and he would have nothing to gain by antagonizing citizens in the capital with a statue few of them would want. And perhaps not even the president wants to see Iron Feliks through his limo window and be reminded of better days, when the Soviet Union still existed, the KGB was nearly omnipotent, and Vladimir Putin wasn’t one of the most hated people in Russia.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States has provided Kyiv with more than $43 billion worth of security assistance. Opponents of aid to Ukraine have argued that the United States is drawing down inventories of systems and ammunition that are already in short supply for its own forces, and which would be needed in any high-intensity conflict.

Our country could very well lose a large-scale war for lack of weapons and ammunition—but not because of aid to Ukraine. In a major conflict, the U.S. would run out of munitions in a few weeks, and in less than a week for some crucial categories. The quantity of weapons we are providing Ukraine is marginal compared with necessary weapons that we have not stocked. As Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, “Over the past nine fiscal years, budget after budget has traded away combat power, truncated needed weapons early, and permanently closed production lines.”

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

Nor can we rely on our allies to supply themselves or engineer a lend-lease program to send us weapons if we should be fighting but they are not. For instance, even before it began sending weapons to Ukraine, the British military was so poorly stocked that in a major war, it would have run out of ammunition in a week.

Cutting off Ukraine won’t solve our under-capacity problem. We need to dramatically ramp up our spending and accelerate our defense production.

The adversary capable of forcing a high-intensity war on the United States is, of course, China. And China is giving worrisome indications of interest in doing so. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that China spends roughly $700 billion a year on defense, approaching U.S. levels of spending. It is on course to triple its nuclear arsenal by 2035. U.S. intelligence assesses that China aims to be able to conquer Taiwan by 2027. President Joe Biden himself has said the United States will send troops to defend Taiwan if it is attacked. And yet the president has cut the budget for troops, ships, and aircraft until 2035. Congress added $29 billion to Biden’s first defense budget and $45 billion to his second. It also allocated supplemental funding to replace for U.S. forces what’s being provided to Ukraine. But these sums are not enough to get U.S. forces where we need them to be.

More than one dollar in eight from the 2023 budget goes toward things that have little to do with fighting and winning wars. The current defense budget contains $109 billion in spending for nondefense items that belong more properly in the budgets of other parts of the government, such as the Department of Education. Administrations tend to put such items in the defense budget because it’s the only appropriations bill guaranteed to pass, and politicians like to claim that they are increasing defense spending. But the United States is not focusing its spending on essential weapons and ammunition.

Congress is also to blame for the deficiencies in funding. Debt-ceiling standoffs, sequestrations, and a failure to pass spending bills on time wreak havoc on DOD. As part of the debt-ceiling agreement, unless spending bills are passed by the end of the calendar year, Elaine McCusker and John Ferrari of the American Enterprise Institute calculate that sequestration spending caps will effectively cut defense spending by 8.6 percent.

In 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz fought on the Midway Islands with only three aircraft carriers at his disposal. Less than three years later, he commenced operations against the Marianas with 15 new, larger, and faster carriers to feed into the fight. China has built a defense industry capable of such rapid production—but today, the United States couldn’t pull it off. The U.S. defense industry is sized for peacetime production. Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that at current production rates, just replacing the 155 mm artillery ammunition and the Javelin and Stinger missiles provided to Ukraine will take more than five years—and those pre-Ukraine inventories were themselves wholly inadequate.

In 1990, the United States had 54 companies that produced major defense articles; now it has just five. America reaped a peace dividend after the Cold War, then continued to take one even as the world grew more dangerous. The lack of defense production has created an alarming gap between what the United States says it can do in its strategy and what it’s actually capable of.

Nor are the shortfalls just in production. The United States has natural resources in abundance, but it mostly does not mine or process essential minerals, preferring to outsource that inefficient, messy, environmentally unpleasant work to other countries. “Rare earths” aren’t actually rare; they just exist in small quantities amid other soils. They need to be separated and chemically processed for use.

To genuinely redress the domestic shortfalls in weapons and ammunition that the intensity of combat in Ukraine has revealed, the United States needs to increase funding, rebuild its defense industry, and relax restrictions on allied cooperation in defense production. The fixes aren’t hard to identify—but as the great theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

Start with funding: In 2017, the Trump administration adopted a National Defense Strategy, which Congress reviewed. Both branches of government concluded that enacting the strategy would require defense allocations to increase by 3 to 5 percent above inflation every year. The Biden administration’s defense strategy follows the same outlines as its predecessor’s, except in the areas where it is even more ambitious. But the 3 to 5 percent increase in spending hasn’t materialized; this year’s budget actually loses ground because of inflation. Filling the gap will cost at least $40 billion more than Biden’s $842 billion budget asks for. Unless Washington increases spending, it will have to choose between the size of its military force and the adequacy of that force’s weapons and munitions.

[Read: Biden is more fearful than Ukrainians are]

The single most important contribution Congress can make to the nation’s defense is to return to the regular order of passing budget bills on time. When Congress delays, the Defense Department has to rely on temporary spending bills, which do not allow it to sign long-term contracts, begin construction on military bases, and speedily invest in munitions production. The cost of these delays to the department is about $5 billion to $6 billion every month in purchasing power. And the lags are now routine: Last year, the defense budget was passed 75 days after the start of the fiscal year, robbing the DOD and taxpayers of about $15 billion in purchasing power.

The lack of funding and predictability has made the defense industry understandably skittish. If Washington were instead to deliver—on time—a budget that fully funds the country’s defense strategy, manufacturers might have the confidence to build the plants and hire and train the workers needed to replenish U.S. military stockpiles. The industry will want multiyear contracts, because it has been burned repeatedly by starting production only to have funding zeroed out by either Congress or DOD the following year. Congress has given DOD limited authority for multiyear contracts, but it should extend this authority and push DOD to make fuller use of it.

The United States has hampered its defense industry with regulations that don’t allow it to access economies of scale. Factories operated by allies abroad could help the United States build munitions much faster, and domestic businesses, especially those specializing in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, could help build them much better. But the International Traffic in Arms Regulations have erected barriers that deter partners both at home and abroad. The Biden administration urgently needs to reform those regulations.

The Defense Department needs to ask—loudly—for what it needs and complain when the White House or Congress impedes the mission of quickly building the stockpiles that fighting China, shoring up allies, and supporting Ukraine would require. The U.S. government does an incredible disservice to its men and women in uniform by not ensuring that they have the supplies of weapons and ammunition to match their commitment. Without those supplies, the United States may lose its next war.

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