trump, munitions, iran, military

The United States went to war with Iran and ran out of missiles before it ran out of things to hit.

"It takes several years to produce a missile. If you put money into the system today, you wouldn't get a missile for three or four years. Sometimes even five."

— Mark Cancian, retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser at CSIS

The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report last week that should be required reading for anyone who still thinks America's military industrial base is some kind of bottomless pit. Fewer than 827 Patriot interceptors remain in US stockpiles. Fewer than 278 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors are left. Before the war with Iran began in March, the US had an estimated 2,200 Patriots and 452 THAAD missiles. The math is not complicated: the US has burned through more than 60 percent of its most critical air defense munitions in a conflict that measured in weeks.

The Pentagon does not want to talk about it. Chief spokesperson Sean Parnell sent CNN a statement identical to two previous statements issued since April: the military "is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs." It is the kind of line that sounds authoritative until you read the CSIS report that shows the Patriot stockpile will not return to pre-war levels until after 2031, even with accelerated production and supplemental funding.

The war cost the US government $37.5 billion so far, and the vast majority of that went on munitions. During Operation Epic Fury, US forces struck over 13,000 targets across Iran and intercepted more than 1,700 Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. More than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired. As many as 1,430 Patriot interceptors were used.

The arithmetic of depletion is even uglier when you look at cost. Each Patriot interceptor costs approximately $4 million. Iranian drones cost between $20,000 and $50,000 apiece. The US has been shooting $4 million missiles at $50,000 drones and calling it defense. Over 1,700 interceptions means somewhere between $6.8 billion and $34 billion spent on Patriots alone, depending on how many were used for aircraft versus drones. The Tomahawks are roughly $2.6 million each.

Translation: the United States spent a Fortune 500 company's annual revenue on missiles, and most of those missiles will not be replaced for half a decade.

The most consequential fact about the munitions crisis is not that the stockpiles are low. It is that they are low at precisely the wrong time.

The "Davidson window" is a concept that dominates US military planning in the Pacific. Named for Admiral Philip Davidson, who warned in 2021 that China could attempt to invade Taiwan within six years, the window suggests that Beijing will be ready for a major operation by 2027. That is fourteen months away. And the munitions the US would need for such a conflict are the same munitions it just used up in Iran.

CSIS lead author Mark Cancian called it a "window of vulnerability." The United States will not have "the depth of the preferred munitions it needs" if there is a conflict in the Pacific. China has been closely studying American air defenses in the Iran war, according to US officials. Beijing has invested heavily in hypersonic glide missiles and drone-swarm tactics that would require massed interceptor fires to counter.

The US military fired 803 interceptors on the first day of Operation Epic Fury alone, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That is nearly three hundred missiles in twenty-four hours against an adversary whose primary delivery systems are relatively slow and predictable. Chinese hypersonics would be faster, harder to track, and deployed in far greater numbers.

The domestic politics of the depletion crisis are equally bleak. Trump's approval rating has fallen to 34 percent in a CNN/SSRS poll and 36 percent in Reuters/Ipsos, the lowest marks of his second term and approaching the all-time low of 34 percent he hit in his first term. Barely a third of Americans approve of his handling of the job. He is underwater on the economy, immigration, and foreign policy.

This is a president who told the Wall Street Journal that "we have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need." It is a president who blamed Biden for the shortages, even though Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, told the appropriations committee that "the shortfalls in munitions have been well known to this committee for some time" and that they are "growing increasingly urgent."

The bipartisan agreement on one thing: the problem predates this administration. What changed is that someone found out the hard way.

The most telling detail in the CNN reporting is not a number. It is a change in tactics. NBC News reported that US commanders are now choosing not to shoot down Iranian projectiles headed for unpopulated areas of bases in the Middle East. The goal is to conserve interceptor missiles. This represents a break from standard operating procedure, where a US-manned Patriot detachment defended a mostly evacuated Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar against an Iranian ballistic missile barrage in June 2025.

When you start letting incoming missiles fly past your bases because you are afraid to waste the interceptors, you have crossed a threshold. The United States does not usually ration its air defense against known threats. It is doing that now.

General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, briefed Trump and other senior officials on the stockpile situation during a meeting where the president was weighing a major escalation in the Iran conflict. After the briefing, Trump announced a pause in strikes. The pause lasted about two days. On Tuesday, US and Saudi forces conducted joint strikes on Iranian proxies in Iraq, followed by what the military called a "surprise attack" by Iran on US forces in the region.

The supplemental defense funding request includes $87 billion to address "critical shortfalls." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee to make the case. Two deals were announced this week to expand Patriot and THAAD rocket motor manufacturing with L3Harris. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to say when the expanded production will yield actual missiles.

The answer from CSIS is one to five years per missile, depending on the type. There is nothing that can be done to speed it up. What the military is getting now were missiles funded in 2023.

Trump held a summit with the CEOs of America's largest defense firms at the US Army War College, flanked by Hegseth. His message was: build more weapons, build them faster. The CEOs listened. The missiles will not arrive in time for the Davidson window.

The United States went to war with Iran confident it could win quickly and absorb the cost. The war has not ended. The cost has not been absorbed. And the missiles that were supposed to defend Taiwan, Ukraine, and Korea are sitting in craters across the Persian Gulf.