Why the U.S. Is Running Dangerously Low on Weapons
The United States, long regarded as the world’s preeminent military power, has found itself in an uncomfortable position: it cannot sustain high-intensity combat against a regional adversary like Iran for more than a few months without facing a serious shortage of key munitions. Since hostilities with Tehran began in late February 2026, American forces have burned through large portions of their most advanced interceptors and precision-strike weapons at a pace far exceeding production capacity. Reports indicate that roughly half of the pre-war inventory of Patriot and THAAD missile interceptors has been expended, along with about one-third or more of Tomahawk cruise missiles and significant numbers of other systems such as JASSM and Precision Strike Missiles. Replenishing these stocks to earlier levels will take years, not months.
This is not merely a temporary accounting problem. It reveals deeper structural weaknesses in how the United States prepares for and sustains modern warfare. The current shortfall is the product of wartime consumption colliding with an industrial base deliberately optimized for peacetime efficiency rather than rapid expansion, combined with strategic assumptions that no longer match the reality of protracted, high-end conflict.
The Iran campaign, sometimes referred to as Operation Epic Fury, has been the most visible and immediate driver. Unlike the lower-intensity counterterrorism operations that dominated U.S. military activity after 2001, this conflict has demanded continuous use of expensive, long-range, and highly sophisticated munitions. Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, each costing several million dollars, have been fired against Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. THAAD batteries have similarly been heavily engaged. Naval forces have launched more than a thousand Tomahawks in some estimates—roughly ten times the number the Navy typically procured in a single recent year. Precision ground-attack missiles intended for potential use against peer competitors in the Pacific have also been drawn down sharply.
What makes the rate of consumption particularly striking is that a shaky cease-fire interrupted the heaviest fighting for months, yet stocks remain critically low. Analysts note that enough munitions remain for plausible scenarios in the current Iran conflict, but the depleted inventories have created a window of vulnerability. A larger contingency—particularly one involving China in the Western Pacific—would require many of the same systems that have already been heavily used. Pre-war wargames had already suggested that U.S. stocks of long-range precision munitions could be exhausted within weeks in a Taiwan Strait scenario. The Iran fighting has only shortened that timeline.
The problem did not begin with Iran. Support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 drew heavily on artillery shells, certain air-defense interceptors, and tactical missiles. Operations against Houthi forces in the Red Sea and assistance related to Israel’s conflicts further reduced inventories of naval interceptors and other systems. While Ukraine aid primarily affected ground munitions rather than the high-end air and missile defense weapons most stressed against Iran, it contributed to overall pressure on the arsenal and highlighted production bottlenecks that had been ignored for years.
Those bottlenecks have deep roots. After the Cold War ended, American defense strategy shifted from preparing for a massive conventional war against the Soviet Union to planning for two nearly simultaneous but limited regional conflicts—typically imagined against Iraq and North Korea. Munitions requirements shrank accordingly. At the same time, the defense industrial base underwent dramatic consolidation. In the early 1990s, senior Pentagon officials told industry executives that the post-Cold War budget environment would not support the existing number of contractors. The result was a wave of mergers that reduced the number of major aerospace and defense primes from dozens to a handful. Production lines were streamlined for efficient, steady-state output rather than wartime surge. Spare capacity was viewed as wasteful.
Munitions themselves have long competed poorly in internal Pentagon budget battles. Ships, aircraft, and armored vehicles last for decades, are highly visible, and contribute to deterrence signaling. Precision missiles and interceptors, by contrast, sit in bunkers until they are needed or expire. They have frequently served as bill-payers when other priorities required funding. As a result, annual procurement rates for many critical systems remained modest even as the strategic environment grew more contested after Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.
When demand finally surged after 2022, the industrial base struggled to respond. Complex weapons require specialized components—solid rocket motors, advanced electronics, high-performance explosives, and precision-machined parts—many of which have limited domestic suppliers. Lead times from contract award to delivery often stretch two to four years or longer. Simply appropriating more money does not instantly create new production lines, trained workers, or secure supply chains. Even relatively simple items such as 155 mm artillery shells have proven difficult to scale. Despite multi-billion-dollar investments and ambitious targets of 100,000 rounds per month, production has lagged, hampered by shortfalls in shell-body manufacturing and explosives supply.
A further complication is the changing character of warfare. Cheap, mass-produced drones and missiles have forced the United States and its partners to expend expensive interceptors against low-cost threats, creating a deeply unfavorable cost-exchange ratio. Iran has demonstrated the ability to field large numbers of relatively inexpensive unmanned systems that can be assembled far more quickly than the sophisticated defenses needed to stop them. Ukraine’s experience has shown that adaptive, lower-cost production of drones and munitions can matter as much as traditional high-end platforms. The U.S. military has only recently begun shifting emphasis toward more attritable, cheaper long-range strike weapons, but those efforts remain in early stages.
The consequences extend beyond current operations. Allies that have structured their forces around American equipment and the assumption of reliable U.S. resupply now confront the possibility that those assumptions no longer hold. Gulf partners, European nations, and others that depend on U.S. systems for air and missile defense may begin exploring greater self-reliance or alternative suppliers. Arms exports have long been both a strategic tool and a significant economic sector for the United States; visible shortages undermine both.
Washington has begun responding. Production of several critical munitions has been accelerated through multi-year contracts, expanded facilities, and greater use of authorities such as the Defense Production Act. The administration has sought substantial additional funding specifically for munitions replenishment and has pressed industry to move faster. Yet the fundamental constraint remains time. Deliveries arriving in the near term largely reflect decisions made years earlier. Building true surge capacity and deeper inventories will require sustained political commitment across multiple budget cycles, not a one-time emergency appropriation.
In the longer view, the munitions crisis is a symptom of a larger mismatch between America’s strategic ambitions and the industrial foundation required to support them. Decades of assuming that future wars would be short and that precision weapons would compensate for smaller numbers have left the United States with inventories and production rates better suited to the 1990s than to the 2020s. The war with Iran has simply made the gap impossible to ignore. Closing it will demand more than money. It will require a willingness to treat munitions and the capacity to produce them at scale as central elements of military power rather than afterthoughts—and to maintain that focus long after the current fighting ends.
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