The 39-day air and missile campaign against Iran consumed staggering quantities of America's most advanced weapons, roughly half the nation's Patriot interceptors, more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and over 1,000 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, and rebuilding those arsenals will take years, a new analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found.
The Pentagon insists it has what it needs right now. But the CSIS numbers tell a different story about what comes next, and about what happens if the United States faces a second major conflict before the production lines catch up.
Even before the Iran war, U.S. stockpiles of key precision munitions were considered insufficient for a large-scale fight with a peer adversary like China. The conflict didn't create that problem. It deepened it, fast, and across nearly every high-end weapons category the military relies on for deterrence in the Western Pacific and beyond.
The CSIS report, drawn from Pentagon budget documents, historical procurement data, and reported battlefield usage, paints a detailed picture. Exact U.S. munitions stockpiles are classified, so the figures are estimates, but they come from one of the most respected defense think tanks in Washington.
Patriot interceptor usage landed between roughly 1,060 and 1,430 missiles. THAAD interceptors, at about $15.5 million apiece, saw an estimated 190 to 290 rounds fired. SM-3 interceptors, costing roughly $28.7 million each, ran between 130 and 250 used. SM-6 missiles, at about $5.3 million per round, saw 190 to 370 fired. The Army's precision strike missiles, at around $1.6 million per unit, accounted for another 40 to 70 rounds.
The Tomahawks alone, more than 850 at roughly $2.6 million each, represent over $2.2 billion in a single weapons category. The JASMs add another $2.6 billion-plus.
Mark Cancian of CSIS warned that the expenditures have opened a dangerous window:
"The high munitions expenditures have created a window of increased vulnerability in the western Pacific. It will take one to four years to replenish these inventories and several years after that to expand them to where they need to be."
That timeline, one to four years just to replenish, then more years to expand, matters because the Western Pacific is where the United States would need many of these same weapons in a conflict over Taiwan.
Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell rejected what he called efforts to raise alarm about the military's readiness, telling Fox News Digital that the armed forces remain fully capable.
"America's military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President's choosing. As Secretary Hegseth has highlighted numerous times, it took less than ten percent of American naval power to control the traffic going in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. Since President Trump took office, we have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests. Attempts to alarm Americans over the Department's magazine depth are both ill-informed and dishonorable."
Secretary Hegseth has faced no shortage of political opposition during his tenure at the Pentagon, including impeachment articles filed by House Democrats, but the stockpile question cuts across partisan lines and into the realm of hard math.
President Trump himself addressed the concern publicly. He said the United States has a "virtually unlimited supply" of medium and upper-medium grade munitions and claimed stockpiles at those levels "have never been higher or better." But he drew a distinction at the top end.
Trump acknowledged on Truth Social that at the highest end, the U.S. has "a good supply, but are not where we want to be." He also noted that additional high-grade weaponry is stored in outlying countries and said the U.S. is "stocked, and ready to WIN, BIG!!!"
That candid admission, plenty of mid-tier munitions, not enough of the most advanced, tracks with what the CSIS analysis found. The weapons under the most strain are precisely the high-end interceptors and long-range strike missiles that a conflict with China or Russia would demand in volume.
The CSIS report noted that after heavy use of long-range missiles in the early phase of the Iran campaign, U.S. forces shifted toward less expensive and more plentiful weapons, Joint Direct Attack Munitions and other short-range systems. That shift itself signals the pressure on top-tier stocks.
Ryan Brobst of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told the Associated Press that the problem predates the current conflict. Patriot and THAAD interceptors had already been heavily used in Ukraine, Israel, and against earlier Iranian attacks.
"These were already in very high demand and we had not procured enough before the conflict. I'm not particularly worried about us actually running out during this conflict... It's about deterring China and Russia the day after this conflict is over."
Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, put it more bluntly: "Our munitions are low. That's public knowledge." That rare bipartisan agreement on the basic facts, even as the two sides disagree on who bears responsibility, underlines the scale of the challenge.
The Trump administration has moved to address the gap. The Pentagon's latest budget request seeks roughly $70 billion for munitions in fiscal year 2027, described as a nearly threefold increase over current levels. That request includes sharp increases in purchases of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot and THAAD interceptors, and long-range strike weapons.
The administration has also proposed a $1.5 trillion defense budget that signals the seriousness of the rebuild effort.
A Navy official told Fox News Digital the service is moving aggressively. The FY27 budget request of $22.6 billion would fund over 4,600 all-up rounds. The official detailed a broad production surge:
"We are significantly increasing production for our most critical systems, including the Standard Missile, Tomahawk, AMRAAM, and the PAC-3. To support this surge and provide a stable demand signal to our industry partners, we are continuing the multi-year procurements for LRASM and NSM, while initiating new multi-year contracts for the Tomahawk and Standard Missile. We are also working with the Department of War through the Munitions Acceleration Council (MAC), to synchronize efforts across the enterprise to break down barriers and speed up production."
Defense contractors are scaling up. Lockheed Martin aims to boost Patriot interceptor production from roughly 600 per year to about 2,000 by decade's end. The company also plans to expand THAAD interceptor capacity from under 100 annually to several hundred. RTX has said it will increase Tomahawk production to more than 1,000 missiles per year. Lockheed also told the AP it agreed to "quadruple critical munitions production," though no firm timeline was provided.
The CSIS analysis, however, noted that delivery timelines for many of these systems range from roughly three to more than five years, once contracting delays, production lead times, and manufacturing capacity limits are factored in. Promises to surge production are one thing. Missiles on the shelf are another.
The strain isn't limited to U.S. forces. In 2025, the Pentagon paused shipments of some air defense missiles and other weapons to Ukraine after an internal review found certain inventories had declined too far. The U.S. has also faced a backlog of more than $20 billion in approved weapons sales to Taiwan, a backlog that now grows harder to clear.
U.S. officials warned that some previously contracted weapons deliveries to European countries, including in the Baltic region, could face delays. Leaders in Estonia and Lithuania said they had been informed delivery timelines for U.S. military equipment were shifting.
A European defense official told Fox News Digital the delays could have longer-term consequences, warning that allies may begin to "rethink" future purchases of U.S. weapons if delivery timelines become unreliable. That's a concern that extends well beyond the current conflict, it touches the credibility of American defense commitments worldwide.
The Pentagon also moved elements of its THAAD system from South Korea to the Middle East during the conflict to bolster defenses against Iranian missile attacks. That kind of shell game, borrowing from one theater to cover another, is exactly the scenario defense planners have warned about for years. The leadership changes Secretary Hegseth has pushed at the Pentagon, including forcing the Army chief of staff into immediate retirement, suggest an appetite for shaking up the institution. Whether that urgency extends fast enough to the industrial base remains the open question.
Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. James Adams told the House Armed Services Committee that Iran's military took serious damage, but is far from finished.
"Despite significant degradation of Iranian military capabilities through coalition strikes in operation Epic Fury Tehran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAV's capable of threatening U.S. and partner forces throughout the region."
Central Command has reported destroying Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control facilities, air defense capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields. The New York Post reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned the next phase of operations would be even more severe.
But the question isn't whether the U.S. can finish this fight. It's whether it can deter the next one while the factory floors are still catching up. A future conflict in the Western Pacific would likely require sustained use of the same high-end missiles now being depleted, and Beijing is watching the same CSIS report everyone else is reading.
The Pentagon's efforts to rebuild through the Munitions Acceleration Council, multi-year contracts, and a massive budget request are real and serious steps. Hegseth's push to reform Pentagon culture and promotions signals a willingness to challenge business-as-usual thinking. But production lines don't run on willingness. They run on time, money, and industrial capacity, and the clock started late.
Decades of under-procurement and a defense industrial base that was never built for this tempo created the hole. The Iran war just showed everyone how deep it goes. The only question now is whether America fills it before someone else decides to test it.
