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By Tom O'Connor
Deputy Editor, National Security and Foreign Policy
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A "surprise" Iranian missile salvo targeting U.S. bases in the Middle East amid a new White House pivot to diplomacy marks the latest test for the United States' dwindling munitions stockpiles.
That alone marks a major concern for President Donald Trump's administration as it oscillates between vows of war and peace. It's not just markets in disarray over the Persian Gulf crisis; military replenishment simply cannot keep up.
"The United States has burned through Patriot, THAAD missile interceptors, and long-range strike missiles at an extraordinary rate," Kelly Grieco, senior fellow with the Stimson Center's Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program, told Newsweek. "In the near term, this is a force-protection issue."
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"Interceptors are what stand between Iranian missiles and American forces at bases across the Gulf," Grieco said. "This is the immediate risk, and it gets worse the longer this runs."
Both U.S. systems are sophisticated and costly to sustain in active combat. The latest PAC-3 MSE Patriot interceptors run roughly $4 million per unit, while THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors run on average at closer to $12 million each.
In comparison, Iranian ballistic missiles are believed to range in the lower hundreds of thousands of dollars per projectile. Iran's most widely used tool, the Shahed suicide drone, has been estimated to cost between $20,000 and $50,000, and often as little as $7,000.
Cheaper alternatives are in the works, though they have yet to hit mass production at the scale required for the current conflict. Meanwhile, there is an arguably even more urgent resource on which the White House is running precariously low.
"Political support is the binding constraint," Grieco said. "Wars normally open with public backing that erodes over time—Iraq had roughly 70 percent in its early months, Afghanistan about 90. This war has been below 40 percent since it started and now sits at one in three."
"Starting with such low public support means the administration has no political reserve to spend," she added. "The political constraints that usually take a war years to reach have been there from the start. The administration is operating on borrowed time."
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How Much Is Left in the U.S. Stockpile?
In their assessment, experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated that the U.S. has used up between one-third and one-half of its reserves of seven key munitions, including Patriot and THAAD interceptors, SM-3 and SM-6 ship-based surface-to-air missiles, land-launched Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs), air-launched Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The research found Patriot interceptors down to around 1,000 from a pre-war estimate of 2,500, while THAAD interceptors have dwindled to around just 70–170 from an estimated count of 360 prior to the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran in February.
CSIS Defense and Security Department senior adviser Mark Cancian, who previously served as chief of the Force Structure and Investment Division at the White House's Office of Management and Budget, argued the issue was not immediate in the Middle East, as "there's enough left for continuing the war against Iran for an extended period."
But the problem is not limited to one theater. These figures account for systems also tasked with maintaining U.S. force posture across the globe, and allies abroad, especially NATO allies in Europe, have already begun sounding the alarm.
"The risk is in a future war particularly against China but also against North Korea or Russia," Cancian told Newsweek. "Even before the current war, most analysts considered the inventories to be insufficient for a war against China and they are now even lower."
"It will take one to five years to get the inventories back to where they were pre-war and another several years after that to get to where war planners want them to be," Cancian said. "That creates a window of vulnerability."
The Department of Defense, for its part, remains confident in U.S. capabilities.
“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," chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement shared with Newsweek.
"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," Parnell said.
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With little sign of the war slowing down, however, some fear the imbalance is only set to grow if stark measures are not taken to address the issue.
John Ferrari, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who also served at the Office of Management and Budget and oversaw contingency operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned: "The munition challenge is very serious."
That challenge is made all the more difficult as funding bottlenecks throttle efforts to ramp up U.S. production, while reports indicate that Iran, on the other hand, was rebuilding its missile and drone capabilities at a pace faster than U.S. intelligence had anticipated.
"Why does this remain critical? Because the U.S. Congress has yet to provide a single dollar of funding to rebuild the stockpile," Ferrari told Newsweek.
"So, we keep shooting and the stockpile keeps getting smaller; the Iranians are just keeping score at this point," Ferrari said. "The Iranian government is working furiously to rebuild their stocks of munitions and the U.S. is not; in war, you need bullets to win."
The Bigger Problems
The looming crisis speaks to systemic issues that go beyond defense-industrial capacity.
"The reason is twofold," Ferrari said. "The first is that the political policymakers within the Pentagon, over a period of two decades, made an assumption that wars would be short and we would only fight one at a time; this led to us having insufficient stocks and no means to increase them; our industrial facilities are sized for one short war, no resupply really needed, that was a political assumption."
"Second, the military establishment believed war is a targeting exercise, one where you can use really exquisite and expensive weapons, and that will win wars," he added. "That assumption is completely incorrect as most every war since Desert Storm has proven. This is the legacy of Desert Storm; we fell in love with these expensive weapons as a nation."
The Iran war has brought hard truths. Even Trump has expressed frustration with the tenacity with which Iran has retaliated, wreaking massive devastation to U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf region to the point where the administration has reportedly explored the option of repositioning facilities further west rather than footing a repair bill likely running billions of dollars.
The Islamic Republic's decision to launch a new wave of missile strikes Tuesday, days after Trump called off what would have been the 14th consecutive round of U.S. strikes since the breakdown in talks two weeks ago, has also shown Tehran was willing to operate proactively rather than simply react to U.S. operations.
The Iranian government's continued resolve, despite suffering major setbacks in the loss of equipment and personnel, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, belies core vulnerabilities not only in U.S. military might but also strategy.
"The dwindling munitions stockpiles are worrisome, but the much bigger concern is that the U.S. military has been unable to achieve its strategic objective in this war despite months of a widespread and high-intensity campaign," Mara Karlin, former deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy now serving as faculty co-lead for the Security, Strategy, and Statecraft focus area at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, told Newsweek.
"The operational approach to date has failed to collapse the regime," she said. "Instead, it has survived and grown more relevant."
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What Can the US Do?
Even if the U.S. were to substantially intensify operations, as Trump has often threatened, the course of the war thus far has demonstrated only limited, temporary gains from military means along with a hefty price tag on collateral damage, including U.S. partners in the region now pressing the White House for a solution.
But diplomatic wrangling from both Washington and Tehran has substantially impeded efforts to settle the conflict. While Trump seeks—and has already declared on several occasions—total victory, Iranian officials view themselves as having the upper hand in the war and hold little faith in the kind of U.S. commitments outlined in the memorandum of understanding signed by the two countries last month.
"While both the United States and Iran see the need for this conflict to wrap soon, they want it to cease on better terms than they are getting today," Karlin said. "The tit-for-tat military exchanges that we have been seeing could end up dramatically escalating the war if one side suffers significant losses or miscalculates."
That insiders appear to be leaking pessimistic depictions of U.S. stockpiles also appears to indicate some level of concern within the administration and military regarding the prospect of such an escalation.
"This is part of why the military appears to be wary of further escalation," Stephen Biddle, a professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who advised the Pentagon during the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Newsweek.
As to whether Trump could find himself in a similar situation to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who remains mired in a costly war in Ukraine, unable to achieve victory nor find a face-saving exit, Biddle said: "The president is already there."
Grieco came to a similar conclusion. And with the conflict becoming less popular over time and the president's approval rating reaching an all-time low in the lead-up to the November midterm elections, she argued there's no better time to leave than the present, even if it means the White House having to accept some inevitable concessions.
"On when staying becomes costlier than leaving, I’d say we are there now," Grieco said. "The war is likely to end with Iran holding some administrative role over the Strait. There is no way around it: That is strategic defeat for the United States."
"But the alternative is the same result later, after we’ve spent more interceptors, more money, and more credibility getting there."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sam Wilson.
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