President Donald Trump said the United States has far more munitions than it needs, but some national security experts fear the Iran war has depleted critical stockpiles that could be used in other operations.
“We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal.
However, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that at least 1,500 Patriot interceptors have been used in the war with Iran, leaving an inventory of less than 1,000 interceptors that are crucial to missile defense abroad. In 2023, long before Operation Epic Fury, CSIS released the results of a war game showing the U.S. could last less than a week in a high-intensity conflict with China.
“We’re very low,” said Robert Peters, a missile defense expert at the Heritage Foundation. “We’ve used an enormous amount of missiles, both offensive and defensive during Epic Fury.”
There are costs every time the U.S. expends its munitions or sends them to be used in other conflicts, Peters said.
“Every time we give munitions or systems to Ukraine that’s needed to deter Chinese aggression, that adds to the problem,” he said. “We gave a lot of munitions to Ukraine, we have used a lot of interceptors, correctly, in the defense of Israel. We have used a significant amount of ordnance in Epic Fury. That’s not to say that those were unimportant activities or that we got no benefit from them. But we have to understand that there’s costs every time we use these munitions.”
Building up the munitions stockpile could take years, Peters said.
“You’ve got to appropriate the money to build more missiles at a higher rate than what we’re building today, and then the companies that build those interceptors have to expand production lines, which will take a few years because they’ve got to do new construction, and then they’ve got to get the machines and the people to be able to build these missiles,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called the report that munitions are dwindling “totally false.”
“We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need, despite the fact that an unprecedented amount was given away by Crooked Joe Biden and the Biden Administration to Ukraine and Europe at no cost, in one of many of their extremely dumb moves,” Kelly told the Daily Signal in a statement.
She said defense companies are currently “making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels.”
“And as we build up, we will start issuing more to our allies in Europe and elsewhere,” she said.
A D.C.-based national security expert said the biggest threat is not a lack of munitions but that traditional European allies are not supporting the U.S. in the conflict.
“Some of it is will, especially in Western Europe, but a lot of it is also capacity,” the expert said.
The Trump administration has been right to push allies to contribute missiles, according to the expert.
“The Trump administration has gone where no prior administration has ever gone before in identifying and eradicating direct threat to the American people, and has, by doing so, brought this all to light, and has sharpened the focus on who our actual partners that can contribute and want to contribute are, and where the gaps are with some of our more traditional partners and allies,” he said, “and I think that’s that’s one of the understated but equally important aspects of the administration’s policies.”
Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, said that while there is no shortfall in weapons to address the Iranian threat, there could be a shortfall to address other threats, like if the U.S. were to defend against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or if Ukraine required multiple interceptor capabilities to address a major Russian offensive.
“The real question here isn’t necessarily whether the U.S. has the ability to intercept Iranian missiles targeting American bases,” he said, “but does it have a strategy to eliminate the Iranian capability to launch missiles in the first place?”
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
